University of Strathclyde Students’ Association
Teaching Excellence Award 2014
The University of Strathclyde Students’ Association student led teacher awards are the Teaching Excellence Awards or TEAs. This is the fifth year of the Strathclyde TEAs and it has continued to grow and develop over the last five years. There was a record number of 798 nominations this year with a record number of 291 teachers being nominated.
The project was led by James Ferns, Vice President Education and supported by Al Wilson, Engagement & Support Manager and Julie Henderson, Academic Representation Coordinator. There were many others involved in the organisation of the event and the promotion of the nomination process.
There was also a considerable involvement from class representatives and faculty representatives. To promote the event and to encourage participation throughout the university, there was regular communications between the Academic Representation Coordinator and the 753 class reps. We also arranged promotion events around the campus to encourage students to nominate the teaching staff they felt deserved to be recognised for excellent teaching. This was extremely effective and resulted in an increase in nominations from previous years. It also increased awareness of the event throughout the university. We also distributed flyers and put up posters throughout the campus.
There was a total of eight awards available. There was Best Teacher in Faculty for all four faculties (Humanities and Social Sciences, Business, Engineering and Science). Then we had the cross university awards; Most Enthusiastic Teacher Overall, Most Innovative Teacher Overall and Most Supportive Teacher Overall. The main award was Best Overall Teacher 2014.
The Nominations
There were 798 nominations received. The students were able to nominate their teachers online using the three categories of Most Enthusiastic, Most Innovative and Most Supportive. There were 391 (49%) most enthusiastic nominations, 324 (41%) most supportive nominations and 83 (10%) most innovative nominations.
The most enthusiastic category nominations tended to focus on motivation, passion, inspiration, and enthusiasm as well as exciting, engaging and interesting.
The most supportive nominations were more focused on encouraging, approachable, understanding and supportive as well as hardworking, caring and dedicated.
The most innovative nominations tended to be relating to creativity, fun, enjoyable and innovative as well as imaginative, helpful and easy to understand. There was also a lot of mention of the use of technology in innovative ways.
The students were asked why they were nominating their teacher and to give an example to support their nomination. They were also asked to give three words to describe their teacher. The Wordle graphic below shows the words which were most commonly in this section of the nominations. As you will see enthusiastic and supportive were the most commonly used words with approachable, knowledgeable, passionate and helpful also commonly appearing.
The University of Strathclyde has four Faculties, Humanities and Social Sciences (HaSS), Engineering, Business and Science. There was a somewhat uneven split of nominations between the faculties with HaSS accounting for 267 nominations (33%), Business 216 (27%) Science 179 (23%) and Engineering 136 (17%).
The Winners
The decision making panels were split in to four Best in Faculty panels and one Overall Winners panel. The Faculty panels were made up of the Vice President Education, two members of USSA staff, a student representative and a Vice Dean Academic from the relevant Faculty. The Best Overall panel was made up of Vice President Education, two members of USSA staff and four student representatives.
For the best in facility panels the nominations were anonymised and printed out so that each panel member could read through the nominations before the panel actually met. Before printing the nominations we removed the students’ details to ensure anonymity. Each panel member then put forward four or five teachers they thought deserved to be considered and gave reasons why they made this choice. The panel then discussed each teacher who was put forward before coming to a shortlist of three and then finally a best in faculty winner. The overall winners’ panel followed a similar process, however, more emphasis was placed on the views of the Vice President Education and the student representatives. Firstly we chose the Most Enthusiastic, Most Supportive and Most Innovative. We then chose the Best Teacher Overall 2014. There were also 7 shortlisted candidates before a final overall winner was chosen. The winners were as follows;
Best Teacher 2014 – John Levine – Science
Shortlisted for Best Teacher; John Murphy, Amanda Corrigan, Lizann Bonnar, Michael Marck, Kevin Pilkington and Gillian MacIntyre
Most Enthusiastic - Gian-Luca Oppo – Science
Most Innovative - Duncan Smeed – Science
Most Supportive - Nigel Langford – Science
Best in Faculty (Science) - John Murphy
Shortlisted; John Levine and Owain Millington
Best In Faculty (HaSS) - Gillian MacIntyre
Shortlisted; Lizann Bonnar and Alan McGroarty
Best in Faculty (Business) - Paul Ferri
Shortlisted; Michael Harker and Hilary Kane
Best in Faculty (Engineering) - Mike Murray
Shortlisted; Jim Murphy and Ian Taylor
The Award Dinner
The award dinner took place on Wednesday 7th of May 2014. One hundred and twenty nominees were invited to the event. Each received a certificate and a specially engraved Teaching Excellence Awards 2014 Nominee pen. The certificate also included a quote from one of their nominations.
Due to restricted space we could not invite all 291 nominees, however, all nominees received a certificate with a quote from one of their nominations. All shortlisted and winning nominees were invited first and then we made a random selection from the remaining nominees.
It was an excellent event and the nominees were treated to a three course meal and entertainment from the Strathclyde Concert Jazz Orchestra. There was a video for each shortlisted nominee which featured students who had nominated, explaining why they had nominated them. These videos were very well received by those who were shortlisted. Each winner received a framed winner’s certificate as well as a presentation box with engraved whiskey or champagne glasses. The event went very well and we received excellent feedback from those who attended.
Evaluation
This year’s Teaching Excellence Awards have been very successful, with record numbers of nominations and teachers nominated.
The results show that students appreciate teachers who are enthusiastic and supportive and who provide an interesting and engaging teaching environment. They also appreciate teachers who are knowledgeable and passionate about their subject. While these findings are not unexpected, what was interesting was that only 10% of the total nominations were for innovation. It would be interesting to survey the students to find out how they view the use of innovation in learning and whether they feel there is enough use of innovation.
With regard to the split of students who nominated, it is clear that there need to be more done to engage Engineering students as only 17% of the total nominations came from that faculty. The faculty with the most nominations was HaSS with 33% followed by Business with 27% and Science with 23%. Interestingly all of the major award winners came from the Science department which demonstrates that the number of nominations received is less important that the content and quality of the nominations.
Working with Caledonian University this year has had a positive impact on the promotion of the nominations and raising awareness of the event. We worked together to target students around both campuses and the surrounding areas by taking flyers out around Glasgow city centre and talking to students we met.. As a result both Universities saw an increase in nominations.
We are also working together to prepare a Best Practice Report which we will share with teaching staff. This wayBy working together, we will will be able to utilise the have a bigger pool of nominations received this year from both universities to from which we can take identify patterns and themes to share with the Universities and teaching staff.
Working together with support from the NUS/HEA Project has meant that we were able to promote the nominations and the event itself to a much greater extent. This has proved successful in the increase in nominations and the general buzz which was created around the awards. It will also help us to put together a substantial Best Practice Report and allow us to offer Best Practice workshops for teachers. The grant was spent on promotional materials such as posters flyers and stickers. We used some of the money to give free tea to students around campus to promote the ‘TEA’ theme. The rest of the grant will be spent on printing the Best Practice Report and materials for the workshops.
Also the training we received as part of the NUS/HEA Project has been invaluable and the initial get together training we had in London was extremely interesting and a great way to exchange ideas with other Students Associations from all around the UK. We also used the analysing and coding techniques training to analyse the nomination data.
Looking Forward
We are already planning our TEAs for next year! We hope to build on the excellent promotional work that we did this year. We will also be looking at ways to best engage the Engineering Faculty students as we realise that they were the least engaged student cohort. We would ideally be looking for an even split of nominations from each of the four faculties.
We also need to think of ways in which to help students give quality nominations while being careful to ensure that they use their own thoughts and words to articulate their nomination reasons. We will consider a more detailed online nomination template which will give ideas on how to provide a quality nomination. We may also design promotional materials that give examples of good nominations. We hope to incorporate this into the promotional events next year.
The next step for us is to write a comprehensive and practical Best Practice document which can be used to inspire and motivate teaching staff to take on board the thoughts and views of students. This document needs to highlight what students see as excellent teaching.
Once this report has been completed, we then need to look at incorporating this into useful and interesting workshops for teaching staff.
We anticipate that the Strathclyde Teaching Excellence Awards will continue to grow and be successful over the coming years. We also hope to develop and build on the Best Practice documents and teacher workshops.