Another fortnight, another get-together to talk about our portfolios for the HEA fellowship accreditation. This time we talked about A4 – Develop effective learning environments and approaches to student support and guidance.

At Fellow level we need to give evidence of our debelopment of a learning environment, for example

• examples of an online environment
• mentoring or tutoring plans and notes
• photos of equipment, exhibitions, etc. in a relevant setting

At Senior Fellow level we need to give evidence of our managing the development of learning environments and support, for example

• organising personal tutoring
• setting up online environments
• organising exhibitions, placements, etc.

We talked about how we support, set up and manage both online environments  for modules (and particularly the tools here that go beyond the mere information delivery of putting up lecture slides, for examples the use of discussion forums, blogs, wikis) and also resources (different ways of accessing our in-house research collection) as well as the ‘old-fashioned’ not quite as virtual environments we create – and why sometimes the one is more appropriate than the other. Actually we thought what would probably be an important factor in our annotation of our individual examples would be exactly this explanation – why did we choose to set it up this way, with reference to the content and skills we teach, and the type of students we interact with.

We ended by having a little chat about the references. Each of us needs to references, which should be provided by somebody who knows our teaching, so we thought about who we could ask.

Next time: A5 – Engaging in continuing professional development in subjects/disciplines and their pedagogy, incorporating research, scholarship and the evaluation of professional practices.

Today we talked about Area of Activity 3: Assess and give feedback to learners.

Suggested as evidence for the portfolios was at Fellow Level:

• Anonymised assessment feedback
• Evaluation of the impact of assessment feedback
• Formative or summative assessment brief

at Senior Fellow Level:

• Evidence of co-ordination toles in relation to student feedback, for example standardisation and moderation

When discussing what examples we could include into our individual portfolios, we were thinking not just about the written feedback the students get, but about the whole experience and how that is structured. For example, one of us explained the feedback procedure in her award area and how the students are provided with written feedback as preparation for a tutorial, which allows them time before the tutorial to reflect and actually prepare for the tutorial, so they can come up with specific questions they have. This is something that wouldn’t necessarily be apparent from the suggested examples, so we thought that it might be a good idea to put together a flow-chart of how the feedback process works – and how it is effectively turned into feed-forward.

We were talking about how to visually present the feedback to students, and I particularly mentioned a paper on this I heard at a conference in 2010 (which I highly recommend and can be found here), which I have based my current feedback sheets on.

We were then also thinking about ways to visually explain to students the weighting of different aspects, whether they be different parts of the module or different learning outcomes, as this is a problem that students often seem to have, not quite understanding that not every part is of equal importance when it comes to coming up with the final grade. We thought that it might be a nice idea to include a pie chart to show this to students.

Rather than getting distracted for days and then delaying the writing of this like last time, I’m doing it today – only one day after our meeting.

This session we wanted to look at the annotation that needs to be done for these portfolios. While we have to provide evidence as to the different Areas of Activities, we need to show the Core Knowledge and Professional Values through some sort of annotation of the included Area of Activity documents.

There are six areas of Core Knowldge:

• K1 The subject material
• K2 Appropriate methods for teaching and learning in the subject area and at the level of the academic programme
• K3 How students learn, both generally and within their subject/disciplinary area(s)
• K4 The use and value of appropriate learning technologies
• K5 Methods for evaluating the effectiveness of teaching
• K6 The implications of quality assurance and quality enhancement for academic and professional practice with a particular focus on teaching

and four areas of Professional Values:

• V1 Respect individual learners and diverse learning communities
• V2 Promote participation in higher education and equality of opportunity for learners
• V3 Use evidence-informed approaches and the outcomes from research, scholarship and continuing professional development
• V4 Acknowledge the wider context in which higher education operates recognising the implications for professional practice

For the different levels of accreditation, Associate Fellow candidates have to annotate the portfolio to demonstrate examples of at least K1 and K2 and each element of the Professional Values, Fellow and Senior Fellow candidates have to demonstrate at least two examples of all the Core Knowledge and Professional Values.

In order to get our heads around this, we had a look at an example of a successful document from a colleague at a different university. However, as this didn’t go down the portfolio route it was describing the evidence of the Areas of Activity rather than including them as examples. Even though the process is therefore a bit different from what we will have to do, it was really helpful to look at an actual example. We really liked how this clearly refered to each of the Knowledge and Values in brackets after the description (for example K1 and V4), and how it used the discussion of both of these dimensions of the UK Professional Standards Framework to fold in theory.

We thought that it might be useful to physically organise this annotation (and also the editing of the portfolio) by collecting our possible evidence and using different coloured sticky-notes to remind us of what Knowledge and Value descriptors would be shown by these examples. That would make it easier to later on decide which examples to best include (briefness always being a virtue in portfolios) and would also make the writing-up of the annotations much easier.

We also thought about possibly keeping a grid to show what Areas of Activity could cover what Knowledge and which Values, to allow us each an overview to make the editing process easier. A grid of the submitted pieces of evidence could then also be submitted to give the reviewers that same overview.

And then we had some fun thinking about different ways of presenting these annotations. As we will have documents as evidence, we could signpost good practice much more directly than our colleague could in one long written piece. So we were thinking of using post-its to refer to the Knowledge and Values – and even where appropriate to point towards theory – or maybe luggage tags. Maybe the Knowledge needs to be represented by something other than the Values, so we could possibly have both? Or will that just become confusing?

As I am still thinking about at least somehow including a quilt (although whether I will have an appropriate one ready by then remains to be seen), I was also thinking of attaching things with safety pins, putting in looped (or sewn on straight) labels, or maybe even showing how things are being held together through Knowledge and Values by differently coloured thread. Yes, it would be way more complicated, but so much more fun than a boring collection of printed WordDocuments…

Yes, we had a second meeting, but I haven’t had time to blog about it until now…

This time we were concentrating on the area of Activity 2 – Teach and/or support learning.

The examples that are listed in our portfolio suggestions are at Fellow level:

• Teaching aid (e.g. visual aid, handout)
• Explanation of a teaching activity used in a relevant setting
• Evaluation of teaching/learning sessions
• Your reflection on National Student Survey results for your area

and at Senior Fellow level

• Evidence of providing mentoring or development opportunities for staff who are teaching or supporting learning
• Your strategic response to National Student Survey results for your area.

At Associate and Fellow level, we felt that this was an easier activity to provide evidence for than A1 – as we are all teaching, and that it was great to have the option to explain a teaching activity if teaching aids were inappropriate to include (or would be needed to back up a handout). so people who are demonstrating or giving tutorials a lot could still find evidence for this area or activity.

We spent a bit longer taling about what evidence we could provide at Senior Fellow level. on reflection (and in discussion) we were able to come up with examples how the people interested in that level of fellowship do mentor other mentors of staff, whether that be through sessions as part of a PgC, workshops offered through staff development, contributing to conferences and unconferences, just helping out colleagues or indeed this blog.

Next session: Annotating the Evidence – how to show Core Knowledge and Professional Values (as this session is scheduled during the Easter break, there might be only a few people coming, but we might do another session later in the term)

Let me first say: apologies to all readers who this really doesn’t apply to. Because this is only tangentially tactileacademia related, and some of the lingo is probably very Staffs specific…

Part of the university plan at Staffordshire University is that everybody should be HEA accredited within 5 years, so a small group of people from my award group have decided to get together regularly to have a chat about the things we need to for our individual portfolios. As inevitably not everybody can make it to these sessions, I promised to put a short summary on this blog, which also will allow exchange of ideas. I will put them into a new category called ‘HEA accreditation’. Who knows, maybe we will even get some virtual group members from other universities…?

So today we focused on Area of Activity 1: Design and plan learning activities and/or programmes of study

This seemed really straight-forward. For our portfolio we need at least one piece of evidence that shows we design and plan learning activities. Suggested on the tick-list for Fellow were:

• module handbook developed by you
• session plan
• evidence of involvement in a validation panel
• learning resource pack
• plans to integrate the Staffordshire Graduate attributes

Suggested on the tick-list for Senior Fellow were:

• Award or module handbook developed by you
• Award monitoring form completed by you
• Evidence of driving forward the Staffordshire Graduate agenda within your area

In our discussion we wondered how old the evidence could be. Some of us have recently had a significant change in our module leadership duties due to a restructuring on the awards, so things have changed quite a bit. We figured that as long as not all the evidence was ancient it would probably be ok to put in something that showed good practice but wasn’t current at the moment – and obviously that could be mentioned as part of the annotation/overview.

We decided to all think about examples we could include in our portfolio (to be edited down at a later stage), and to bring them to the next session, so that we could use these get-togethers to share good practice as well as just put together our own portfolios.

Next session: A2: Teach and/or support learning (moved from 12 to 1)