Associate Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy
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Here are my application materials for Associate Fellowship of the HEA, for which I applied though the Teaching Recognition at King's programme, and when I was putting my application together I found very few accounts of applying though teaching recognition online. And none that were ancient history or classics specific. I have written a kind of 'how to' article for the Council of University Classics Departments (CUCD) Bulletin, which you can find here. In the mean time - here are the parts of my application (what these represent in terms of the overall application are explained in greater detail in the vlog and CUCD article).
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Personal Statement
Guidance notes: Please use this space to position yourself in the institution and your work context/your subject discipline(s) and explain your teaching philosophy and pedagogic approaches with evidence (800 words maximum).
My primary aim as an educator is for students to grow into critical, creative, and active thinkers. This means encouraging and supporting students to ‘do’ Ancient History from the beginning of their degree, rather than spending time passively listening and reading. I do this by engaging students with the ancient material, and supporting scholarship, and giving them space to begin formulating and sharpening their own ideas and opinions about the ancient world. This is the foundation of ancient history as a discipline and also teaches students a range of ‘transferable skills’, including critical reading and analysis. While I teach my students how to read Thucydides (for instance), they are also learning how to critically engage with, say, The Mirror. This this end, I actively bring my own research methods into the classroom in level-appropriate ways. In this year’s Introduction to Ancient History seminars I have, for example, had students write short newspaper-style articles, write broad summaries of texts and concepts, condense a text into a series of 140 character ‘tweets’, and held a judicial trial (these activities are discussed in more detail in the Account of Professional Practice). By allowing students to process evidence in different ways and to write for different purposes they feel more prepared for formal assessment and more confident in engaging with new material, and this has been reflected in my student feedback. One student commented (in informal feedback I solicited at the end of class in week 5) that ‘the most helpful aspect of the seminars has been the process of exploring the, frankly rather dense, subjects that are rushed through in the lecture… creating short succinct notes on the large readings has been helpful’.
As a teacher, I am committed to research-oriented and research-based teaching, as distinguished by Griffiths (2004) and Healey (2005), and described by Clarke (1997). Students then learn both how to research, write, and engage with the material, and learn through active research activities. This approach works particularly well in Ancient History because research is largely focused on text and object analysis, through a variety of methodological frames. By introducing these frames in a level-appropriate way, students can begin actively ‘doing’ ancient historical research from the beginning. This can be written into courses in a variety of ways, both traditional (e.g. essay) and non-traditional (e.g. public engagement activities), and through in-class activities. I expect my students to be active learners, and this is the basis of my identity as an educator: I am a ‘moderator’ rather than a ‘teacher’. I often joke with my classes that my job is to do as little as possible during our time together, but there is truth in this. I am serious about my role as an educator, and I plan classes that are thought provoking, incorporate the historical background, and allow space for students to think critically and creatively. This means that the ‘hard work’ is done by the students while in class. The success of my approach is demonstrated in the student feedback I have received, including comments such as ‘The things that Ellie says about how to be a good historian and how to analyse text properly, they really help me as I haven’t done anything like this before’, ‘I like that we engage quite practically with the texts we are reading’, and ‘The breakdown of different historical texts, in uncommon methods, the discussion that has an agenda such as how to approach those texts’ (prompt was ‘what do you find most helpful…’). I have always felt that this approach was enthusiastically encouraged in the King’s Classics Department.
I try to enable my students to become ‘fledgling ancient historians’, and I believe this can be easily achieved by empowering students with the confidence to be in charge of their own learning, and this is tied to my ideas about research-based, student-focused teaching. Then, rather than a student-teacher dichotomy, students feel that we are accomplices in their learning. I also encourage students to be reflective in their practice, and demonstrate ways that I use reflexivity to improve my practice (as an educator and as a researcher). I encourage students to write reflective ‘research and learning’ notes, rather than summaries of articles and texts. I have suggested a range of prompts including specifically ‘what is my interpretation of this text/object’, ‘do I agree with this scholar and why/ why not’, ‘how has this text changed or reinforced my ideas about x-subject’.
Finally, the foundation of my teaching philosophy relates to supporting and encouraging students. I pride myself on this, and it has also been reflected in student feedback: ‘Ellie is very engaged with the demands of being an undergraduate and also could see how passionate she was and therefore inspired me to work harder’.
Word count: 790
Bibliography:
My primary aim as an educator is for students to grow into critical, creative, and active thinkers. This means encouraging and supporting students to ‘do’ Ancient History from the beginning of their degree, rather than spending time passively listening and reading. I do this by engaging students with the ancient material, and supporting scholarship, and giving them space to begin formulating and sharpening their own ideas and opinions about the ancient world. This is the foundation of ancient history as a discipline and also teaches students a range of ‘transferable skills’, including critical reading and analysis. While I teach my students how to read Thucydides (for instance), they are also learning how to critically engage with, say, The Mirror. This this end, I actively bring my own research methods into the classroom in level-appropriate ways. In this year’s Introduction to Ancient History seminars I have, for example, had students write short newspaper-style articles, write broad summaries of texts and concepts, condense a text into a series of 140 character ‘tweets’, and held a judicial trial (these activities are discussed in more detail in the Account of Professional Practice). By allowing students to process evidence in different ways and to write for different purposes they feel more prepared for formal assessment and more confident in engaging with new material, and this has been reflected in my student feedback. One student commented (in informal feedback I solicited at the end of class in week 5) that ‘the most helpful aspect of the seminars has been the process of exploring the, frankly rather dense, subjects that are rushed through in the lecture… creating short succinct notes on the large readings has been helpful’.
As a teacher, I am committed to research-oriented and research-based teaching, as distinguished by Griffiths (2004) and Healey (2005), and described by Clarke (1997). Students then learn both how to research, write, and engage with the material, and learn through active research activities. This approach works particularly well in Ancient History because research is largely focused on text and object analysis, through a variety of methodological frames. By introducing these frames in a level-appropriate way, students can begin actively ‘doing’ ancient historical research from the beginning. This can be written into courses in a variety of ways, both traditional (e.g. essay) and non-traditional (e.g. public engagement activities), and through in-class activities. I expect my students to be active learners, and this is the basis of my identity as an educator: I am a ‘moderator’ rather than a ‘teacher’. I often joke with my classes that my job is to do as little as possible during our time together, but there is truth in this. I am serious about my role as an educator, and I plan classes that are thought provoking, incorporate the historical background, and allow space for students to think critically and creatively. This means that the ‘hard work’ is done by the students while in class. The success of my approach is demonstrated in the student feedback I have received, including comments such as ‘The things that Ellie says about how to be a good historian and how to analyse text properly, they really help me as I haven’t done anything like this before’, ‘I like that we engage quite practically with the texts we are reading’, and ‘The breakdown of different historical texts, in uncommon methods, the discussion that has an agenda such as how to approach those texts’ (prompt was ‘what do you find most helpful…’). I have always felt that this approach was enthusiastically encouraged in the King’s Classics Department.
I try to enable my students to become ‘fledgling ancient historians’, and I believe this can be easily achieved by empowering students with the confidence to be in charge of their own learning, and this is tied to my ideas about research-based, student-focused teaching. Then, rather than a student-teacher dichotomy, students feel that we are accomplices in their learning. I also encourage students to be reflective in their practice, and demonstrate ways that I use reflexivity to improve my practice (as an educator and as a researcher). I encourage students to write reflective ‘research and learning’ notes, rather than summaries of articles and texts. I have suggested a range of prompts including specifically ‘what is my interpretation of this text/object’, ‘do I agree with this scholar and why/ why not’, ‘how has this text changed or reinforced my ideas about x-subject’.
Finally, the foundation of my teaching philosophy relates to supporting and encouraging students. I pride myself on this, and it has also been reflected in student feedback: ‘Ellie is very engaged with the demands of being an undergraduate and also could see how passionate she was and therefore inspired me to work harder’.
Word count: 790
Bibliography:
- Clark, B. R.. (1997). The Modern Integration of Research Activities with Teaching and Learning. The Journal of Higher Education, 68 (3): 241–255.
- Griffiths, R (2004) ‘Knowledge Production and the Research-Teaching nexus: The Case of the Built Environment Disciplines’, Studies in Higher Education, 29 (6): 7-9-726.
- Healey, M (2005) ‘Linking research and teaching: Exploring Disciplinary Spaces and the Role of Inquiry-Based Learning, in Barnett, R (ed), Reshaping the University: New Relationships Between Research, Scholarship, and Teaching (McGraw-Hill): 67-78.
Account of Professional Practice
Guidance notes: You must address at least two Areas of Activity, together with relevant areas of Core Knowledge and all the Professional Values. Please give the word count at the end of each example (maximum of 500 words for each section).
Evidencing A1: Design and plan learning activities and/or programmes of study
I primarily design active learning activities, this has been shown to improve student engagement and outcomes (Felder and Brent 2009, Prince 2004). The aim is to engage all students, so many activities are designed to involve individual or small-group work (cf. Felder and Brent 2009). Active learning enables students to apply prior knowledge, utilising historical data (tying in with lectures and set readings), strengthen analytic skills, gain academic confidence, and facilitates the development of transferable skills.
An effective problem-based activity that I have successfully used with several first-year Introduction to Ancient History classes is the ‘Trial of Alexander the Great’, for the death of his officer Cleitus. This involves the class being divided into two groups, and using set historical texts must construct cases arguing for Alexander’s guilt or innocence in the death. Students must explore the problem by looking at the specific texts and what they say about both the incident and Alexander’s character. Using their prior knowledge (from lectures and readings), students must theorise, discuss, and agree on the solution, and articulate it using direct evidence. In future it would be interesting to develop this into a group activity that spans a longer time-period, either by assigning groups and specific readings in the week before the ‘trial’, or by simply assigning groups and allowing students to research sources themselves. While informal and formal feedback on this activity has been neutral, I observed that students were keen to participate in groups, and overall even more reserved students were actively engaging with their groups.
This year I implemented several interactive learning activities, for which I will discuss two specific cases. The first was a small-group activity writing newspaper reports based on individuals from Herodotos’s Histories. This was undertaken early in the term, and the first opportunity for students to analyse an ancient text though writing. The purpose was for the articles to ‘take a side’ regarding the individual’s characterisation. The aim of this activity was to encourage students to think critically about sources (in this case Herodotos’s bias and reliability), and to enable them to see that their own reading could be coloured by interpretation. By sharing the finished articles among students, it became apparent that multiple groups had read and interpreted the text in different ways, and applied their interpretations in different formats to convey sometimes very contradictory readings.
The second was an individual activity, which involved writing sections of Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War into a series of Tweets (following the example https://twitter.com/iThucydides). Students were randomly assigned eight sections of the text (which they had previously read in full) and asked to precis each section into one 140-character tweet. The aim of this activity was to encourage close reading of the text and practice breaking the text down into manageable ‘chunks’. The activity was designed as a tool for exam preparation (specifically for fast, accurate reading of text ‘gobbets’), but has wider research implications for text reading and analysis.
Word count: 492
Bibliography:
Evidencing A3: Assess and give feedback to learners
I have predominantly been involved in the setting and marking of ‘traditional’ assessment types, including essays, exams, and oral presentations. While the majority of these have been formally marked by me, I have also tried to incorporate self-assessment and peer-assessment activities alongside this. These methods of alternative assessment can be very useful, and understanding the mechanics of marking also enables students to improve their marks on subsequent assignments (Dochy, Segers, and Sluijsmans 1999). Essays are useful in history subjects, and can be effective in research-oriented curricula, but there are drawbacks, including students’ preconception of essay-writing (predominantly from empirical evidence, but discussed in studies on assessment preference and performance e.g. McCune 2004).
Often, students do not understand what is involved in a research-based essay. This can easily be circumvented by dedicating time in class both to a discussion, with examples, of good essay writing practice and detailed discussion of the marking rubric required – both of which have been scheduled into first year Introduction to Ancient History classes at King’s College. The most beneficial activity, in terms of student confidence, is the discussion of the criteria. One way of achieving this is to incorporate ‘unofficial’ assessment and feedback into normal class activities, and this is where self- and peer-assessment can be valuable. In one case involving oral presentations at Monash University, students were required to submit an assessment form following their presentation. This was the same form I used to mark their presentation and aspects on depth of content, use of ancient sources, and overall presentation. In one year these forms were given to students when topics were assigned, and in another immediately before presenting (although criteria were available prior). While self-assessments were generally close to the assigned mark, students who had been given the form earlier consistently gained higher marks and reported feeling more confident in their presentations. Moving forward, I would like to utilise different types of formal assessment including writing portfolios, individual or group blogging, Wikipedia editing, and public engagement projects. Many of these can be used in conjunction with more traditional forms of assessment. For example, a student could select an essay topic at the beginning of term and use a weekly blog to explore different aspects of that topic, before writing the final essay at the end of term.
Student feedback can also be enhanced by using a self-assessment model. Following feedback, I like to meet with students to discuss their work, and often ask students to summarise the feedback they have received before these meetings so I can understand how they have interpreted it. From this point, it is easy to discuss how the feedback can be implemented to improve future work. This is facilitated by providing clear feedback featuring concrete examples for improvement. While marking for Greek Religion at King’s, I had some trouble writing effective feedback, and was assisted by a colleague to develop good feedback practices. Following this, I now base my feedback on Nicol and Macfarlane-Dick’s principles of good feedback practice (2006).
Word count: 500
Bibliography:
An application for Associate Fellowship requires engagement with two of the Areas of Activity (Fellowship and above require engagement with all five). The primary reason for my application for Associate Fellowship over Fellowship was the experience requirement, as I don't have the equivalent of three years of full time teaching. The other areas are:
Evidencing A1: Design and plan learning activities and/or programmes of study
I primarily design active learning activities, this has been shown to improve student engagement and outcomes (Felder and Brent 2009, Prince 2004). The aim is to engage all students, so many activities are designed to involve individual or small-group work (cf. Felder and Brent 2009). Active learning enables students to apply prior knowledge, utilising historical data (tying in with lectures and set readings), strengthen analytic skills, gain academic confidence, and facilitates the development of transferable skills.
An effective problem-based activity that I have successfully used with several first-year Introduction to Ancient History classes is the ‘Trial of Alexander the Great’, for the death of his officer Cleitus. This involves the class being divided into two groups, and using set historical texts must construct cases arguing for Alexander’s guilt or innocence in the death. Students must explore the problem by looking at the specific texts and what they say about both the incident and Alexander’s character. Using their prior knowledge (from lectures and readings), students must theorise, discuss, and agree on the solution, and articulate it using direct evidence. In future it would be interesting to develop this into a group activity that spans a longer time-period, either by assigning groups and specific readings in the week before the ‘trial’, or by simply assigning groups and allowing students to research sources themselves. While informal and formal feedback on this activity has been neutral, I observed that students were keen to participate in groups, and overall even more reserved students were actively engaging with their groups.
This year I implemented several interactive learning activities, for which I will discuss two specific cases. The first was a small-group activity writing newspaper reports based on individuals from Herodotos’s Histories. This was undertaken early in the term, and the first opportunity for students to analyse an ancient text though writing. The purpose was for the articles to ‘take a side’ regarding the individual’s characterisation. The aim of this activity was to encourage students to think critically about sources (in this case Herodotos’s bias and reliability), and to enable them to see that their own reading could be coloured by interpretation. By sharing the finished articles among students, it became apparent that multiple groups had read and interpreted the text in different ways, and applied their interpretations in different formats to convey sometimes very contradictory readings.
The second was an individual activity, which involved writing sections of Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War into a series of Tweets (following the example https://twitter.com/iThucydides). Students were randomly assigned eight sections of the text (which they had previously read in full) and asked to precis each section into one 140-character tweet. The aim of this activity was to encourage close reading of the text and practice breaking the text down into manageable ‘chunks’. The activity was designed as a tool for exam preparation (specifically for fast, accurate reading of text ‘gobbets’), but has wider research implications for text reading and analysis.
Word count: 492
Bibliography:
- Felder, R.M and Brent, R. (2009) ‘Active Learning: An Introduction’, ASQ Higher Education Brief, 2(4). Online: http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/lockers/users/f/felder/public/Papers/ALpaper(ASQ).pdf
- Prince, M.J. (2004) ‘Does Active Learning Work? A Review of the Research’, Journal of Engineering Education, 93 (3): 223-231.
Evidencing A3: Assess and give feedback to learners
I have predominantly been involved in the setting and marking of ‘traditional’ assessment types, including essays, exams, and oral presentations. While the majority of these have been formally marked by me, I have also tried to incorporate self-assessment and peer-assessment activities alongside this. These methods of alternative assessment can be very useful, and understanding the mechanics of marking also enables students to improve their marks on subsequent assignments (Dochy, Segers, and Sluijsmans 1999). Essays are useful in history subjects, and can be effective in research-oriented curricula, but there are drawbacks, including students’ preconception of essay-writing (predominantly from empirical evidence, but discussed in studies on assessment preference and performance e.g. McCune 2004).
Often, students do not understand what is involved in a research-based essay. This can easily be circumvented by dedicating time in class both to a discussion, with examples, of good essay writing practice and detailed discussion of the marking rubric required – both of which have been scheduled into first year Introduction to Ancient History classes at King’s College. The most beneficial activity, in terms of student confidence, is the discussion of the criteria. One way of achieving this is to incorporate ‘unofficial’ assessment and feedback into normal class activities, and this is where self- and peer-assessment can be valuable. In one case involving oral presentations at Monash University, students were required to submit an assessment form following their presentation. This was the same form I used to mark their presentation and aspects on depth of content, use of ancient sources, and overall presentation. In one year these forms were given to students when topics were assigned, and in another immediately before presenting (although criteria were available prior). While self-assessments were generally close to the assigned mark, students who had been given the form earlier consistently gained higher marks and reported feeling more confident in their presentations. Moving forward, I would like to utilise different types of formal assessment including writing portfolios, individual or group blogging, Wikipedia editing, and public engagement projects. Many of these can be used in conjunction with more traditional forms of assessment. For example, a student could select an essay topic at the beginning of term and use a weekly blog to explore different aspects of that topic, before writing the final essay at the end of term.
Student feedback can also be enhanced by using a self-assessment model. Following feedback, I like to meet with students to discuss their work, and often ask students to summarise the feedback they have received before these meetings so I can understand how they have interpreted it. From this point, it is easy to discuss how the feedback can be implemented to improve future work. This is facilitated by providing clear feedback featuring concrete examples for improvement. While marking for Greek Religion at King’s, I had some trouble writing effective feedback, and was assisted by a colleague to develop good feedback practices. Following this, I now base my feedback on Nicol and Macfarlane-Dick’s principles of good feedback practice (2006).
Word count: 500
Bibliography:
- Dochy. F, Segers, M, and Sluijsmans, D (1999) ‘The Use of Self-, Peer-, and Co-assessment in Higher Education: A Review’, Studies in Higher Education, 24 (3): 331-350.
- McCune, V (2004) ‘Development of First-Year Students’ Conceptions of Essay Writing’, Higher Education, 47 (3): 257-282.
- Nicol, D and Macfarlane-Dick, D (2006) ‘Formative Assessment and Self-Regulated Learning: A Model and Seven Principles of Good Feedback Practice’, Studies in Higher Education, 31 (2): 199-218.
An application for Associate Fellowship requires engagement with two of the Areas of Activity (Fellowship and above require engagement with all five). The primary reason for my application for Associate Fellowship over Fellowship was the experience requirement, as I don't have the equivalent of three years of full time teaching. The other areas are:
- Evidencing A2: Teach and/or support learning
- Evidencing A4: Develop effective learning environments and approaches to student support and guidance
- Evidencing A5: Engage in continuing professional development in subjects/disciplines and their pedagogy, incorporating research, scholarship and the evaluation of professional practices