In 2012-2013 Newcastle was part of an international four centre HEA-funded project called Promoting Teaching. With Sue Robson I was one of the two Newcastle leads for this project which was carried out in collaboration with the University of Leicester and, in Australia, with the Universities of Tasmania and Wollongong. The aim of this project was to produce a set of resources to support universities wishing to review their promotions processes in relation to the reward and recognition of teaching. Alongside this the project team also produced a document called Making Evidence Count which was a guide to how to evidence teaching for purposes of supporting a promotions or award application. The completed materials were delivered to the HEA in 2013 and Making Evidence Count in particular has become a widely used document.
However, since the original project was completed the HEA had commissioned a number of reports on various aspects of reward and recognition in teaching. This has included reviews of teaching excellence (Gunn and Fisk, 2013), scholarship of learning (Fanghanel et al, 2016) and teaching and education leadership (Fung and Gordon, 2016) as well as studies on the changes in the composition of the academic workforce (Locke, 2014 and Locke et al 2016). Alongside there has been something of a growth in the HE literature in this area over this period. As part of a relaunch of Promoting Teaching Sue Robson and I were commissioned by HEA/AHE to review developments in the field and integrate those with the HEA commissioned reports since 2013 to update our Promoting Teaching report. The paper was presented at a launch event at the AHE in York on July 23rd this year.
The seminar consisted of presentations from Sandra Wills, PVC(T) at Charles Sturt University, Australia describing the work that she had led developing a standards framework for academic activity and academic promotion. Sandra was one of the Promoting Teaching project leads at Wollongong. We also had a presentation from Claire Goudy, Director of Education Planning at UCL, London describing the new Academic Careers Framework that has been developed and is in the process of being implemented at UCL. In both cases an initial drive to refine promotions process led to a more substantive review of academic career structures.
Following the presentation of these three papers the afternoon consisted of an extended and wide-ranging discussion of their wider implications from which four clear themes emerged. Given the breadth of these discussions it is not possible to do them full justice here but the four themes can be summarised as follows. The first was how do we recognise teaching related activities and outputs fully especially at higher grades and should that recognition link to UKPSF. The second theme was how to address the need for parity of criteria of teaching in promotion routes to Chair including the recognition of the importance of education leadership in a career profile. The third theme concerned the need to view TEF and REF more holistically and included a discussion of the place of pedagogical research in promotion and in the REF. The final theme focussed around the need for promotion committee members and heads of academic units or schools to understand the nature of teaching evidencing so that they can better assess promotions applications where teaching is a component of the case being made for advancement.
AHE will be placing the materials from the seminar on the web, we had hoped this would already have been done. In the meantime I am happy to send a pdf copy of the Guiding Principles paper that Sue Robson and I wrote for the AHE. The other reports that I identified above can all be found on the Advance HE website
Steve McHanwell, Medical Education