Inaugural lecture at Southampton Solent, 15th March

1. Click to edit Master title style
Inaugural professorial of Dr Tansy Jessop
Fostering educational change through
research: stories from the field.
15 March 2017

2. Click to edit Master title style
Welcome
Professor Graham Baldwin
Vice-Chancellor
Southampton Solent University

3. Fostering change through research:
Stories from the field
Tansy Jessop
Inaugural Lecture
Southampton Solent University
15 March 2017
@tansyjtweets
@solentlearning

4. The lecture
• Educational change is difficult
• Learning about change in the field
• Bringing about change through TESTA
• Principles of change

5. Proving is different from improving
“It is incredibly difficult to translate assessment
evidence into improvements in student learning”
“It’s far less risky and complicated to analyze data
than it is to act”
(Blaich & Wise, 2011)

6. Learning about change:
A South African story (1995-7)
• What are teachers’ narratives in
resource-deprived, rural
KwaZulu-Natal?
• How should their narratives and
the context shape teacher
development?

7. 43:1 pupil teacher ratios?
42% schools
electrified
34% schools
have no water

8. “I’ve seen nothing”

9. What did I learn about research and
change?
• It changed me
• Listening is important; making sense of people’s
stories in context vital
• The heart-side of doing research is marginalised
but needs a place in the canon
• It really matters how you tell the story

10. A story from Kolkata (1998):
The nun with a social justice habit

11. The Rainbow School, Loreto Sealdah
A school within a school

12. Elements of change
• Passion drives change
• Shared vision arises from action
• Change builds out of relationships
• Lack of resources is a red herring
• The best change is systemic and multi-dimensional
• Pace of change – chaos, risk, disorder
• Counter-intuitive risks can pay off…

13. Your thoughts about change
What is the single most important factor in bringing
about change and why? Chat to the person next to
you about it or….
Go to www.menti.com and use the code 79 15 6
Type in words or phrases in answer to the question.

14. TESTA: a ‘perfect storm’
of educational change principles?

16. A modular programme

17. The Methodology
Programme
Team
Meeting
Assessment
Experience
Questionnaire
(AEQ)
TESTA
Programme
Audit
Student
Focus Groups

18. Sustained sector-wide growth

19. Why is TESTA a convincing change
initiative?

20. 1. It speaks into the context
It was heavy, tons of marking for
the tutor. It was such hard work.
It was criminal.
Media Course Leader
I’m really bad at reading
feedback. I’ll look at the mark
and then be like ‘well stuff it, I
can’t do anything about it’
Student, TESTA focus group

21. The value was to look at what we do from a scientific
perspective and look at things objectively, and that is
really enabling us to re-think how we do things.
2. The hard data convinces…
It has fed into the changes that are going on in the
curriculum. From my perspective, someone who is a
number cruncher, this helps me go to the team and say
‘Well, look, we’ve got the evidence now to be able to go
ahead and do this’ rather than it being on a whim…

22. 3. So does the soft data….
I’ve found it useful to have a mirror held up, to give a
real reflection. We talk about the ‘student voice’, but
actually this has provided a mechanism.
It’s been challenging. It has shown us
that there is no room for complacency. It
also has shown us that we need to listen
more to what students are saying.

23. 4. But the tools alone are not enough….
I don’t think it’s just the
tools. The tools are
good and they work
really, really well, but
..[the change] comes
through a kind of
collegiality.
It’s been a collaborative
thing. It hasn’t just been
me saying to the team
“We’re going to do this”
It’s “This is what they’ve
found out folks. What
are we going to do
about it? How are we
going to develop it?

24. It is not top-down!

25. Paradigm What it looks like
Technical rational Focus on data and tools
Relational Focus on people
Emancipatory Focus on systems and structures

26. Everybody has brought
in more formative. The
idea was to consolidate
the summative
assessment and bring in
more formative.
Do we want to continue
offering twenty different
types of assessment or
do we bite the bullet and
say “We want the
students to be able to
master five of them”?
There has been more of a
spacing of assessments.
5. It has practical impacts…
There is a lot more feed
forward, which is what
came out of the TESTA.

27. Quick Pause
Which of these TESTA
change approaches
most resonates for you
and why?

28. Lessons learnt played out in TESTA
1. Listen to stories and perspectives
2. Develop ownership of the data
3. Work across the organisation with teams
4. Robust data and sound theory are convincing
5. So is the art of telling the research story

29. 1. Listen and build evidence with and for participants
2. Share practical strategies
3. Develop systematic team approaches
4. Build a shared vision through cross-institutional
working group
5. Tell the story artfully:
https://youtu.be/crRF51x__jQ
Implications for the RIT agenda @Solent

30. References
Arum, R. and Roksa. J. Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. University of Chicago Press.
Barlow, A. and Jessop, T. (2016) “You can’t write a load of rubbish”: why blogging works as formative assessment. Educational Developments 17(3)
Gibbs, G. & Simpson, C. (2004) Conditions under which assessment supports students' learning. Learning and Teaching in Higher Education. 1(1): 3-31.
Jessop, T. (2017) Inspiring transformation through TESTA’s programme approach. Chapter 4 (49-64) in Scaling up Assessment for Learning in Higher
Education. Singapore. Springer.
Jessop, T. And Tomas, C. (2016) The implications of programme assessment patterns for student learning. Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education.
Jessop, T. (2016) Seven years and still no itch – why TESTA keeps going. Educational Developments, 17(3) 5-8. SEDA.
Jessop, T. and Maleckar, B. (2014). The Influence of disciplinary assessment patterns on student learning: a comparative study. Studies in Higher Education.
Published Online 27 August 2014
Jessop, T. , El Hakim, Y. and Gibbs, G. (2014) The whole is greater than the sum of its parts: a large-scale study of students’ learning in response to different
assessment patterns. Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education. 39(1) 73-88.
Jessop, T., El Hakim, Y. and Gibbs, G. TESTA 2014: A way of thinking about assessment and feedback. Educational Developments 14:3.
Jessop, T., El Hakim, Y. and Gibbs, G. 2011. TESTA: Research Inspiring Change. Educational Developments 12(4) 12-16.
Jessop, T. 2001. Key ingredients in the search for social justice: A case study of 'best practice' in a Calcutta school. Catholic Education: A Journal of Inquiry
and Practice, 5 (1). 100-115.
Jessop, T. and Penny, A. 1999. A story behind a story: Developing strategies for making sense of teacher narratives. International Journal of Social
Research Methodology 2 (3). 213-230.
Jessop, T. and Penny, A. 1998. Recovering Teacher Voice and Vision in the Narratives of South African and Gambian Teachers: Implications for Teacher
Development Policy and Practice. International Journal of Education Development, 18. (5). 393-403.
Jessop, T. 1997. Towards a Grounded Theory of Teacher Development: A narrative study of rural primary teachers in KwaZulu-Natal, King Alfred’s College,
accredited by the University of Southampton.
TESTA (2009-17) Transforming the Experience of Students through Assessment (www.testa.ac.uk)