Tim Herrick

1. Student Observation of
Teaching:
Partnerships for individual
growth and cultural change
Tim Herrick, University of Sheffield
t.herrick@sheffield.ac.uk

2. Overview
1. What can students do to support staff in their teaching?
2. The Sheffield Student Observation of Teaching scheme
3. What is the scheme missing? How can it be improved,
including through learning from your experiences?
4. How can we develop this notion of student-staff
collaboration in professional development?
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3. What can students do to
support staff teaching?
• Quick discussions in your groups:
• What already happens in your institution?
• If you had a magic wand, what would you like
to happen?
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4. Student Observation of Teaching:
It does exactly what it says on the tin
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5. How it works (1/2)
• Students partner with one or more staff in a
different department, who are all
volunteers, to work together for one
semester
• Pilot year, 2017/18: 22 staff and 16 students,
in 17 pairings; first full running, 2018/19: 16
staff and 36 students, in 14 pairings
• Pairings agree what they want to get out of
the scheme, what they will do, and how they
will work together
• Observations take various forms, e.g. one-
off observations and discussions; discussion
of online materials; students mediating
feedback from other student focus groups
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6. How it works (2/2)
• Students create feedback on
observation, and discuss this with staff,
including agreement of next steps and
any changes in (personal /
departmental) practice
• Option of looping in other colleagues in
each department, who are aware that
this is happening (but not the details of
what is being discussed)
• Workshops and informal drop-ins to
support participants
• Written reflection from each party to
bring the cycle to a well-defined close
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• More information about all this here: https://tinyurl.com/soot2019

7. Purposes and principles
• To enhance the quality of the conversation about
“teaching excellence”, in an era of the datafication
of educational processes
• To connect individuals interested in learning and
teaching, outside of traditional institutional
structures
• To enable everyone to benefit
• To foster active learning:
• [U]nderstanding multiple sides of the teaching
and learning process encouraged me to
approach studying and learning differently [...]
I think I would now pay more attention to the
way I could use what I’m taught rather than
only study it and memorize it until the exam
session is over
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8. Impact on students
• Greater sense of autonomy: “It is useful to remind myself that I’m in control
of my own learning”
• Overall sense of achievement and empowerment: “What amazed me the
most is that at the beginning I didn't believe in this scheme and thought that
it could not bring me something more than HEAR recognition, but it actually
changed the way I look at my future.”
• Deeper appreciation of teaching, and the circumstances under which it
takes place: “Teaching is complicated, especially in dealing with students
and their satisfaction”
• Clearer sense of partnership with staff, and confidence in working with
them: “This was [...] one of the very few times when I had the feeling that I am
in the same team as my teacher and we are working together towards the
same goal.”
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9. Impact on staff
• Developments to practices, individually and collectively: “the observers were
able to see how my students were taking notes in lectures (which the
lecturer cannot see from the front) and reported that some students had
made preparatory notes and annotations before the lecture, which I did not
expect. [This is of] potential great interest in designing new learning
activities in the Department.”
• Feedback on their practice is welcomed from anyone, but particularly
students: “It was really interesting to hear honest perspectives from
students”
• Fostering a sense of a learning and teaching community: the best part was
“being involved with a community of practice at the university around
teaching, and actually getting to get together with academics from across
the university”
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10. Theoretical background
• Long-standing tradition of fostering student-staff collaboration, with
pioneers in the field like Alison Cook-Sather (e.g. Cook-Sather, 2008), and
Catherine Bovill (e.g. Bovill et al., 2016)
• Recent(ish) reviews of the literature and practices (Healey, Flint, and
Harrington, 2014, for the HEA; Mercer-Mapstone et al., 2017, for the
International Journal for Students as Partners)
• Behind all of this, Michael Fielding on “radical collegiality” (Fielding, 1999);
and behind this, Freire and other exponents of “radical pedagogy”
• Student observation schemes running in a number of UK institutions, e.g.
University of Lincoln (who inspired this scheme), Birmingham City (as
detailed in O’Leary and Cui, 2018), Edinburgh Napier (Students as
Colleagues), and LSE (Changemakers), plus…
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11. Doing it better
• What is the
scheme missing?
• How can it be
improved,
including with
insights from
experiences in
your institutions?
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12. Doing it wider
Bit of discussion in groups, to identify some new frontiers:
1. What support should be offered to staff and students
to engage in developmental conversations?
2. What might be more or less effective ways for
individuals to share the benefits they have
experienced through the scheme?
3. In what other ways might professional development in
higher education be framed as a collaborative
endeavour between students and staff?
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13. Collaboration with students
• Power relations: you can’t go round them, you
can’t go over them, you have to go through them
• Support for going beyond their comfort
zone: a small number of staff “holding” the
scheme, and acting as a point of stability in an
experience that might be unsettling for everyone
• Not happening in a vacuum: “Original theory
and views on student-centred education have
perhaps become colonised by government
drivers and policy, reproduced in universities as
institutional policy and resulting in forms of
‘student voice’ practice as determined by
everyone other than the actual student” (Seale
et al., 2015)
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14. Student observation of teaching
fostering (meta-)learning
• Meta-learning as "being aware of and taking
control of one’s own learning“ (Biggs, 1985)
• “Hearing a lecturer's position on modern
teaching for the first time gave me a fresh
perspective on some of my own learning
practices.”
• For staff too, a deeper understanding of the
complexities of student learning:
• “[Participation in SOOT] has challenged me
to make sure I don't speak from someone
else's perspective or assume I know what it
means to be a student.”
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15. ReferencesBiggs, J.B., 1985. The role of metalearning in study processes. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 55:3, 185-212.
Bovill, C., Cook-Sather, A., Felten, P., Millard, L., & Moore-Cherry, N., 2016. Addressing potential challenges in co-creating
learning and teaching: overcoming resistance, navigating institutional norms and ensuring inclusivity in student–staff
partnerships. Higher Education, 71:2, 195-208.
Cook‐Sather, A., 2008. ‘What you get is looking in a mirror, only better’: inviting students to reflect (on) college
teaching, Reflective Practice, 9:4, 473-483.
Fielding, M., 1999. Radical collegiality: Affirming teaching as an inclusive professional practice. The Australian
Educational Researcher, 26:2, 1-34.
Healey, M., Flint, A. & Harrington, K., 2014. Engagement through partnership: students as partners in learning and
teaching in higher education, available from: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/engagement-through-
partnership-students-partners-learning-and-teaching-higher, last accessed 25-6-19.
Mercer-Mapstone, L., Dvorakova, S. L., Matthews, K. E., Abbot, S., Cheng, B., Felten, P., Knorr, K., Marquis, E., Shammas, R.
& Swaim, K., 2017. A Systematic Literature Review of Students as Partners in Higher Education. International Journal
for Students as Partners, 1(1). Retrieved from https://mulpress.mcmaster.ca/ijsap/article/view/3119, 25-6-19.
Neary, M. and Winn, J., 2015. Beyond public and private: a model for co-operative higher education. Krisis: Journal for
contemporary philosophy.
O’Leary, Matt and Cui, Vanessa (2018) Reconceptualising Teaching and learning in higher education: challenging
neoliberal narratives of teaching excellence through collaborative observation. Teaching in Higher Education, online
pre-publication, 1-16.
Seale, J., Gibson, S., Haynes, J., & Potter, A. (2015). Power and resistance: Reflections on the rhetoric and reality of using
participatory methods to promote student voice and engagement in higher education. Journal of Further and Higher
Education, 39:4, 534-552.
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16. Questions?
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Thank you!
t.herrick@sheffield.ac.uk