CHAT (Conversations Helping Advance Teaching) trialled an innovative approach to peer review of teaching practice. It was designed to answer the question ‘Could peer review of teaching practice have greater impact if it brought together academics from different disciplines, thereby removing the usual temptation to discuss individual’s disciplinary knowledge and, therefore, focus solely on pedagogy?’ The project was also designed to remove lengthy reporting and focus instead on creating rich, supportive and informative conversations. The project was facilitated through College of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CoASSH) Teaching & Learning Innovation Fund 2023/24.
Participation in the project was voluntary. Volunteers from across the different schools within CoASSH were randomly paired with each other, ensuring that the pairings were from different academic disciplines. This quickly built unexpected, creative and critical friendships across the College.
Paired participants were provided with vouchers for coffee and cake to facilitate their pre- and post- observation meetings in an informal setting. In the first meeting, participants introduced themselves to each other, and agreed which areas of their teaching would benefit from fresh eyes and critical feedback. Pairs observed each other delivering a teaching session and met-up again to share thoughts and feedback on the teaching sessions they’d witnessed. The absence of any reporting paperwork resulted in a genuinely open facilitated conversation, building flexibility and trust for participants to use the scheme in whichever way they felt would most benefit their personal development and teaching practice.
Thirty-two people signed up to the project, representing a good spread of disciplines across the College. The scheme ran throughout the 2023/24 academic year with feedback taken throughout the process, culminating in a plenary session held in June 2024 to evaluate the project’s success. The overwhelming majority of feedback was positive.
Participants used the scheme in a variety of ways. For example, one pair used it to explore the differences in teaching undergraduate and postgraduate cohorts in large and small lecture environments. Another pair used it to provide mentorship to a new member of staff who had only been in the UK for a few months. For one participant, engagement in the scheme opened-up possibilities for new assessment methodologies.
Feedback from participants included:
“I found this very helpful and it has boosted my confidence.”
“I appreciated this process because it allowed me to see how things are done outside [my school] and how different the student/lecturer ratios are [in my school] compared to everywhere else.”
“[A]s someone new to HE teaching (I started in August), I found being part of this incredibly useful.”
Findings from the pilot showed that significant enthusiasm existed across the College for such a scheme and could be particularly useful for staff who were new to teaching. Voluntary participation was seen as a strength of the project, as was the provision of refreshment vouchers. These helped encourage engagement and set an appropriate tone for the conversations. Participants also fed back that sharing findings in a collaborative environment, rather that reporting via a form, resulted in higher levels of engagement.
Jon Rowlands, project lead, said “I believe that schemes such as this can foster a true and rich connection between participants, helping build an authentic, collaborative and cross-disciplinary academic community. The pilot project has created supportive and collegiate academic partnerships that will continue beyond the life of this project, which perhaps is the true measure of its success.”
