The Teaching Excellence Initiative

The Teaching Excellence Initiative (TEI) 2018-2020 aims to improve learning and teaching in the Adam Smith Business School at the University of Glasgow. It builds on prior work carried out as part of the REAP and PEER projects. Its specific focus is assessment and feedback practices. The TEI offers:

  1. A new conceptualisation of assessment
  2. A radical rethinking of the meaning of feedback and about how it is mediated, the relationship between internal and external feedback, and the role of feedback in the self-regulation of learning.

The goals of the project are:

  1. To improve assessment and feedback practices across the School based on the best available research
  2. To change the discourse of feedback away from discussions of problems to more productive discussions about solutions
  3. To use feedback to develop learner self-regulation without increasing teacher workload (i.e. to improve the effectiveness of teaching)
  4. To collate examples of good practice and innovation from across the Business School and to publicise them here
  5. To raise awareness of best practice in the educational literature pertaining to the Business School practices and of key findings from other disciplines
  6. To help academic staff carry out educational research and to publish their findings in highly rated educational and business and management journals 
  7. To provide a range of resources (from simple and easy techniques and practices to more detailed case study examples) to support academic staff 
  8. To agree and adopt a set of guiding principles of good assessment and feedback practice based on best research to frame all the work within the school
  9. To produce resources for students that raise their awareness of the meaning of feedback and their crucial role in its effectiveness
  10. To publicise ASBS developments in this area externally so as to raise the profile of the School externally as a centre of innovation in assessment and feedback 

 

The above is just a brain dump for now...

Regarding assessment the stance taken in the ASBS pages is that if students are to develop their own capacity to regulate their own learning, then they must get practice in assessing and judging the quality of their own learning and performance rather than just receiving tjudgements about their work from teachers and others. A second fundamental shift relates to feedback. The starting point in considering feedback is to recognise that all feedback is internally generated by students. Teachers only provide information, it is students who turn this into feedback. Indeed, students are generating feedback all the time, whether they are consciously aware of this or not. It is this feedback that enables them to regulate thier own learning.  If they did not generate internal feedback the behaviour of students would be random and unpredictable. Hence a key question addressed through this Teaching Excellence initiative is how do we improve students own feedback capability. To understand this we must have a better understanding of how inner feedback unfolds during learning tasks and how it mediates self-regulatory activities.

Although the TEI is centred in the Adam Smith Business School, the resources that will be develooped and showcased here should be relevant to all disciplines and educational contexts.