Postgraduates who teach GEES

18 November 2013

Welcome – ice breaker

Introduce yourself to AT LEAST ONE other person in the room

1. Your name and institution

2. Best teaching / learning experience

3. Where you want to be in 5 years time

4. What you want to get out of today (“How can I…?” write it on a post-it note)

HEA support for teaching and learning

Teaching Development Grants - Look out for individual (up to £7000), departmental (up to £30,000) and collaborative calls (up to £60,000); see http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/funding#tdg.

Fellowship of the HEA recognition for your teaching achievements ( UK Professional Standards Framework) (Associate Fellow, Fellow, Senior Fellow and Principal Fellow), as well as our prestigious National Teaching Fellowships: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/individuals.

GEES Technician of the Year award Recognising the importance of technicians in GEES education the GEES Technician of the Year Award deadline - 1 February 2014.

Planet http://journals.heacademy.ac.uk/journal/plan

Source of ideas and a place to publish your innovations and reflections

Free one day workshops

18 December 2013, 10:30 – 15:30 Death to Powerpoint: Effective student and tutor presentations using Prezi, graphs and screencasts, University of Southampton.

15 January 2014 STEM Innovations in teaching and assessing large classes, Bangor University

16 January 2014, 10:00 – 16:00 Students as partners in co-creating STEM outputs, Bournemouth University.

12 March 2014, 10:00-16:00 STEM: Students as partners in learning enhancement, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow.

26 March 2014, 10:00 – 16:00 Accommodating diversity: changing cultures of GEES in higher education, Coventry University.

Resources:

How to succeed at university in GEES disciplines: using online data for independent research By Richard Waller (Keele University) and David M. Schultz (University of Manchester)

Re-thinking undergraduate students’ transitions to, through and out of university: examples of good practice in GEES disciplines By Simon Tate and Peter Hopkins (Newcastle University)

Public Engagement in the GEES disciplines by Dawn Nicolson and Phil Wheater (Manchester Metropolitan University)

Enhancing fieldwork learning project A HEA funded project between GEES and Biosciences

Getting and enjoying your first teaching job: Dr Helen Walkington, Oxford Brookes University

Outline

Selling your teaching experience:

How can I get teaching experience?

How do I demonstrate teaching experience on a CV?

How can I turn networks into contacts for future jobs?

Managing the balance between teaching and research

How can I balance time between teaching and research and life?

How can I take control of my job role?

Line up!

What teaching experience do you already have?

NoneLOADS!

So what counts as teaching experience?

Marking, giving feedback, tutorials, fieldwork demonstrator, lab assistant, invited lectures, planning sessions, lecture courses, curriculum design, validating new courses, mentoring, dissertation supervisor….

Strategies for gaining teaching experience

Offer guest lectures / seminars on your research. Go on tour!

Offer sessions to other postgrads – start a reading group

Ask you supervisor for opportunities e.g. double marking / moderation, podcast some written feedback, a short 10 minute presentation within a lecture on a specific topic, run an activity within a lecture

Become a mentor (provide feedback to student)

Attend public lectures and think critically about what works

Ask to shadow lecturers or team teach with them

Offer to run tutorials

Ask to demonstrate on fieldwork or create an optional field visit

See if your university runs a postgraduate course in LTHE

Go on additional fieldtrips

Create a learning and teaching website about your research (OER)

Providing constructive feedback

GEOverse reviewer experience

“I’d never reviewed anything before for a journal, but I’ve done marking of undergraduate essays… and getting a little bit annoyed, ‘cos you don’t get to give much feedback. You know, you can make general comments on the essays, because time is restricted, whatever you have to say. It is satisfying that you make more constructive comments. I’m probably more constructive in my comments now which may help if I do marking in the future”

“The wiki made the actual writing of the review easier, we had two or three drafts of the review”

Activity

Network of contacts

Networking – making connections

Conferences

INLT http://www.ucd.ie/inlt/

HERG (RGS)

HEA SIGs

Linked in groups

THE GEES network email Sarah Dyer S.Dyer@exeter.ac.uk – wordpress and Linked in groups

Cross discipline fora

Jobs

In small groups have a look at the job adverts.

Identify the types of teaching experience each is asking for

Gap analysis - what experience are you missing that would be useful?

How could you evidence experience in a CV or covering letter to address these requirements?

How could you create opportunities to get that experience?

Nexus-Linking teaching and research

‘The ecology of a university depends on a deep and abiding understanding that

inquiry, investigation and discovery are at the heart of the enterprise, whether in

funded research projects or in undergraduate classrooms or graduate

apprenticeships. Everyone at a university should be a discoverer, a learner. That shared mission binds together all that

happens on a campus.’

Boyer Commission on Educating Undergraduates in the Research University. (1998) Reinventing Undergraduate Education: a blueprint for America’s research universities. Stony Brook: State University of New York

Geography Benchmarking statement

5.8 Within most honours degree programmes in geography, some form of independent research work will be a prerequisite, often in the form of a dissertation presented in the later stages of the programme. Where field-based research is carried out, this represents an area of the student's learning requiring mature and intelligent reflection on the potential risks as well as the moral and ethical issues associated with a proposed project.

HEFCE (2007)

Synergies

• Class discussion as helping to clarify ideas

• Class activities to develop your research e.g. annotated bibliographies, source of new approaches, crowd sourcing, collaborative research, laboratory work on a much greater scale

• Team teaching as basis for research collaboration with other staff

• Co-production of knowledge

• Clarifying the context of your research, the ‘so what?’

Top tips

Marking – explicit criteria save time

Don’t over assess or assess things that are not related to the Learning outcomes

Set aside blocks of time to plan teaching (otherwise it will take as long as you have)

Focus on learning how to communicate complex ideas

The best teaching is where students get a chunk of theory, then are challenged to do something

Blocking out time helps to give ‘research’ time more focus

Being available – balance this carefully! Use office hours, set clear expectations.

More food for thought -http://tenureshewrote.wordpress.com/2013/10/03/research-to-teaching/

Further support and information

Funding:

http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/travel-fund

Resources:

Discipline specific -

http://www.gees.ac.uk/

HEA resources centre – general learning and teaching :

http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/resources

http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/new-to-teaching

http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/documents/ukpsf/ukpsf.pdf

• Associate Fellow (PhD, Postdoc, NTT, technician)

• Fellow (Early career academics, New to UK)

• Senior Fellow • Principal Fellow

Accreditation

Enjoy your teaching!

Keep in touch with each other – share emails!