This work was later published in a research article in Teaching in Higher Education - learn more.
At Edinburgh University Students’ Association, I am proud to coordinate the longest-running student-led Teaching Awards in the UK. These Teaching Awards are an extremely valuable part of the Students’ Association’s work in partnership with the University of Edinburgh to reinforce our positive partnership. I work with the Students’ Association Marketing team and School Offices to promote the Teaching Awards, normally receiving 2,000 - 3,000 student nominations annually for teachers, tutors, supervisors and support staff. I also organise the prestigious awards ceremony for shortlisted university staff each year. In addition, my team sends each of the University’s twenty Schools a report including a list of all nominees and the anonymised student nomination comments for their School. However, staff did not previously have the time to engage well with these long reports.
At Edinburgh University Students’ Association, I am proud to coordinate the longest-running student-led Teaching Awards in the UK. These Teaching Awards are an extremely valuable part of the Students’ Association’s work in partnership with the University of Edinburgh to reinforce our positive partnership. I work with the Students’ Association Marketing team and School Offices to promote the Teaching Awards, normally receiving 2,000 - 3,000 student nominations annually for teachers, tutors, supervisors and support staff. I also organise the prestigious awards ceremony for shortlisted university staff each year. In addition, my team sends each of the University’s twenty Schools a report including a list of all nominees and the anonymised student nomination comments for their School. However, staff did not previously have the time to engage well with these long reports.
Therefore, I initiated a research project analysing the
extensive qualitative data collected through the student-led Teaching Awards
nominations in order to understand student perceptions of excellence in
teaching and student support. After gaining a small grant from the University
of Edinburgh Principal’s Teaching Award Scheme (PTAS), I hired a postgraduate
student as a research assistant who analysed all of the 2,926 Teaching Awards
nominations collected during the 2014-15 academic year. Four key themes were
identified: 1) concerted, visible effort; 2) charisma, personality and engaging teaching; 3) breaking down student-teacher barriers and
fostering student engagement; 4) consistency, predictability and stability of
support.
The Research Assistant, Vice-President Academic Affairs, and
I worked together to produce and disseminate the research report 'What Does Good Teaching Look Like to Students?', which was launched on 1 December 2016 and is
publicly available on our website. The report discusses the nuances of the four
key themes that were identified in the research, and it shares examples of best
practice activities digestible way to highlight practices that surfaced in the
close reading of the students’ Teaching Awards nominations. By sharing research
findings in a digestible way, it is hoped that staff will incorporate more of
these engaging teaching methods and partnership work with students into their
work. Especially with the introduction of the Teaching Excellence Framework
(TEF) and a stronger reliance on quantitative data to demonstrate teaching
excellence, this initiative shows the importance of understanding the nuances
within the vast qualitative data from student-led Teaching Awards to identify
student perceptions of teaching excellence and consequently enhance the student
experience.
Student-led Teaching Awards generally demonstrate the
partnership between Edinburgh University Students’ Association and the University
of Edinburgh to recognise and reward excellent teaching and student support. In
particular, this project demonstrated a strong partnership since the
University’s small grant funded the research assistant position and allowed the
Students’ Association to progress this work. University staff were keen to
learn about the research findings and disseminate the best practices in
teaching and student support that we identified through this project.
The project has been extremely well received at the
University of Edinburgh and beyond. The report was launched online on 1
December, 2016 and at a launch event attended by 60 University staff. In semesters
1 and 2 of this academic year, we disseminated the research findings in
presentations at the Institute for Academic Development’s Course Organiser
Network, Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice courses for new academic
staff, Moray House Graduate School of Education seminar series, and the
University’s Gearing Up conference. This summer, I have shared our work beyond
the University at the Quality Assurance Agency Scotland’s Enhancement Themes conference and the Higher Education Academy’s annual conference.
It has been exciting to receive a very positive reception to
this project, leading to other interesting projects. Within the University of
Edinburgh, we have started having more conversations about the Teaching Awards
recommendations provided at the end of the report concerning academic community
for students and staff, including students as partners in pedagogical
discussions, being aware of staff workload and reasonable expectations for
them, support for postgraduate tutors and personal tutors, and implications of potential
student biases in nominating women staff and staff from diverse backgrounds.
Furthermore, I am now involved in supporting another PTAS project led by the
Medical School on best practices of dialogue and presentation of feedback to
students, extending our previous project and analysing samples of anonymised
feedback given by markers whom students have recognised for their outstanding
feedback.
Beyond Edinburgh University Students’ Association, it is
also exciting to see how many other student unions which already run
student-led Teaching Awards are interested in conducting similar research
projects to analyse the themes within teaching and student support highlighted
by students in their nomination comments. In particular, colleagues at the
University of Stirling Students’ Union and at the Manchester Met Students’
Union look like they will be taking forward similar projects this year. It is
great that there is interest in conducting similar qualitative research like
ours. We do recognise that this can be very time-intensive and
resource-intensive, and we don’t have the capacity to analyse the trends across
all of each year’s nomination comments. However, we have been able to use the
themes identified from the research in the nomination forms to give students
the opportunity to self-code up to three key reasons why they are submitting
their nomination for the best teachers at the University. It has been really
helpful having this additional, quantitative follow-up data. We hope other
unions that might not have the capacity to do a full, qualitative analysis may
at least be able to take more of this light-touch approach.
This research project and its dissemination have been a
creative, enjoyable way for me to go beyond the provision of the Teaching
Awards project to support learning and teaching by analysing and sharing
the thematic trends in the nomination comments by understanding student
perceptions of how they learn best and how they evaluate effective teaching. This research helped me to better
understand and respect individual learners’ stories about the obstacles and
struggles that they have personally overcome during their academic study with
the support of staff, as well as the themes arising from the data from our
diverse student bodies and learning communities across the university.
I have especially enjoyed that the Teaching Awards research
project has connected my role at the students’ association with my PhD research
into teaching excellence and innovative practices of student engagement,
including student/staff partnerships. It has helped me to take an
evidence-informed approach by engaging more with higher education theory,
literature, and practices around teaching excellence as I have
shared the work widely across the University of Edinburgh and at other conferences.
I also worked to engage deeply with the teaching excellence literature when
writing an academic journal article on this research which I submitted for
review in May 2017, and I hope it can be published in due course. Stay tuned!
By conducting these presentations and in particularly by
facilitating workshops (for instance my presentation and workshop slides from the HEA conference) that help participants (and myself) explore further the
student perceptions of teaching excellence, I have been able to look at the
wider implications of this research. Student welfare, struggles with ill
mental health, and resilience are some interesting areas that have been raised
by this research. However, the resulting issues of sometimes time-consuming
student support have knock-on effects for staff members’ welfare and what
students should reasonably expect from staff. The workshop that I facilitated
at the HEA conference in particular resulted in fascinating discussions about
students’ expectations, and how they would reasonably change between Year 1 and
Year 4, as well as subsequent postgraduate study at university. It would be
interesting to look closer at the data to see if there are any thematic trends
in student perceptions of teaching excellence stemming from different
demographics such as year of study, subject of study, and home/international
students. This project generally has been very exciting and interesting
intellectually to engage more with staff by sharing the research, and hopefully
it will have a positive implication on quality enhancement by sharing
tangible teaching and student practices that students have recognised, and
rewarded.
This later work was published in a research article in Teaching in Higher Education.
This later work was published in a research article in Teaching in Higher Education.