The London- and Birmingham-based Institute of Inner City Learning at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David employs more than 150 hourly-paid lecturers (HPLs), who normally teach between four and 20 hours a week.
Three years ago, following a review of its engagement with these colleagues – and as part of a strategy to enhance staff feedback and marking practices with a view to improving levels of student retention, progression and attainment – it introduced a continuing personal development (CPD) programme for HPL staff.
The design and development of this programme isinformed by engagement with those HPLs themselves, who are paid for taking part in these training activities. This provision has received positive responses from participants. The year following its introduction also saw significant rises in the relevant metrics – the most dramatic being in the area of student retention, which leapt from 50.04 per cent to 78.95 per cent. The provider is now looking to offer a similar opportunity to HPLs based on its Wales campuses.
Developing staff has positive impacts
Since Aberystwyth University launched a similar staff development programme for postgraduate research students who engage in teaching activities, its participants and their colleagues have observed significant positive impacts on their pedagogic practices. It has now supported the training of more than 150 graduate teaching associates, a group (like HPLs) whose development hasn’t always, historically across the sector, received the attention it deserves – as a key current teaching resource and as one which is essential to the future of tertiary provision.
These outcomes should perhaps come as no surprise to a sector whose fundamental value is based upon a belief in the capacity of education to transform, for the better, economies, societies, communities, workplaces, professional cultures and practices and individual lives. Indeed, you might consider a focus on the training of HE professionals as something of a no-brainer. It nevertheless seems crucial – especially during a period of unprecedented financial constraints – that we recognise the benefits to students and the cost-effectiveness to providers of continued investment in the professional development of teaching staff.
Published today, a report from QAA Cymru charts The Impact of Staff Professional Development on Teaching Practice and Student Learning and Performance. Funded by Medr, Wales’s Commission for Tertiary Education and Research, this new report comprises a collection of 13 case studies developed by colleagues based in colleges and universities across Wales.
These case studies have been designed to support learning transfer across staff based in different providers and to encourage dialogues around learning, teaching and quality, both within and across providers. In doing so, they demonstrate both the immediate impacts of staff development activities, and the importance of the continuing evaluation of those impacts.
Staff time is a key resource
Colleagues have, for example, detailed the positive impacts of participation in action research projects on both the staff involved and the students they teach. One such project has seen a lecturer at Bridgend College working with students in developing approaches to Generative AI to determine that technology’s effectiveness when used as a learning tool.
Providers have discovered the value of supporting such activities with perhaps their most precious resource – their own staff’s time.
Another initiative has involved staff and students in learning design activities to underpin the development of flexible delivery models at the University of South Wales. Yet another has rolled out professional development training to provide teaching staff with mechanisms for improving their students’ feedback literacy and engagement – resulting in significant increases in the documented engagement of those students in these feedback processes. Meanwhile, other projects featured in our new report have shown the positive impact which supporting and enabling bilingual and Welsh-medium delivery can have on classroom practices and students’ and staff members’ linguistic competence and confidence.
Such work can have significant impact even at a relatively modest scale. Low-cost opportunities to support staff development can have unexpectedly valuable benefits. When, for instance, Coleg Cambria’s Sadie Thackaberry – a finalist in the Best Lecturer category for this year’s Professional Teaching Awards Cymru – had the opportunity to take a course in the science of wellbeing, it led her to develop a resilience toolkit for her own students which has not only been well received by its participants but has also prompted interest in being rolled out more widely.
At the same time, in a rather larger-scale initiative, Wrexham University has been working to become a TrACE (Trauma and Adverse Childhood Experience)-informed institution, involving students, staff and external partners in a collaborative approach to developing activities designed to underpin the university’s strategic commitment to mental health and wellbeing and the promotion of equality, diversity and inclusion. The impacts of this project are to be evaluated on a biennial basis, affording both an ongoing assessment of its effectiveness and opportunities to promote and share the practices it has developed.
Wales supports collaborative enhancement
We at QAA very much hope that the insights brought together in this report will prove valuable not only for our colleagues in Wales but also across the tertiary sector throughout the UK. The evaluation and promotion of the impacts of these professional development activities should benefit both students and colleagues – and should, we hope, help inform those developing institutional strategies, sector guidance and public policy in this area.
Academic year 2022-23 saw all nine higher education institutions in Wales, together with 12 further education institutions, collaborating on a HEFCW-funded QAA Cymru Collaborative Enhancement project in digital learning and teaching. This in turn has led to the creation of the Welsh Collective, a networking group focused on the development and enhancement of practices in immersive learning. Commentary on this initiative is also included in our new report.
It is, we believe, through such collaborative working – and through the sharing of the outputs and outcomes of such work – that the benefits of activities designed to develop the skills, understanding and knowledge of staff in tertiary education can add significant value for staff, students and providers across the entire sector, both in Wales and beyond.
None of this, of course, comes free. But the positive impacts of these sector-led activities – -activities led not only by providers but often also by staff and students – can, as the scope of their ambition is fostered more widely, prove remarkably cost-effective – when providers are willing to commit sometimes relatively modest investments to support them to grow and flourish.
They remind us that the sector’s most valuable asset is of course its staff – staff who can often add extraordinary value when given the time, support, training, trust and confidence they need in order to innovate effectively and learn from one another. Together with the tools to evaluate, the opportunities to promote, and the networks to share, the immediate and long-term impacts of their enhancement initiatives can then significantly underpin and boost- tertiary education’s transformative power.
Read more: The Impact of Staff Professional Development on Teaching Practice and Student Learning and Performance.
