Welcome to this our last newsletter of this academic year.

In this edition we are featuring reports about some of the work we have been funding through our project grant scheme as well as listing new projects we are funding. The project grant scheme is helping many of you to carry out small pieces of work supporting curriculum development as well as funding short periods of study leave to enable you to learn about wok going on in other institutions and bring back those ideas to Newcastle. We are also providing small amounts of pump priming funding to support people to bring small educational conferences to Newcastle. Not only does this again bring us new ideas it also helps to raise the profile of the Faculty as a centre of educational excellence. In the autumn we will be devoting our first learning and teaching forum to the dissemination of results from our funded projects and we hope as many of you as possible will come along to hear what your colleagues have been doing.

Also in this newsletter are reports from two conferences attended by staff in the Faculty. It is always interesting to hear what is going on elsewhere and so as we approach the time when many conferences are held please can I invite any of you attending a conference this summer to find some time, when you come back, to write a short piece for the autumn newsletter.

We like to celebrate individual successes in the newsletter so congratulations to all those who have won awards and prizes this year. Of course, the other big success is the achievement of our TEF Gold status. As Jane Calvert says this is very much an award that reflects the work of all of us ensuring that the learning and teaching we support is of the highest quality we can make it. Among the things highlighted in the TEF Panel statement of findings were the outstanding levels of stretch (their words), facilitated in part by the University’s commitment to research-led teaching that we give to students as well as exceptional levels of staff support.

Our last two events of the year are a Journal Club being given by Michael Atkinson and a seminar from Val Wass. Please come along to one or both of those events. I am now starting to think about putting the seminar programme together for next year. I have a number of ideas for possible speakers but I will be consulting with you all in your teaching schools to gather ideas from you. Our first event next year is a workshop delivered by Viv Baumfield and Jane Stewart. This will be a highly stimulating session and I encourage you to attend.

All that remains for me to say is to wish you some time for relaxation over the summer (though our summers become ever busier) so that we can all come back refreshed to start a new academic year.

Each year since 2000 the Higher Education Academy (HEA) has organised and managed the National Teaching Fellowship scheme. The purpose of the Scheme is to recognise, reward and celebrate individuals who are judged to make an outstanding impact on the student learning experience, and provide the means to develop a proactive community of National Teaching Fellows (NTFs). Each year universities and other providers are invited to nominate up to three candidates who are then invited to submit a claim for A Fellowship to the HEA.

In recent years the Association of National Teaching Fellows has organised a series of regional workshops designed to help nominees in that year to develop their claims and to introduce the scheme to intending applicants in future years. For the last two years the regional workshop in the north east has been hosted in Newcastle University and run by the President of the ANTF, Sally Brown and myself. The workshop this year was held in March. After a brief discussion of the benefits of the scheme for applicants the workshop went on to cover the criteria, how to address those criteria and how to frame a claim. It also covered how claims can be supported by evidence and what is needed to help a claim succeed. Finally, a range of practical and administrative issues were outlined.

Though the Higher Education Academy (HEA) organises and runs the Scheme its funding comes from elsewhere. Currently the funding comes from the Higher Education Funding Council for England the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales and the Department for the Economy (DfE) Northern Ireland (now incorporating the responsibilities of DELNI). With the establishment of the Office for Students it is unclear where funding will come from in the future and though the expectation is that the Scheme will continue the Scheme is also undergoing a full review.

If anybody is interested in the Scheme and wishes to learn more, and assuming its continuance, the resources for the workshop will be found on the ERDP website, at the bottom of ‘useful links’.

Prof Steve McHanwell, Director ERDP

We’re pleased to announce that the following projects have been funded by the ERDP in 2017.

Active learning workshop for pharmacy and healthcare educationalists.

Hamde Nazar and Andrew Husband

Evaluation of Context Café, a session which allows Stage 2 Biochemistry/Biomedical Genetics students to contextualize learning in their Degree Programme and beyond.

Luisa Wakeling, Jeremy Brown and Jane Stewart

Developing student resilience and compassion.

Stephen Jones, Dominic Johnson, David Kennedy and Maryanne Freer

Aligning Learner and Patient Feedback Priorities to Enhance Communication Skills and Professionalism in Dental Undergraduates.

Ashleigh Stamp and Sarah Rolland

Study on placements for life science undergraduates.

Vanessa Armstrong, Nigel Page (Kingston University) and Luciane Vieira de Mello (University of Liverpool)

Exploring the experience of undertaking an educational integrated training post in general practice.

Sarah Cope and Hugh Alberti

Engaging distance learners with no economic background in an online health economics course

Heather Brown

On June 16th the School of Dental Sciences was delighted to host a symposium focusing on dental education research.

Coming together in a ‘Northern/Celtic alliance’ the dental schools of Newcastle, Glasgow and Cardiff met to discuss the challenges of undertaking high quality and meaningful dental educational research, to consider how cross school collaborations may be beneficial in overcoming such challenges and to identify strategic areas of common interest where collaborations would be fruitful.

Whilst it was evident that the three schools faced common dilemmas and challenges, at the end of the day it was gratifying to witness a real willingness to work together with objectives to improve our programmes, enhance student experience and increase the quality of our graduates.

Having developed a network of researchers, with collaborations established, and study visits planned, we look forward to meeting again at the same time next year and will be welcoming other UK dental schools to forge a network of pedagogical research and practice for UK dentistry.

Janice Ellis and Luisa Wakeling, School of Dental Sciences

In July Faculty staff will be presenting their work at the HEA Annual Conference 2017 which is titled Generation TEF: Teaching in the spotlight

Here’s who is on the programme. If your work has been missed off, let us know fms.educational.research@ncl.ac.uk.

• Designing for excellence via inclusion: challenging preconceptions of heterogeneity in the student population, Joanna Matthan
• Inclusive research with students and members of the public: how can we best evaluate innovative teaching about ageing? Luisa Wakeling
• Integrating ‘Flipped Learning’ to engage students with their own career development, Salome Bolton & Gigi Herbert
• Enterprise Challenges in Psychology and Beyond: Developing graduate skills and employability through entrepreneurial learning, Patrick Rosenkranz, Alecia Dunn, Amy Fielden & Charlotte Warin
• Once upon a time… retelling the research project story to a new audience. Using peer feedback to develop the language and clarity of the research narrative, Carys Watts & Lindsay Marshall

We’ve got a wide range of work being presented at ASME’s annual conference this year. Here’s a list, in no particular order, of what we’re showcasing via presentations, workshops and posters.  If your work has been missed off, let us know fms.educational.research@ncl.ac.uk.

Iain Keenan et al: Life Sciences in an integrated medical curriculum 6 Equality and Diversity in healthcare teaching: Supporting LGBT

Richard Thomson et al: Promoting resilience: latest fad or realistic educational target?

Laura Delgaty: If storytelling is central to human meaning, why, in the research world, is there not more storytelling?

Hugh Alberti et al: Facilitators and barriers to teaching undergraduate medical students in primary care: The GPs’ perspective.

Bryan Burford and Gill Vance et al: Evaluation of the educational impact of multiprofessional handover

Bryan Burford, Hugh Alberti, Susan Hrisos (IHS) , David Kennedy, Gill Vance: Active participation of ‘real-time’ patients in undergraduate medical education

Hugh Alberti: “Just a GP”: Active denigration of General Practice as a career choice.

Richard Thomson, Jane Stewart et al: Revolutionising feedback: an exploration of barriers and drivers to change

Laura Delgaty et al: A systematic review of qualitative research addressing learner and educator perceptions of valuable e-learning in
medical education

Hugh Alberti: Top Tips for GP Teacher Recruitment and Retention

Jane Stewart, Steve McHanwell et al: Creating and Evaluating the Impact of a Core Syllabus in Anatomy Education using a Delphi Methodology.

Richard Thomson, Jane Stewart et al: ‘Great idea’, ‘sounds scary’, I’m too busy’? Identifying the barriers in developing a staff peer observation programme

Charlotte Rothwell, Madeline Carter, Wayne Medford, Andrea Myers and Jan Illing: A Multinational Approach to Curriculum Design S Jones

Jan Illing, Charlotte Rothwell et al: A mixed-methods study to explore the system for assuring continuing fitness to practice of Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC) registrants