Sally Brown

As the Autumn leaves fall in the UK and the nights are drawing in, universities are continuing to think about how to make assessment more authentic to engage students and make the process all about learning, building on the innovative approaches developed during Covid closures.  In our most recent guest post, Kay and I are delighted to welcome a thoughtful piece from Wendy Garnham of Sussex University in which she writes about how she and a colleague Heather Taylor are moving away from simply setting an essay and leaving students to produce it, towards their more innovative approach to essay writing that actively fosters their students’ information retrieval and reflection skills as well as deconstructing the tasks into manageable objects. Thanks Wendy and Heather for enabling us to showcase this approach.

Recently Kay Sambell I participated in a marvellous online conference run by Chris Headleand of Lincoln University on Practical Pedagogy https://chrisheadleand.com/practical-pedagogy/

I went to a session run by Gaby Tobin and Laura West-Burnham of Cardiff Metropolitan University who were talking about how, in times of Covid, there has had to be flexibility in managing changing assessment needs while still assuring quality. Kay Sambell and I were so impressed by their thinking that we asked them to write a guest post for our Covid collection which you can read here entitled “Here be dragons: The challenges of balancing quality assurance and pedagogy”. Sincere thanks to Gaby and Laura for sharing their ideas here: Balancing-quality-assurance-and-pedagogy-w.docx (716 downloads)

NTF Dr Chris Headleand of Lincoln University rocks! Congratulations to him for organising the terrific Practical Pedagogy conference attended by hundreds of people and engaging so many of us in engaging conversations. I learned loads in the day, not least from the many contributors who helped me create my crowdsourced keynote including Mark Glynn, Theo Gilbert, Mick Healey, Ruth Healey, Phil Race, Becky Sellars, Ale Armellini, Kay Sambell, Nick Freestone, Suzanne Fergus, Peter Hartley, Mark Childs, Sue Beckingham: the basic slides I used are here: practical-pedagogy-SB-keynote-w.pptx (354 downloads)   The recordings of the whole conference will be available in due course from Dr Chris Headleand.

Next stop, the PGCE Research conference at Sunderland on Thursday where I am presenting with Prof Kay Sambell!

June and July have been busy months with lots of work with Kay Sambell on authentic assessment during and after the pandemic. We are told our resources have proved useful for people and we are really happy about that.

We staged a PhD ceremony in my garden for a successful PhD student of Kay Sambell’s who won’t get an actual one this pandemic year. Lucas was here so we capitalised on the occasion by presenting him with a cucumber Kay had grown.  He rose to the occasion and made a very nice acceptance speech.

We were also delighted to be part of the launch of the Advance HE torch relay event that is bringing together creative ideas on assessment from people all around the world. A link towards our little introductory video is here:

It was such fun to create this video on a gloriously sunny day in our garden: I haven’t laughed so much in years.

We are also delighted to be contributing to an event to launch AdvanceHE’s latest publication on assessment edited by Patrick Baughan. Our article is called “Changing assessment for good: building on the emergency switch to promote future-oriented assessment and feedback designs”; Kay Sambell and Sally Brown, In Baughan, P (ed) Assessment and Feedback in a post-pandemic era: a time for learning and inclusion. York Advance HE.

Most recently in the last fortnight I’ve been working with the Physiological Society on a series of workshops and linked one-to-one sessions on providing evidence for promotions on the grounds of learning and teaching. It’s been fascinating to talk to so many physiologists who are doing such interesting work, including on dry labs and assessment.

After this week things are looking much quieter: it will be lovely to have a few peaceful weeks over the summer and a chance to spend time with the grandchildren, with a little writing with Kay of course on some resources for Heriot Watt university.

In the time Kay Sambell and I have been producing resources for our Covid Collection on assessment during and after the pandemic, many people have mentioned the difficulties of using authentic assessment processes in Maths to bring to life the creative possibilities and excitement of the subject. Here today we are delighted to offer you a special account by NUI Galway’s President’s Award winner Dr Giuseppe Zurlo in which he outlines a fascinating approach to engaging Maths students now and for the future.  Authentic_Assessment_gz-w1.docx (783 downloads)

In March, Kay Sambell and I provided in our Covid Collection of articles on how to undertake assessment better this year when we’ve all been dealing with the backwash of the pandemic. Here we post a second collection which we are terming, after the terminology of the Star Wars films, the Authentic assessment compendium: Episode Two – the saga continues!  This contains a plethora of further examples of good authentic assessment, fifteen which have followed our established format that has proved of value to lots of people globally plus six more which were sent to us in different formats, but we thought still merited sharing. Even during the editing of this collection, we have been receiving more suggestions so it is possible that, in due course, we may well put out a third collection, potentially entitled Authentic Assessment 3: the Innovative Approach that Strikes Back at Boring Traditional Assessment (or something snappier!) Do let us know if you are finding these useful. (Corrected versions of this download added from time to time)  Authentic-assessment-compendium-Epiosode-two-the-saga-continues-2-may-w2.docx (1757 downloads)

(Thanks to Jim Edwards:  jimedwardspaintings.com for allowing me to use this wonderful image of the Great North Run on the Tyne Bridge with the Red Arrows flying by in the presentations Kay Sambell and I do together).

In March, April and May, Kay Sambell and I are leading a whole series of workshops designed to support staff who have made the complex transition in the last year, once face-to-face on campus assessment was not possible. A whole range of approaches were adopted and adapted by academics globally not only to cope with the contingency but also to improve assessment long term by ensuring that assessment is fully part of learning. Through the articles and presentations in our Covid Collection, we have argued that we can’t ever go back to former ways of assessment and so we propose approaches that fully integrate assessment and feedback with learning, leading to improved outcomes for students. To support these workshops, we have collected together a compendium of brilliant lightly-fictionalized examples collected from National Teaching Fellows and others in the UK and internationally, of what such alternative assessments might look like in different subjects, based on the approach we describe in our paper on 17^th August in the Covid collection on this website. Thanks to everyone who has helped us with this. Its first iteration is here,  Authentic-assessment-examples-compendium-w2.docx (2408 downloads) but we anticipate this will be added to over time as we encounter more similar super examples from different disciplines. Indeed, successive versions of this download are being added as corrections and additions are received – hence the change in ‘number of downloads’ field. Please note that example 3.2 was kindly provided by Thomas Broderick of Munster University of Technology.

Today I really enjoyed doing a virtual workshop on assessment and feedback for nearly 100 colleagues at NCG, which is an HE in FE provider in Newcastle, Carlisle, Lewisham, Southwark, Skelmersdale and Kidderminster. It was lovely to do a session for colleagues, many of whom live relatively close to me here, and to engage in a productive conversation. The slides for the session are here: NCG-Masterclass-10-Feb21-w.pptx (307 downloads)

Friends and colleagues of Phil Race will be delighted to know he is making steady progress in his recovery from a hip replacement three and a half weeks ago and he is looking forward to extending his walking range beyond the house and garden, currently constrained by snow. But it’s an ill (and chill North East) wind that blows no good, so instead of a photo of Phil striding up the street, here is one of our grandson Lucas eating porridge and doing elementary science in the garden, weighing snow (and then using the snow as giant snowballs!).