The following activities encourage a focus on enquiry into teaching and exchange of practice at various levels.
Teaching observation
One of the required activities is the teaching observation. Arrange for your teaching to be observed by someone more senior than you – someone you know is heavily involved in Education in your department or Faculty, who either knows your subject area or your teaching approach well. If you’re struggling to find somebody, King’s Academy can arrange for you to meet and be observed by one of the members of the King’s Educators Network.
Use the standard Teaching Observation form for this, completing the first sections in advance and passing them to your observer before the observation. You can find that form on the HEA Recognition KEATS space (also linked from the LTP Part Two KEATS space).
As long as your Teaching Observation happens no more than six months before your HEA submission (and you have used the standard form above), you can use it in the application.
Peer observation
Arrange for your teaching to be observed by a member of your cohort, a member of the King’s Educators Network, or a colleague who is active in education in your department. The peer observation process is as follows:
- Fill out the early sections of the observation form for your observer. You can find the form on HEA Recognition KEATS space (also linked from the LTP Part Two KEATS space).
- Alternative to in-person observation, you can ask for a peer review of course content, objectives, materials or a KEATS space – but select something which demonstrates how you and your students interact with each other.
- Email the form to your observer.
- Meet afterwards to discuss the observation. Write or record your reflections on the discussion and your ideas for next steps (300 words).
- Repeat the process where the person observed then becomes the observer.
Come to a workshop
Participate in a King’s Academy Core Workshop and produce a reflective summary on how you plan to apply what you have learned to your own practice.
Some reflective question prompts:
- What is your context and why was the workshop relevant to you?
- What did you learn from the workshop that you intend to put into practice?
- For your context, what are the considerations and conditions for success?
- How will you know if your changes have positive effects?
Reflective practice and enquiry
Review the research literature on teaching and learning a selected area within your discipline. Create a short annotated bibliography of three to five references and contribute to King’s Academy’s growing disciplinary resource.
Benchmarking
Analyse your module or programme using any of these benchmark tools:
- NUS Assessment and Feedback tool,
- JISC/NUS Student Experience tool,
- The Inclusive Practice checklist,
- Rice University’s course workload estimator helps anticipate how much time students are likely to be spending on reading, writing and revision based on aspects such as wordcount, difficulty, and genre. You can use this in your curriculum design too.
For your students, encourage them to analyse their own digital capabilities using Jisc’s Digital Discovery Tool and facilitate a discussion.
Assessment mapping
Initiate a review of the assessment in your programme using the TESTA method. TESTA (Transforming the Experience of Students Through Assessment) is intended as a year-long process around engagement with programme teams and making substantive changes to assessment practices.
Although you will not complete TESTA within a single term, any single element of the process will deepen your understanding of assessment and feedback, and will be enough to discuss in your Exit Session. Elements are (in order):
- Initial team meeting to discuss programmatic assessment practices,
- Online survey to students (you could analyse the responses for the programme team),
- Focus group with students.