We’re pleased to announce that the following projects have been funded in the latest ERDP Development Grant call.

Graduate School

‘Introduction and evaluation of voice thread software in facilitating student feedback in 3 online masters programmes’ Dr Jenny Yeo, Mrs Lynne Rawles, Miss Eleanor Lockheart, Miss Victoria Petrie.

School of Biomedical Sciences

‘Inclusive research with students and members of the public: How can we best evaluate innovative teaching about ageing?’ Dr Ellen Tullo, Dr Laura Greaves, Dr Luisa Wakeling, Prof Rose Gilroy.

School of Dental Sciences

‘A study visit to develop teaching teeth carving to enhance the learning of tooth morphology for dental students’ Dr Bana Abdulmohsen.

‘Scoping Exercise to develop a 3-D printing facility within the School of Dental Sciences’ Dr Iad Gharib, Dr James Field, Dr Simon Stone, Dr Andrew Keeling (Leeds), Mrs Cecilie Osnes, (Leeds), Dr Graham Davis (Queen Mary).

‘Developing public engagement in the quality assurance of teaching programmes’ Dr Janice Ellis, Mrs Zoe Freeman, Dr Richard Holmes, Dr Paula Waterhouse, Dr Sarah Rolland.

‘Leading the pan-European development of curricula within Dental Sciences’ Dr James Field, Professor Damien Walmsley (ADEE), Professor Andreas Schulte (Organisation for Caries Research), Professor Julia Davies, (Malmo University), Professor Cristina Manzanares Cespedes (University of Barcelona), Professor Corrado Paganelli (University of Brescia).

‘What are the benefits of a UK-USA educational initiative and visit programme for dental students?’ Dr Richard Holmes & Dr Paula Waterhouse.

School of Medical Education

‘Longitudinal integrated medical student placements: A study visit to Harvard medical school to inform the new Newcastle medical school curriculum’ Dr Hugh Alberti & Dr Steve Jones.

‘The Research Journey: using digistories to unveil the hidden process’ Dr Laura Delgaty, Mrs Lynne Rawles, Mr Marc Bennett, Ms Linda Errington, Mrs Erika Gavillet.

What route has your career taken to get you where you are today?

I first moved to Newcastle as a new post-doc, setting up a molecular biology lab for the university spin-out company, Novocastra Laboratories. I then moved to an RA post in the Department of Virology on an MRC training fellowship and later to a senior RA post in the musculoskeletal group. During this 12 year period I had my 3 children and worked part-time after the arrival of number two.  As time went on I came to realise that the part of my job I enjoyed the most was teaching and mentoring younger students in the lab and I started to take on some undergraduate seminars as well.  I was on the verge of leaving academia altogether and retraining as a school teacher when a teaching-focussed lectureship came up in the School of Biomedical Sciences – I applied and was appointed along with Chris Baldwin in 2006.  It was the best move of my career!  I’ve found teaching hugely enjoyable and rewarding and love the infinite variety of the job.  I became steadily more involvement in administration and management of the programmes, including becoming Senior Tutor and chairing the exam boards, and was promoted to senior lecturer in 2009.  I went on to become Deputy Head of School before being appointed as Head of School in August 2015.

What do you find most challenging about working in HE learning and teaching?

Finding time to think! From speaking to colleagues in the Faculty, across the university and from other HE institutions it’s clear that we’re all experiencing increasing demands on our time.  The increase in student numbers, levels of student expectation and associated admin have all contributed to this and it can be tricky to protect time to develop new ideas and give some thought to scholarship of learning and teaching.  I’ve tackled this recently by taking part in the EquATE programme – a cross-faculty programme facilitated by colleagues in the Research Centre for Learning and Teaching (CfLaT). The Equate days have created much needed space in my diary to focus on an educational research project and have also led to collaboration with Sue Thorpe in the School of Psychology, who’s brought a new dimension and expertise to the project.

What’s the best thing you’ve been involved in since you started working with Newcastle University?

I particularly enjoyed being involved in development of Personal Tutoring across the university. One of my first roles in the school was to act as a Phase 1 adviser, providing back-up for the personal tutoring system.  At the time this role was fairly novel in the university and, when Personal tutoring was identified as an area for development in the 2009 QAA Institutional Audit, I was invited to join a working group to review university Personal Tutoring policy.  Tutoring practice varied enormously across the university and one product of the working group was the Personal Tutoring Framework, which outlined minimum expectations for tutors and tutees.  I also worked with colleagues in the Student Wellbeing service to develop Personal Tutor training and have helped to facilitate training workshops for CASAP and SDU since then.

What’s the wisest piece of advice you’ve received from a mentor or colleague?

Don’t send an email when you’re angry – sleep on it!

What’s your top educational research interest

I’ve previously published on the use of attendance monitoring to identify students who are becoming disengaged and using this as a trigger for proactive intervention. More recently I’ve started investigating the extent to which students are distracted from study by social media use and strategies which they use to control this distraction.  I have to confess to often fighting the compulsion to “phone check”, so I became intrigued as whether today’s students, most of whom who can text faster than I can speak, deal better with this distraction than I do.  Previous studies have shown both negative and positive correlations between frequency of social media use and academic performance, depending on how the social media is being used.  I would love to know how we can enable students to avoid the distracting aspects of social media (when studying) so that they can reap the potential benefits.

If you could have dinner with 3 famous people from history who would they be?

Much easier to answer from the living – but if pushed I’ll go with Jane Austen, Freddie Mercury and Mozart. With plenty of wine.  I bet it wouldn’t be dull!

Dr Debbie Bevitt, Head of School of Biomedical Sciences

From the 19th to the 27th May 2016, six American dental students from Indiana University School of Dentistry (IUSD) joined their six Newcastle dental student ‘buddies’ to dip their toes (some may say, sink their teeth) into the life of a dental student at Newcastle University.

This is the first time within any university in UK and US where dental students have been involved in exchange activities.

Attracted by our established and vibrant oral health education outreach programme across Newcastle (led by Drs Paula Waterhouse and Richard Holmes), the visitors worked in partnership with their Newcastle buddies and immersed themselves into planning and providing oral health education to various community groups including schools, care homes and drop-in centres to support asylum seekers and homeless adults. They also experienced ‘a week in the life of a Newcastle Dental student’ by shadowing student and staff treatment clinics and technique courses. The students were encouraged to reflect upon and compare the US healthcare system with that of the UK and to understand the role played by our local City Council and Community Dental Services in ensuring oral health education reaches the communities most in need.

As part of our students’ elective studies, this innovative new programme endeavours to deliver the 6 Newcastle students on a reciprocal visit to Indiana in July 2017; building on trans-Atlantic friendships and experiences. Accompanying the students were two academic colleagues from IUSD providing a unique opportunity to forge clinical educational collaboration and educational research collaboration between our respective institutions.

The feedback has been enormously positive from both the staff and the students but may be summarised by a comment from their staff leads Drs Stuart Schrader and Joan Kowolik, “our students had a wonderful time and the experience was absolutely transformative”.

Dr Paula Waterhouse, School of Dental Sciences

Image legend: Newcastle and Indiana students celebrating a successful week of collaborative learning.

Working in conjunction with the staff development unit, the School of Dental Sciences has developed an online tool for recording professional teaching activity, and mapping it to the UK professional standards framework. The tool encourages reflective practice and collection of evidence to facilitate recognition by the HEA. The toolkit can be found at http://www.reflectiontoolkit.org and all new teaching staff are being encouraged to use it regularly.

Dr James Field, School of Dental Sciences

Congratulations to Lindsey Ferrie (BMS) who has been recognised for her excellence in teaching clinical pharmacology by the British Pharmacological Society. The Rang Prize rewards Lindsey for her outstanding commitment to the teaching of pharmacology in both her undergraduate and postgraduate teaching as well as her extensive and innovative outreach activities with primary, secondary and further education and the public over the last 8 years.

‘Dr Ferrie is incredibly passionate about supporting young people to develop their own scientific curiosities, raising their aspirations to study science in higher education. It is here that her enthusiasm for teaching Pharmacology has resulted in the development of some truly unique and exciting learning sessions’

Professor Ann Daly, ICM

Congratulations to Rachel Green (School of Dental Sciences) who has been awarded an ADEE Futuredent Scholarship. This Scholarship Programme is aimed at exploring the use of video dentistry in dental teaching and training at undergraduate and post graduate levels.

Rachel’s project will be to ‘explore the effectiveness of video dentistry in oral surgery undergraduate teaching with a specific focus on feedback: the Newcastle experience’

What route has your career taken to get you where you are today?

Sometime after I started as a Lecturer in Anatomy in Newcastle in 1983 I realised that I had a passion for teaching.  The teaching I was delivering seemed to be appreciated and so gradually, and at first without a definite plan, I found myself concentrating on teaching and taking on roles, as many of us do, contributing to the development of the learning and teaching agenda of the University both at Faculty and University level.  So, just to highlight three of those roles I became DPD for the B Med Sci degree then the route to intercalation for MB BS and BDS students, Director of PG(T) programmes for FMS and then Faculty Liaison Officer for the PG Cert (now CASAP) programme for the University.  Another important external role happened essentially by chance when I was elected to Anatomical Society Council for after quite a short interval I was then, as a consequence, invited to become Hon Education Officer for the Society serving for nine years.  This opened up a variety of opportunities to develop my national and international profile while at the same time enabled me to bring back to the University ideas for developing student learning and teaching in anatomy.  These internal and external roles provided the platform for a successful claim for a National Teaching Fellowship which I was awarded in 2007.  Ultimately though while I have planned a career path in teaching to an extent it has also been the case that some opportunities opened up in unexpected and serendipitous ways and it has been important to identify and take advantage of those as they occurred.

What do you find most challenging about working in HE learning and teaching?

The sector as a whole continues to grapple with rewarding teaching equally alongside research.  It seems to me that in rewarding teaching we are saying that it is of value.  This an important means to increases the self-esteem of teaching staff which in turn we can then see reflected in personal practice.  By this means we all win, students, staff and the institution.

What’s the best thing you’ve been involved in since you started working with Newcastle University?

I would identify two things.  Undoubtedly the award of the National Teaching Fellowship and joining a community of practice that includes many creative and original thinkers has provided a number of opportunities for further work since 2007 including the HEA-funded Promoting Teaching project.  I also count myself privileged to be able to teach some of the most able and lively young people who are our students and who are a constant source of energy and creativity.

What’s the wisest piece of advice you’ve received from a mentor or colleague?

I started out as a physiologist and I am going to choose some advice given to me by two physiologists; one serious, one less so.  Many of my physiology colleagues will remember Joe Lamb who died recently.  It was at a Physiological Society Dinner that he told the assembled diners never to cross the campus of the University without a piece of paper in your hand.  It meant you would always appear to be on university business even if you were simply off to Sainsbury’s to buy some sausages for tea.  The second piece of advice came from my PhD supervisor Tim Biscoe.  He said that as a teacher the thing you should never do is mislead your students.  Intellectual honesty seems to me to be absolutely crucial to everything we do and being clear to your students when you do not have an answer to a question is a key starting place.

What’s your top educational research interest

At the moment I am provoked by questions about the importance of knowledge in our teaching and how we make decisions about what to teach.  These are ideas that we can trace back to Dewey via Brunner and Stenhouse.  This has led me to the ideas surrounding threshold concepts and the work of Ray Land and which I think I am going to approach through the ideas of Lee Shulman and his ideas of signature pedagogies.  Of course I have ongoing interests in rewarding and recognising teaching achievement that I continue to pursue.

If you could have dinner with 3 famous people from history who would they be?

This is so difficult and where does one start?  I think Virginia Woolf would have to be high on the list for me.  Her writing whether in the novels, diaries or letters is a constant source of stimulation.  Gustav Holst would be another choice.  His combining of a creative life with that of a teacher seems to be a balancing act many of us seek to achieve.  His riposte to George Bernard Shaw also places him high in my estimation.  Holst said “those who can do, those who teach also do, teaching is doing, teaching is an art”.  Then finally John Dewey because reading his work is to see presaged and discussed many of the issues we are still grappling with.  I am not sure though that I would want to invite all at the same time

We have just announced the third round of calls for applications to the ERDP Small Grants scheme.  In the first two rounds we have been pleased to receive many interesting and thoughtful proposals.  Can I encourage you all to consider applying?  One area where we have yet to see many applications is for people wishing to make study visits to other Universities.  We feel very strongly that such visits can be enormously beneficial to the staff making such a visit and can be a valuable source of new ideas.  We will consider any well-made case so if you have an idea for a visit then please think about applying to the scheme for support to carry it out.

Our seminar programme for the year is about halfway through and we have had some interesting and stimulating speakers so far with more yet to come.  I am now putting together next year’s programme.  I have had some suggestions for speakers but would be delighted to receive your suggestions for people you would like to invite.

The EQUATE programme is well-advanced and projects are taking shape and plans for publication are advancing.  As our writing retreat approaches I am looking forward to seeing the results of the various projects being undertaken and to looking at the papers as they take shape.

I hope you enjoy the newsletter.  There’s a lot of innovative project work and good news to read about.  If you have articles for the next issue due in June just send them through to  fms.educational.research@newcastle.ac.uk.

An alumni of Newcastle University, having completed her undergraduate and postgraduate studies here, Dr Ruth Valentine took up her first academic post as Research Associate in ICaMB upon completion of her PhD in 1999.  After two years she moved onto a lectureship at Northumbria University where she taught on their Food Science, Human Nutrition and Forensic Science undergraduate and postgraduate programmes.  She returned to Newcastle in 2007 when appointed Lecturer in the Dental School and started teaching physiology and nutrition to Stage 1 & 2 students.

Commitment to professionalism in T&L

During her career Ruth has continuously developed her teaching practice and in 2014 gained Senior Fellowship status of the Higher Education Academy. Through this accreditation, she has become a Professional Standards Advisor for the UKPSF, and she guides and mentors Newcastle University colleagues through the process of attaining HEA fellowship status.

Strategies to remove barriers to Higher Education at postgraduate level

With a strong reputation in student recruitment and running widening participation schemes (Partners, Realising Opportunities, Raising Aspiration) at a University level, Ruth will be using this experience in her new role to develop and lead strategy to help to overturn the barriers to Higher Education at post graduate level.

Supporting staff

In her new role Ruth will be overseeing the training and support at postgraduate level for DPDs, Chairs of Board of Studies and Chairs of Boards of Examiners across the Faculty.  The programme of support will continue to include the established informal forum that gives DPDs the opportunity to meet and discuss ideas and problems. Ruth has plans to expand the programme to include Away Days that involve support staff too.

“I am looking forward to working closely with the Graduate School team and staff in the Schools of Dental Sciences, Medical Education and Psychology to ensure that we maintain and increase the high level of student satisfaction in the Postgraduate Taught Experience Survey (PTES) and provide PG taught programmes that are viable and attractive and of the highest quality to attract the best students.”

Dr Ruth Valentine, Director of PG Taught Programmes

Dr Clare Guilding (SME) has been awarded the ASME Educator Develop Group (EDG) Educator Innovator Award 2016.  Clare’s submission was titled ‘Interactive high-fidelity patient simulations delivered to large group pre-clinical medical cohorts in the lecture theatre.’ 

The Judges were very impressed with the way the author had innovatively taken established technologies and combined them to make a routine lecture exciting, interactive and engaging with appropriate consideration of educational theory.

Clare will be presenting her paper at the ‘What’s Hot’ session at the ASME ASM, 6^th – 8^th July 2016, Belfast.