 good morning afternoon and thank you very much for the opportunity to present I can see this way with the glasses on but I can't see you so I'm in a dilemma I'll go with looking at this and I'll imagine what you all look like and so we're here on behalf of letter Kenny Institute of Technology to present on our proposal which is PDP for LYT an institution-wide approach to professional development for those who teach which supports student success for students in higher education. Now we have a big team involved in this but we have a representative team today so our president Paul Hanigan is here Paul Lynch who's our students union president so two Paul presidents and Helen McRambless who's our senior human resources officer and my name's Lynn Ramsey I'm head of teaching and learning at letter Kenny Institute of Technology. So today we'll do our best to stick to the time we'll give a quick overview of the project team and a summary of the project and we'll let you know the rationale I suppose for the project and what we're going to do we'll let you know how we're going to do it what our methodologies and methodological tools are and crucially we'll look at the impact and sustainability for this project beyond our own institution and for the sector generally and then obviously we'd be delighted to take questions at the end. So I mentioned at the beginning that we have a broad and inclusive team for the project this is a whole institute approach to professional development for those who teach in higher education and with our institution that's not just the academic staff a lot of our professional services staff also teach and we have a number of part-time and on increasingly online staff teaching and so we wanted to reflect all of those elements within the teams and also we wanted to make sure we had buy-in from the senior management level which is why the steering group looks the way it looks and within the operations group because our experience with professional development to date is well we're very good at an institution and getting through people big accredited pieces around teaching and learning level 10s and masters in learning and teaching and we're perhaps less good at creating spaces for people to really trial and implement and refine and review that in a collaborative base within their professional practice so I suppose that team reflects that so the core team will be myself and the senior project academic who will recruit in terms of the case study which we'll talk about we have the core team and also three academics from the School of Science and we'll talk about what that looks like they will be assisted by external support around the digital media training and also our in-house technical staff and in terms of the development of the PD implementation and monitoring plan we're working very closely with Helen McGrande from HR and Shia Henry our HR manager just to make sure that that looks and feels right. The operations group then has representatives from two schools we have a four-skill structure within letter Kenny Institute of Technology and the plan is that two of the biggest schools which is School of Science and School of Business their heads will sit on that and the VP will also sit there of the VP for research equality engagement and then crucially in both groups we'll have representatives from the Student Union so the Student Union president within the steering group and our newly appointed education officer within the operations group so we'll talk about student engagement as we go through but student engagement is part and parcel of all elements of this project so in essence what we're aiming for is a sustainable and tailored professional development model for our institution which is aligned to national professional development framework and underpinned by student engagement or student partnership we know from the evidence that what works in terms of professional development is something which is not one-off which is not something which is unique to the individual but still tailored to the individual works in a collective way and that impacts on student success and there's no point in us investing in staff development if we don't improve the teaching and learning experience in the classroom and the student experience more broadly for students in letter Kenny Institute of Technology so we have four components and these are the four main outputs the development of an evidence-based professional development and implementation plan to develop appropriate methodologies and digital resources for effective individual and crucially collaborative engagement with professional development planning we need to develop a framework to monitor and what's going on in terms of teacher engagement at the moment we have a lot of staff activity we monitor an extent what's going on that we fund we're less effective at monitoring what goes on on mad hoc bases we're certainly not good at capturing what goes on afterwards in terms of impact in the classroom so that monitoring piece is going to be crucial and then finally we want to make sure that we're evaluating what's happening and part and parcel of that will be the development of a learning evaluation framework tied to student success all institutions are required in terms of the performance compacts develop a student success strategy by 2020 we've done some of the kickoff work in our own institution and we see this strategy working in parallel and so we'll be using some of the KPIs under the student success strategy to parallel some of the work in the learning evaluation framework so the projects underpinned by three core values and inclusivity in terms of being a whole institution approach we're a small institution 4,000 students 300 staff of those are 190 academics our student body has increased dramatically in the last five years staff numbers have not increased dramatically as with all in the last five years and we have a very diverse student body we exceed all of the national targets in terms of wedding access and participation so we have a very interesting diverse student body and that makes challenges for staff and also we know that the way students learn and engage with technology has changed dramatically so we're working with all of our academics and all the staff who teach across our two campuses and our goal is to create a sustainable model and we're not interested in getting money to do a bit of work and then leaving this has to be something that creates impact and lasting impacts both for our institution and for more broadly within the sector so aligns very closely to national commitments but also institutional commitments and Paul can talk a little bit more about the strategic plan and the commitments we've made under the performance compacts if that is helpful and at the heart of everything that we're doing really is student partnership and I talked about the students being members of the steering and operations group Paul's been part of the development of this project and students will be active participants in the case study that we're part of the group to evaluate the data we have done a lot of work in our last project the teaching and learning champions project we're just closing out on that where we had student partnership underpinning everything that we did and students were members of the teams what we learned was we had to do a lot more than that we were learned from our work from instep that if students are going to be active participants we need to work with them in advance of all the meetings we meet with them now and say here's the agenda is there anything you want to add here's the documents is there anything you don't understand in that and we do it on a rotational basis so our current president's term of office will be up a new team will come in we have a methodology now for doing the handover and bringing people up to speed what we didn't get a sense of is really what students think and feel in an ongoing basis so we want to include the possibility of reverse mentoring in and through the project so every member of the operations group every member of the steering group will be offered a student mentor and equally the students who are mentored will be offered a senior academic mentor or we've been having a chat with students they might be interested in an industry mentor or community development type mentor it depends on where they're interested in terms of their own professional development life but we think that will create a situation of an ongoing dialogue where we'll have true priority of esteem in terms of how the project flashes out so in terms of the how we're going to do about the what these are three step approach where we'll identify the professional development needs of all our teaching staff at the moment we have a system and again Helen can talk about this in more detail where it's somewhat ad hoc staff make a request through their head department and it's funded to an extent by HR there's also a budget departmental level but it's people that put the hand up all the time who come forward and there's many staff with professional development needs that we don't know so the first stage will be the development of a questionnaire it will be somewhat based on the existing questionnaire we developed under teaching and learning champions and that allows us to cross reference what the managers thought against the whole staff approach to teaching and learning which in itself will be interesting we will also work in a detailed case study and I'll dive into that in a bit more detail in the next slide but the idea of that is to develop a professional development practice and implementation case study because what we know is that staff don't always get the time and space to practice the things they've learned on the professional development courses we know that from our own research that we did in advance of our last teaching and learning champions project where we surveyed the staff across four institutions in the west and northwest about staff who are undertaking PhDs and we said what are you most concerned about and what they said was two concerns one is that we won't be able to carry on with our research afterwards because we'll be so busy when we get back and the other is that my head department or line manager doesn't really value what I do so we need to have a way of finding space to embrace and provide opportunities and interrogate what the buyers might be to making that sustainable change to trialing out particularly on a collaborative basis so that's why we want to focus on the case study and then when we gather the data from the questionnaires in the case studies we want to bring it back to different cohorts of focus groups to interrogate that data to see what works what doesn't work what does it look like if I'm a new member of staff what do you think the buyer might be to you that I'm so busy and I really don't know what I'm doing and I'm terrified imagine that was my barrier and if I'm a graduate of our masters in learning and teaching I might have different challenges if an IT staff I might have different challenges and we really want to understand what the students think of the data that's come back has it surfaced what they think are the development needs okay so we're going to develop that again and interrogate again through the focus groups so the case study we wanted to work with a group of staff that we have from our masters in learning and teaching we're in our third year of the masters in learning and teaching and we're very thankful to colleagues colleagues from Dundalk here where we've worked in the past through their masters in learning teaching project so we have a lot of staff who have this type of qualification and who have developed a research element within that who may have never done anything with it afterwards so I was lucky enough to be second marker for a colleague who did the the bring your own device case study very simple technique for vet nursing students they do a lot of oskies you know the observation of a stuffed rabbit and then someone comes around with the board to to assess how you're getting on and it's very nerve wracking for students what they have to do is practice and get feedback and ideally to be able to centre their own learning and feedback from their own learning so our colleague Tina Pernell developed a piece of work through her masters in learning and masters in learning teaching dissertation where students use their own phone to record and pairs of three there's some technical issues that have been identified that were problematic there's some staff support issues that were problematic there's some data gathering and evaluation issues that were problematic but in essence we know that the students who were who took part in that really felt enhanced their ability to absorb feedback and improve their practice so we think it's a lovely model that we can share across other areas and we've colleagues in science who be interested in doing that taking that case study and working with Tina as the lead so it's a collaborative approach but what we know is it's hard to find time it's hard to find the digital resources and it's hard to find the space to capture and this project should help us do that as a case study and then we might share some of the learning from that particularly we're interested in what how we can capture the digital supports capture the students self-evaluation and how the staff are learning themselves and again we use some of the learning from teaching and learning champions when we use our own VLE for the blog to capture the teacher self-evaluation elements of that so in terms of impact and sustainability and we're interested in both qualitative and quantitative metrics for this first and foremost we want to ensure that there's greater engagement with the national forum professional development plan when we started out with the teaching and learning project teaching and learning champions project when the first things we did was we asked staff what do you know and the answers were variable and these are managers and senior managers and the institutions so we have the benefit of being through that project at least but it'll be interesting to see where our staff are now as opposed to where they'll be in 18 months in terms of awareness of the the framework but it's really to engage in that framework for you to understand as a lecturer in biomedical sciences where you sit in the framework and where you might progress over a five year period say and we want to make sure that all elements of the PDP are core part of business in LYT and increase engagement with staff and teaching and learning right across the board and that's that monitoring piece and enhance student success and crucially we're going to align it with our work on the student success strategy so we started with three schools working with Leo Farrell through DESI to talk about what student success looks and feels like we're getting very different sense of what it looks like in different schools much more sense and employability in some schools and others and so on so it's nuanced already what we're seeing from the academic side of the house and we've another school to work with and then we're going to work with the students as separate groups and then we'll start aligning some of that work with some of this work and obviously all the resources created under here digital resources the questionnaires one will be available for everyone under open access principles so in essence this is what we have a whole school approach which is tailored and evidence-based and we're going to develop resources aligned to the professional development framework some of which already exist some of which we've been trialling for example the mentoring piece we know we have a master's in learning and teaching where we can create bespoke staff development small pieces of accredited learning and that's an option for us if things come back we have to have a way of celebrating staff success as well as student success so it has to be a staff engagement element to all of this and that's part and parcel of what the implementation plan might look like and we didn't present an implementation plan to you today because we want what we do to be evidence-based but we have a sense of what some of those elements will be like it'll be about freeing up time it'll be about creating resources it'll be about changing culture and having management buy-in for everything that we do and absolutely has to be about celebrating staff success particularly in an organization like ours with a flat structure where people don't tend typically to move from one organization to another but have careers as professional teachers for life how do we celebrate and support that and I see Terry out my eye so and these are the sustainability elements the monitoring the learning evaluation framework and crucially the student success strategy thank you very much