“Wow twins they must be hard work”.  This is a common one.  Not quite sure how to respond to this.  Er yes but no.

“Are they identical?” Fine when people don’t know the sexes, fair enough question.  Rather worrying when asked by a healthcare professional who knew they were different sexes.

“How big were they when they were born?” Cue shock when told they were 6lb and 7lb.

“Were they born early?” Again shock when told they were born at 39 weeks.

“You must have had to have a c-section”.  Cue surprise at natural birth.  These above three comments indicate how medicalised people think twin birth is (the whole birth thing is the subject of another post).  Makes me sad in a way as there are reasons why twins have to be born via c-section but that doesn’t have to be the norm.

“Ah the boy is the biggest”. Er no, he was smaller. Everyone always assumes the boy is bigger.

“The only way to deal with twins is to put them into a routine”.  I disagree, they find their own routines.  Tried to Gina Ford my poor daughter, made me miserable and gave up after two days so not doing that with the babies.

“You are feeding them yourself?!” Cue incredulity.  Don’t want to get on a lactivist rant but although time consuming have found breastfeeding them easier than feeding my daughter.  And enables me to get sleep – no really it does.

“I don’t know how you do it”. This is another one I find hard to respond to.  I guess it is hard to imagine what it is like having two babies when you have one.  Just as I found it hard to imagine what it would be like to have a baby when I didn’t have one.  But you just try to get on with it, any way you can. And when they are both smiling and looking at  you adoringly it is wonderful.

“I’m in awe of you”.  I find this hard.  I used to say “don’t be” but then I felt that not accepting the compliment was a bit rude.  So now I just say “thanks” and try not to be shy or overwhelmed, even though I don’t feel particularly awesome.

“Seeing you always makes me feel better about my own situation.” From other mothers! I kind of know what they mean but does make me feel a bit odd.

“Are they yours?” Being barely 5ft3 and a slimmer build people don’t think I could have twins. ARGH!

And two of my favourite ones….

“You are my hero” from another mother. Which was quite embarrassing but also rather lovely and touching.

And a story (everyone has a twins story, is very sweet) from an elderly man who I bumped into on the canal towpath who told me how he had twins in his family and how I shouldn’t worry as although they were tiny when they were born they were now 6ft4 and worked as body builders in a gym

What is also incredibly touching is the number of people who say congratulations and how lucky we are.  And despite those stressful times when they are both crying together I do feel lucky.  But can people please not look at me with pity and say “it must be hard work”. Many things in life are hard work but that doesn’t mean you would change them.

Maternity leave this time around has definitely been easier than last time, even though it now means being a mum of 3 (still catch myself  - have I really got 3 children?!). I guess you already have your “routines” and your life was changed massively when you became a parent the first time so second time around your world is more geared to babies.  Also I think you stress less with the second and subsequent children.   I have found myself worrying less about certain things although the being-on-maternity-leave factor does enable you to stress about other minor things just because you don’t have anything else to think about – hence the title of this blog post.  So I spent at least a day wondering what sort of nappy to put Isaac in at night time – I know, a whole day.  I do wonder what mothers of newborns did before the internet and social media – thank goodness for online shopping! Although perhaps the rise in baby paraphernalia bears a direct correlation to the rise in broadband access at home – all those post natal hormones making you think that you REALLY need that thing as it will make your baby sleep/eat/stop crying/wee/poo/be happy/be confident/etc/etc* delete as appropriate.

That said about the “ease” of this maternity leave the explosion of twin babies into the house has undoubtedly been pretty life changing (no really?!). I had forgotten how all consuming new babies are and how they have the ability to completely floor you at times.  There have been moments where I have just looked at them and wondered what on earth to do.  And the dual crying in the early weeks was pretty tough. There have been nights of no sleep. Ok I lie, no more than 20 minutes sleep in a go.  There have been nights of crying until 2am or 4am.  There have been nights of babies falling asleep only if held on chests.And there have been nights of babies falling asleep at 7 and just waking for 10mins to feed through the night.  However, unlike with my daughter, I am not beating myself up that the babies don’t sleep through the night.  Or that they have to sleep on their own in a particular  place. I am not craving a “routine”,  I am not desperate to force them into a model or insist they follow my schedule.  Instead I just take each day as it comes – or at least try to – aiming low (thanks Anise for that advice I am eternally grateful) and trying to remember to enjoy these days as they go so fast and respecting each baby as an individual. With Sylvia everyone told me that this time went quickly and I never believed it but this time around, as these will be my last babies, I am much more aware of the passing of time.  I even felt slightly nostalgic when seeing some newborns the other day (what is wrong with me – blame hormones).

Of course it is hard at times and I often feel my life has shrunk to my “family bed” and these two little expectant faces looking up at me.  For someone who travelled a lot and was always in back-to-back meetings, the fact that I have not been farther from home than Whipsnade since last June and worked at home for the majority of my pregnancy has taken a lot of getting used to.  And I do feel that this time around my pregnancy really was preparation for motherhood.  BUT most of the time I feel incredibly lucky. To have twins is wonderful and to be a mother of 3 is fantastic.  I am trying to be much more accepting this time and accept that I have nothing to prove to anyone. So I nap when I can and don’t apologise if that includes when people come over, I try to accept help without feeling guilty (still working on that!), indulge myself by absorbing myself in nappy retail experiences and read about nursing twins – there are so many new fabulous blogs and loads of information online now, much more than when Sylvia was a baby.  I endeavour to have confidence in my decisions, trust my instincts, ignore the so-called experts and feel happy in my choices.  However, for all my embracing and acceptance of full-time motherhood I have to draw the line at the acceptance of nits though.  Those I am not thankful for nor accepting of in anyway. No, not at all.

Has been rather weird giving a virtual keynote but enjoyable too – certainly I have been more organised and planned than I usually am! And that goes for the rest of my work too. As I was convinced the babies would be here by now I tried to finish off all the work I could a few weeks ago but to be around until 37 weeks (one more week) in case of problems etc.  The “handover” process has made me reflect on how I work and how much is in my head too – quite scary actually and just sharing folders on dropbox doesn’t quite give access to my head entirely.  Last time I went on maternity leave with my daughter, she was born 4 weeks early so I never had this “organisation” or waiting phase. In fact, I was finishing off the team plan after my waters broke and writing a handover list the week after she was born. Never again, I said!

I have always tried to maintain that if I am a “good” leader, then if I am not around, I will have inspired others and left a sufficient legacy that the work that I was doing would continue. This is not to sound big-headed but in terms of the initiatives I lead I have tried to foster the view that they should and could carry on without me.  And in the main I think this is true although gradually phasing myself out over the past few weeks has really been a test of my mettle on this.  That is not to say that those who are taking over are not skilled enough to do my work- far from it! And in fact they are more than capable and those areas I have been leading will benefit from a new perspective and fresh pair of eyes.  It has become apparent to me, as gently pointed out by one colleague, that I am becoming the problem not the solution.  I think she was probably also hoping the babies had been born so I stop emailing her more “ideas” or “suggestions”.

I have also tried to maintain that when handing over jobs or delegating that you have to let others get on with it and although they might not do as you would do, if the end is the same that is ok. Again this has been tested.  More by my guilt at feeling like I am dumping all these things on others and trying to “help” by telling them what I would do and organising etc. Or worrying that a certain situation wouldn’t have happened if I had been there. This is fine up to a point but again I fear becoming the problem….

So, I just need to let go.  Am sure once the babies arrive work will be the farthest thing from my mind but in these last few weeks, gradually withdrawing has been a challenging process for me.  I know that everything will be fine when I am gone and I’m so glad that others in my team have the opportunity to take over some new work and develop things in new directions.  I’m also lucky that I have had such support from work and my team and that I have good people to hand things over to!

I have to accept my strengths and weaknesses – yes there are some things that won’t happen in the same way as I am an individual and I have a particular way of looking at things – but that is fine.  And other things will happen which would not have occurred if I was there.  New developments will take place and new relationships will be formed.  I trust everyone to do the right thing, that might not be my thing, but it will be right for them, for that time and that place.  And if I want to leave any legacy then it should be imbuing that faith and trust in others.

A colleague emailed me this today telling me to relax – so I should heed their advice!

Despite my quarms about the event – most of which stemmed from my concerns about what on earth I was going to wear given that I would be 7 months pregnant or looking like 10 months pregnant due to the fact I’m carrying twins and whether I would be able to roll or waddle up to collect my certificate – I really enjoyed the evening.  The whole event was designed to make the 55 successful fellows feel special and honoured and I think it achieved that.  We were told that there are around 477  National Teaching Fellows whereas there are 180000 academics in the UK. We all know that teaching recognition can get a pretty raw deal in UK universities and it was great to feel appreciated and respected at a high level.  Many of the great and the good from UK HE were invited including our own VCs, people from HEFCE and HEFCW, president of the NUS etc etc.

The way that the Awards dinner was run and the use such surroundings, which required black tie dress, did make me think about how we honour teaching success at my own University.  We have dispensed with formal dinners instead incorporating awards into our conference and making the occasion a celebration, albeit an informal one.  I wondered, though, after Wednesday, whether we should be doing more to celebrate our winners every year – ok perhaps not on the scale of the NTFS dinner, I think Middle Temple would be out of our league – but perhaps dinner with the VC and President of the Students Union (our awards are led by the SU) would be a suitable recognition.  What was also a really good touch was to enable you to invite your partner or a guest.  There was acknowledgement that often those nearest you don’t always understand or appreciate what you are doing day-to-day and it was pretty impressive for them to see their other half celebrated in such surroundings.  Perhaps this is something else we could do at City.

We’re often too shy to recognise our achievements or not see them as worthy of note or celebration.  However, particularly in relation to learning and teaching, we should be shouting about what we do, as we can make a difference.  Although part of me feels that my award is not entirely down to me – I could not have achieved what I have without colleagues at City and beyond – and also incredibly shy on many levels about shouting about it and a bit uncomfortable with the idea of being “special”, Wednesday night made me realise how valuable these achievements are and what a difference they could make to the profile of learning and teaching within our own institution.  So my award is more than about me, I hope that I can use it to inspire and support others to celebrate their own worth and continue to make a difference to student learning.

A lot of people said how lucky I was to be signed off – the prospect of months at home over the summer seemed idyllic to them.  And in some respects I am very lucky. I’m lucky to have the flexibility and opportunity to continue to work whilst semi-incarcerated at home – one benefit of working in a university I think.  I’m also fortunate in that I live about 20minutes walk from work and this enabled me to invite people to my house and hold meetings at home.  I’ve been very touched about how accommodating people have been – I think people like a walk into leafy Islington and a break from the office – or tried to arrange meetings with me via conference phone, skype or adobe connect.  And my boss and my team have been fantastically patient and worked with me so that I can keep doing my job, albeit remotely.  I’m also fortunate in that remote access, email etc etc have enabled me to keep in touch and keep working.

However, it’s not been easy.  At first I found it really hard to structure my days and get motivated to keep engaging without some of the formality of the work environment. I have also felt very lonely at times.  Initially I tried to have a meeting at my house every day to keep me sane, but then I realised that this broke up the day so much so I changed it and tried to hold a  number of meetings on the same day.  This worked better but also left me exhausted at the end of the day (and with a lot of washing up!). During August my partner was working at home too and this is not ideal in a two bedroom flat with no separate “working” area – and with me having visitors – we almost had to schedule where we would be working! And for the second half of August my daughter finished nursery and was also at home. She couldn’t understand why I could not be with her and I felt incredibly guilty.  There were times when I thought I should just give up as it was just too hard, but I didn’t want to do that. I created routines around my work to give me more structure and planned my time even more than usual – I realised that when I am in the office I spend so much time in meetings that I don’t plan when I do other work, it just tends to be squashed in around other things.

Now the summer is over, partner back at work, daughter at school it has been easier to start a routine and keep working.  My condition has improved so I’m able to come into the office a couple of days a week. Although I am a big advocate of home working as I think it generally encourages productivity and motivation, being forced to work at home for such a long time has really made me appreciate my working environment and also made me understand a lot more about the way I work.  I tend to have many many informal conversations with my team and other colleagues that result in actions for them or me, contact being made or progress on various initiatives.  I think this is a fundamental part of my leadership style. When forced to be at home that informal contact is very difficult to replicate. Twitter is great, for those on Twitter. But email just doesn’t cut it and I find myself sending endless emails to my poor team when I would usually just walk across the office and ask them something. And although I do phone about various things, it is not always convenient or I feel like I am just dictating a bit long list! The benefit of being “allowed” back into the office has enabled me to deal with those informal queries a lot more.

Joining meetings via conference call has been interesting! For informal meetings it works ok-ish, but we always end up talking over each other as you can’t gauge facial expressions and when to join in the conversation.  For formal meetings it is pretty weird.  I have realised that it is a real art to chair meetings when staff are joining in remotely.  It is much more difficult to just jump in with your comments and you really need the chair to ask you for your feedback/thoughts. Or it is hard to follow the flow of the conversation and then you find yourself put on the spot! Video conferencing is better as you can see what everyone is doing but technical glitches much more common.  There have been some successes and amusing moments – the voice from the “ether” in team meetings, or chairing a meeting remotely when everyone else was in the room – I think it was the most efficient meeting I ever chaired, or contributing to a conference panel presentation at ALT-C via Skype whilst I was supposed to be on “holiday” and had bribed my daughter with chocolate and a Barbie DVD only to have her shout at me “be quiet Mummy” every time I spoke – the embarrassment!!

I have had more time to think, though.  Not the time I thought to do things like blog regularly or sort out my mess of a contacts in outlook/iphone etc but more time to be organised for meetings and reflect on what I am doing and trying to achieve. I’ve worried about the example I am setting as a leader and been massively conscious of attempting to be a positive role model, not hypocritical, not place undue stress on others and “do my bit” as a leader and for the team. But  I have found it massively hard to switch-off.  Even though I have taken some leave it has been really difficult when not physically away from my laptop etc to disengage from work. I think as I have brought so much of my working life into my home the boundaries have become so blurred that that separation has not been possible. Roll on next summer when I can take a lovely hot holiday, albeit with multiple babies!

I’ve survived the home incarceration but I miss the office much more than I thought. Although I have perhaps a bit more objectivity and separation which has helped in some situations, there are times when you miss the tenor of the work environment and misjudge situations.  I miss the informal and serendipitous contact with colleagues, the frustrations and the laughter. And I think that for me, that has impacted on my confidence – when I first returned to the office I felt very nervous.  But, I have, almost become more organised, more disciplined and paid more attention to certain facets of my worklife – attempting to prioritise better as well as deal with the increased mound of email because I am not physically present.  I’ve also reflected more on the balance between my work and personal responsibilities, what makes me happy and what I am trying to do.  It’s not been an easy period but ultimately I’m very lucky to have been able to do this and to have such great, supportive colleagues who have helped me keep sane (well just), engaged and focused.

Sometimes, it obviously is – choice of Easter cupcake from coffee shop (lemon, chocolate, strawberry); or on a less flippant level, choice about who you vote for, where you live, where you work, what you say and do. But is all of this real choice? What about other sorts of choices? The privatisation of the energy companies – yes more choice, but not necessarily a meaningful choice but a confusing, mess of a choice between often one poor service provider and another and lots of inefficiency (don’t get me started on an 18mth battle we have been having between British Gas Business and British Gas Domestic who don’t talk to each other). In recent dealings with the NHS I have been offered a lot of “choice”. But when asked what I would like to do by a medical professional who is supposed to be an expert in their field and has studied for 7 or more years, I don’t really want that choice. I want to be advised and guided by the professional, but yet I am asked to make a decision about something I know little about. I want to trust that medical professional to use their judgement to help me. Thinking back to my GCSE reading, Sophie’s Choice is an extreme but graphic example of the often hideousness of having choices.

It seems that so often we are placed in the position of seeming as if we have choice, but actually it is either Hobson’s choice or we are being forced to take responsibility for something when we don’t actually know the impact of our decisions. In a drive for organisations and businesses, particularly organisations in the public sector, to be more customer focused, choice is seen as the epitome of this. But merely providing choices without support and accompanying knowledge is not providing choice at all.

I have been thinking about this because yesterday I attended the Westminster Education Forum’s event on the Future of Higher Education where a selection of policy makers, experts and key leaders in HE discussed how UK HE is changing in the wake of the Browne Review and imminent hike in undergraduate fees.

I found the event fundamentally depressing. As Peter Crisp from BPP provocatively put it there is virtual acceptance that Higher Education is a business and as such it needs to demonstrate return on investment. Throughout the event, speakers talked about students as customers and consumers who demanded value for money and quantifiable outputs. Making Universities more accountable to those funding it – ie students – would engender greater quality of provision. Those engaging in HE should be clear about what careers they will gain when they graduate. There should be a demonstrable path from choice of degree subject to employment. Anthony McClaren, Chief Executive of the QAA, said that we needed to get students more involved in the information we provide so that they can make informed choices about their subjects. Stephen Marston from BIS said that the lack of funding for those subjects not covered by STEM should not be of concern. People would still study for these areas but they needed to have their expectations appropriately managed.

I might have gone to University quite a few years ago to study for my first degree but I don’t think I had a clue what I wanted to do when I finished. And you could argue that being an Arts graduate that was inevitable. However, I also know of many people who studied totally unrelated subjects to their actual jobs, particularly those who studied liberal arts and now work in the City. Given that careers, roles and jobs are changing so rapidly can we really expect Universities to manage student expectations around employment? And do we want an HE market dominated by students who are entering HE only to get a job at the end of it (despite the fact that the fee payment regime actually places disincentives against getting a highly paid job).

What bothers me about this is the reduction of HE to a job factory. Richard Hall’s fabulous recent blog on the purpose of education implies a very different notion of what education, including what HE is for -  – If all HE is for is to get people into employment it is a very expensive and over engineered way of doing it. In order to engage students at HE level, we need to encourage them to love learning for learning’s sake – in fact we should be doing that at all levels of education by appealing to our natural curiosity to question, challenge, discuss and discover. With all the talk of business we are in danger of losing the real value of Higher Education. That is not to say that HE should not change nor that it should not be professional, but surely professionalism cannot only be equated with running everything like a “business”? Can we not be professional educators who work with professional learners? I would hope so.

The other thing that bothers me is that in the proposed model for fees and by association HE, this pursuit of learning for learning’s sake, particularly in those subjects less easy to equate with a defined career, will be the preserve of the privileged few. I know many people have raised this elsewhere, but there was an interesting take on this yesterday. A number of speakers pointed out the UK’s generally poor rate in relation to widening participation which is not necessarily helped by the new fee structure. As Nicolas Barr from LSE said, if we were really serious about widening participation we would start with nursery children and make nursery teachers better paid and valued. Talking about how many bursaries we are going to offer for Universities misses the point. Waiting until students are 14, 15, 16 to talk about University is too late. For many the perception will be that a degree is unobtainable and undesirable, limiting their aspirations from an early age.

So returning to the question of choice, in relation to HE the rhetoric seems to be that higher fees with empower the student; essentially privatising the sector will enable choice, force Universities to be more articulate about what they are actually offering and drive up quality. Barr talked about the concept of “pub economics” we might all agree that something is right but actually the evidence shows it is actually wrong. Or at least more complicated than that! This characterises a lot of the conversations about fees that miss the point, he maintained that Browne is right to remove the restrictions on numbers as higher fees provides universities with more resources but that the way of going about it was wrong. Stephen Marston was quick to point out that all this would have happened regardless of the squeeze on the economy (I am not convinced about this). And tight regulation by OFFA will ensure fair access. Yet as McClaren pointed out, we should be wary of associating student-led choice with quality. Free movement alone is not assurance of quality. Particularly if the student choice is not a real choice but based on poor information and a lack of awareness of the impact of their decisions. Is it realistic to expect students to make decisions at 17 that could shape their whole career when none of us know what careers will be available in 5, 10, 15 years time? Not even the best programme specification in the world can deal with that problem. Surely we need to be equipping them with critical reasoning and analysis skills as well as engendering a desire for learning that will enable them to return to education throughout their life as their career develops and new opportunities arise. Terry Hoard from UCU asked if the Government had actually talked to any employers about what they wanted from students, as well as citing research by UUK which shows that the contribution of HEIs to the UK economy is larger than that of the air and space craft, agricultural and pharmaceutical industries. Yet the current plans for English HE (and the mere that this is just England is bonkers in itself!) surely puts that contribution in danger.

I think the issue is that actually as a sector we have failed in convincing Government, both this and the last one, about the difference HE makes to the UK economy. In many cases we have not demonstrated that we can regulate ourselves convincingly enough and we have failed to engage students by attempting to pile lots and lots of them into tiny lecture theatres, talk at them for three hours and then send them away. Failing to mark their work on time and give them a meaningful experience. And let’s not even go to the subject of international students; as Vincenzo Raimo from University of Nottingham, pointed out, some institutions have been rather over-reliant on international students. That may be the exception, and there are many many people in HE who have been trying to change the sector, but their voices have not been heard. In some cases, some staff have been very complacent. Sadly, we are now paying the price.

I’m not actually opposed to students paying more for their education or changing the funding model. The situation the UK HE sector was in was unsustainable and Universities were suffering. But part of that suffering was of our own making – our students had changed yet in many cases our programmes and pedagogic models had not kept up. I am not in favour, though of the way that these changes are being introduced and am fearful that this ill thought out and consumer driven rhetoric will damage the sector irrevocably. One cannot ignore the financial imperatives that are ultimately driving these changes.

However, in an attempt to think positively, we need to try to see the opportunities that are here. Denise Kirkpatrick from the OU discussed the possibilities inherent in Browne around flexible learning and online provision, particularly with the changes to part time fees. Raimo went on to talk about partnership models of learning whereby UK degrees are delivered abroad as a possible future development model. Chris Morecroft from the Association of Colleges, discussed partnership models with HE, moving to two year vocational degrees and opportunities for FE to offer alternative progression routes, as well as continuing to widen access.

Working with students more effectively and attempting to educate them about choice, provide good information and engender enthusiasm for learning are all still possible. Harder, but possible and vital. Perhaps if we take more time listening to students, not as consumers, but as learners, we will then be able to create new pedagogic models and opportunities for learning that are fit for the 21st century and are not driven purely by business or investment decisions. If we try to squeeze our current offerings and models into the new structures we will fail ourselves and our students. Whether we like it or not the sector is changing and what we need to do is attempt to take control of these changes, retain those values that are important to us by not passively accepting the rhetoric but actively showing why UK HE is one of the best systems in the world through questioning, challenging and adapting. Oh, and as Nicolas Barr said we should complain a lot too –but, like all good academics, base our complaints on good evidence and economics, not “pub economics”.

The exercise relates to my other post on coffee, lego and KPIs about measuring the impact of educational development initiatives. I had about 20-30mins to run this from start to finish but it could definitely have lasted longer.  For the accompanying presentation I used a prezi

Step 1: Take some rather lovely coloured, postcard sized, rectangular card (I used some rather florescent card from Rymans, was a bit lurid but did the trick) and write one educational development activity on each card.  So, my list of “typical” educational development centre activities was as follows:

Journal;  Invited speakers;  NTF; Workshops; Seminar series; Educational technologies; Institutional research; Professional development (ad hoc) ; 1-2-1s ; Awards; Educational strategy; Programme team “interventions”; Conference; Innovation; Peer review; PG Cert (Academic programmes)

There are others I’m sure but this gives a good flavour and a range of activities.

Step 2: Find some other shaped, coloured card. I used (again from Rymans) stars and circles, again in lurid florescent colours.  There was something about the shaped card and using circle type shapes that worked well and some people commented on this in the session. Use these for the evaluation measures. Write one measure on each shape but you can repeat the measures.  I tried to group them by different types of evaluation denoted by a different coloured card.  
The measures I used are given below:

“Counting measures”: Nos attendees, nos users, nos applications, nos awards, other numeric data

More complex “counting” measures: NSS scores, input into curriculum changes, nos networks created, policies produced, committees attended, projects completed, satisfaction scores, hours spent with schools/faculties

Qualitative measures: Focus groups, case studies, interviews

More complex qualitative measures: User stories, egs of changed practice, testimonials, emotional engagement

Research measures: Published research, external/research funding, other research output, % time spent on research

Excuse the rather crude names for the types of measures, this was quick and dirty so does need some finessing – and I love to hear from you if you do finesse it. I’m sure there are other measures but these are the ones I came up with as starters for 10 and would love to know more if you have any ideas.

Step 3: Split your “audience” into 3 or so groups of about 4-5 people each.  Depending on time, give them 3 or 4 different activities – we had about 20 mins and I gave them 3 each.  Then randomly give them a selection of measures from all of the categories.

Step 4: In groups, with a flip chart page, each group identifies those measures that could be used to evaluate each activity. Usually there is some overlap and quite a lot of discussion.

Step 5: At the end of the allotted time each group feeds back to the others as to why they have chosen these measures, any problems they had etc.

Variations

If I was running this again I think I would be more scientific about the categories and also group the activities by colour, but this is a minor tweak.

I’d also like longer – probably an hour to an hour and half would give more discussion and more time to cover all the activities as well as for groups to contribute their own. It worked well though and was a good way of getting people to think about the range of measures you could use and where one “measure” gives you lots of data. Also we talked about how some measures may be relatively meaningless but are important for certain audiences.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the LDC team and those who attended my session at the SEDA conference 2010 in Chester. Also to:

Lesley Salem from Cultivation who worked with us on the initial evaluation at City and identified some of the range of measures and was instrumental in making me think differently about KPIs.

Dr Antonia Ward who helped me think about impact and put me onto the fabulous lego timesheets

So I’ve talked to a few people about the genius coffee and papers idea and I can say genius as it is not my idea at all, but stolen from the inspirational Colin Beard, Teaching Fellow at Sheffield Hallam University and a National Teaching Fellow. I saw Colin speak at the SEDA conference in 2009 and really liked his approach and some easy to use exercises he had to engage students. We then invited him to run an event at City for our Learning Development Fellows where he talked through some more ideas, including the coffee and papers idea.

The idea is very simple. And lovely for its simplicity. Basically, Colin argues that none of us have enough time to read so this activity gives people “permission” to read.  As part of a workshop, seminar or away day or any time where you have people for a few hours you allocate a certain amount of time for reading.  People can go where they are comfortable and read from a selection of papers chosen by the tutor or facilitator. At the end of the time everyone comes back into the group to discuss the readings.

I loved this idea so much that I thought I would try it with our students on the Academic Leadership module. One of the problems we had is that there is so much leadership “theory” out there how do we get students to be familiar with it and critique it without just running through multiple powerpoints which are very dull.  On a radio 4 programme broadcast about leadership earlier this year – Follow the Leader - the presenter commented that a search for literature on leadership produced more results than any other, including very popular topics like cookery etc.  The Academic Leadership module is taught to staff over four days so we decided that the first morning would be the coffee and papers session.  I was concerned that the students might think it was a bit of a “doss” for the tutors, but it took me a considerable amount of time to carefully select about 20 key articles on leadership that would provide a broad spectrum, nevermind getting all the copies sorted etc.  When I introduced the idea to the students they all looked a bit stunned – “what we are allowed to just go and read for an hour and half?” was the question and they seemed a bit hesitant to select the articles etc.  I asked them to all identify three keywords from the article and provide a three minute pitch about it back to the group.

After about an hour and half we called everyone back together for a discussion. I could not have anticipated how successful this was. We produced a flip chart with all the key words on it which gave a really good overview of the kinds of issues that occur frequently in leadership literature.  Many of the articles fed from each other and there were similar or opposing concepts. We were able to have a great discussion about the weaknesses in the literature, which was much greater because the students could compare a range of authors, instead of myself and the co-tutor merely talking through each theory in turn. What also surprised me was that throughout the following two days we referred frequently back to the coffee and papers session and the themes that had come up.  The students loved it! They have asked for it to be incorporated into all modules because they loved having the permission to read as well as getting a really good overview of the key texts.  I also asked them to post their summaries on Moodle so that we had a good resource to refer back to.  The session was so successful that we ran it again at the beginning of the second two day teaching session with the focus on change management.

I would thoroughly recommend this to anyone – whether working with teams or students. Being given the permission to read is a precious thing and one that is so important but that we are rarely allowed to do in work – we must be seen to be “busy” and ironically reading seems not to count as “busy-ness”.  So thanks very much Colin

Last Monday we held our first researchers’ day which was intended to bring new researchers and phd students together and help create a strong research community.  The day was a mix of plenary discussions/presentations and breakout workshops. Ajmal and I had volunteered or been volunteered (can’t remember which!) to run a session on the digital researcher.

The cunning plan…

As is inevitable with these kind of things (or perhaps that is just my way) we did the planning in a rather crazy, 3 part interrupted meeting but came up with the idea of doing a “social presentation” – this means that the audience define the direction that they wish the presentation to go. Given that we were discussing social media we thought that this was quite a neat way of representing the subject matter not with standing that us giving demos and talking through which social media tools we use for our research would be as dull as dishwater.

So the idea was that we got together a list of around 9 or 10 social media tools that we use in our academic activities, but particularly for research. Our list was (in no particular order):

• Twitter
• Blogs
• RSS
• Google docs
• Academic.edu
• LinkedIn
• Zotero (in the session one of the participants suggested Mendeley as superior to this for ease of use)
• Xmind
• Slideshare
• Prezi

There were others but we wanted to give a broad mix across the categories and also focus on those that tools that could truly be called illustrative of social media.

We then subdivided this list into those tools that could be used as a research tool for collection and creation; those that could be used primarily for collaboration and those that could be used for profile raising and networking.  Then the audience chose (via PRS handsets) under each category which tool they would like to know more about and we would give them a brief low down. Then we would run an exercise in pairs where they indicated if they used any of these tools followed by a group discussion where people shared other tools that they used. Sorted!

The presentation is on slideshare – see below. Sadly the slides have gone a bit weird I think that is due to our rather lovely pink template (thanks Ajmal!)

The reality….
Things sort of went to plan, well best laid plans etc. Firstly – the negatives –  we were in a computer room which was a bit annoying and not really the kind of layout we wanted – too much temptation for people to start fiddling with computers, despite our engaging style then we couldn’t get the PRS to work so we had to get people to do a show of hands, which was fine but not the kind of anonymous response we had wanted. However, on the positive side it really was a social presentation as people chose the tools to look at that we thought were least likely – no-one wanted to find out about twitter in research but wanted to know more about academic.edu – so that caught us by surprise. And people started to contribute their own tools and ideas as we were going through the presentation. Great! The pair activity worked really well as people got talking a lot about tools they were using and got some ideas on things to develop. We then had a good general discussion which brought up issues of privacy, personal and professional online personas,  how to give time to this and how to start, and thinking about appropriate application and use. Ajmal and I also had a side discussion about social media often being used for good news and would you use it to deliver bad or sad news – and if not, why not?

The happy ending?

Definitely and we would do it again – hopefully with working PRS this time and with some tweaks in the content. But was fun to go into a presentation and not really know how it would turn out or what you would talk about – and also took a lot more preparation than the usual presentation but was much more rewarding in the session.

And ever after…

We’d like to analyse why people chose the tools they did as well as know what people are using so if you would like to post on this topic via twitter use the tag #dratcity (digital researcher at City)

• summarising a discussion at the Heads of Educational Development Group (HEDG) on Monday about the value of KPIs
• my notes from Barbara Dexter’s session at the SEDA conference the following day on “Targets and performance measures in educational development: how helpful are they?” and David Baume’s session on “How do educational developers make an impact – and how do they know they have done?”. Both part of the Evaluating Impact and Value for Money strand at the SEDA conference
• my presentation as part of the same strand on “Making the drinking the coffee into KPIs – managing impact measures within an educational development setting”. I’ll post up the activity I did for this another time

As ever am pressure prompted so sorting out presentation the night before, but in fairness did have to go to the other strand sessions to work out what would do. Am hoping this post will help me clarify my thoughts.

So, why am interested in this topic?

Well for the past two years, as head of a largeish educational development team, I have been consistently saying that we need to demonstrate impact – I did write “value for money” but I’m not sure what this means in this context.  I get quite cross with some of the (perceived) complacency I hear around this issue.  That what we do is too subtle to measure, that a measurement culture is tantamount to some kind of management control and heresy, that it is too reductionist, that it is obvious that we are necessary, that the measures are useless.  Whilst I would admit that there is some truth in some of these statements, if we do nothing, then unsuitable measures will be imposed upon us.  And, we should not forget, that we are paid to do a job and therefore we should be able to demonstrate ON SOME LEVEL that what we do is having an effect. Otherwise, shouldn’t we all just go home?

I felt very strongly when I moved into my current role that it was important to consider fully whether the work we do is relevant, of value, appropriate and most importantly making a difference.  Leading of staff who on the whole feel passionately about what they do and have moved into this area because they want to make a difference, I felt it was important to give them the opportunity to evaluate how they make a difference.  I also thought that the culture at my institution was such that we would be asked to demonstrate in terms that senior management could understand, what we did and why we did it.  Furthermore, in setting up a new service/department, we needed to ensure that we remained committed to what staff required from us. The caveat of course is that there is a balance between leading the Schools and being led by them, and this is a fine balance to strike.  So, one of my mantras has been over the past two years “we need to demonstrate the value of what we do” with the other one being “if we are not of use to the University, then we may as well go home”.

So, that explains my interest in this, which I guess you could describe as threefold:

• wishing to evaluate work on team and usefulness of service
• path for new developments and innovation
• enable others to understand what we do (from senior management to institutional stakeholders)

At both HEDG and SEDA this week there has been a lot of discussion about KPIs and other measures. The HEDG discussions were prompted by the Australian Council of Academic Development’s work on performance measures – see – http://www.catl.uwa.edu.au/projects/tqi HEDG then also had a discussion on its mailing list about possible KPIs. At the meeting concern was raised about the Australian work as it was very focused on senior management satisfaction, although people felt that the eight overall areas (eg strategy, policy and governance; scholarship of learning and teaching) could be useful at providing comparative measures. There was a feeling that if HEDG didn’t grasp the mantle on some of this work then KPIs and other measures could be “foisted” on the sector.  And there was an acknowledgement of the importance of “playing the game” in terms of being seen to measure to please senior management. The mailing list discussion was more problematic as many of the measures were around things such as NSS scores, student retention, but the problem is that most of these are institutional measures. And whilst, one would hope, that educational development units do play a role here, it cannot be directly attributed to the educational development unit alone.  I have personally always found such measure problematic as our role is as a conduit and a facilitator, there is someone standing between us (ie the academics) and the students and it would therefore not be appropriate to measure us on these scores.

Furthermore, I think many of the measures on the HEDG list were confusing measurement of the impact of the service and measurement of learning and teaching generally. So for example, accreditation, audit reports, student evaluations, retention, distance learning programmes etc cannot be measures of the work of educational development because you cannot contribute cause and effect. Or in other words you cannot measure it.  Other measures just generate the “so what?” question, so take up of new technologies, number of NTFs, number of HEA fellows etc, may all be things we may think we want to measure but why? What difference does this make?

In my team we have been struggling with this for two years.  Whilst I have acknowledged the external expectation around KPIs and measurement, I would not say this is the key driver.  It may sound paranoid to the team but really I have wanted to introduce more of a culture of measurement and evaluation to improve our own motivation and work, as well as ensuring we meet what is required. I prefer to think about us being agile and finding measures we are happy with that we think have meaning but can be adeptly handled to give information to others that they can understand.  And without sounding patronising I say this deliberately as I think that often we get too close to our work then are unable to articulate clearly to staff, whether or not in senior roles, the breadth and extent of our work. This is something else we have struggled with.

We have tried to tackle this issue in a number of ways.  During the first year of the team we did two things. The first was to run a service development workshop with key staff across the institution to ascertain what shape they would like the service to be, what value they saw in the staff and those areas for development. We then commissioned a consultant to work with us on designing some KPIs.  The consultant built on the work from the workshop and spent a long time talking to key stakeholders formally and then chatting to other staff informally. She did a very sensitive and thoughtful piece of evaluation which outlined our core “audiences” and how we could reach them, as well as identifying the types of things we wanted to measure and why.  Her work made me realise that firstly we needed to select a few measures and stick to these – the keep it simple approach – and secondly that we could use a variety of methods in measuring the same thing.  So we could mix and match approaches, which ties into my comments about agility as outlined above.  This work formed the basis of a full team away day where we spent a day considering different areas that we wanted to measure and how.  Key to this work was:

• The area had to be measurable, and preferably in more than one way
• It had to be something that we were used to measuring otherwise we wouldn’t do it
• The measuring and recording had to fit with our vision and values
• We had to produce meaningful data
• We had to demonstrate impact

Some of these areas were easier to address than others. Additionally, there was some resistance from the team.  Some of the team felt that they would spend all their time completing spreadsheets without purpose. Others could not commit to a helpful measure or were not convinced the data would be useful. And I think some, although they probably didn’t say it to me!, felt that this was not appropriate for the academic nature of this work. On a more positive note however there was a general acceptance around the notion of evaluation and continuous improvement even though some of the tactics were more problematic.

At the end of the day though we had a come up with a set of seven areas that we felt we could comfortably measure.  We did have a problem with one area in terms of the “coffee conversations” and discussed various ways we could address this.  We decided though that what we could do was start on those areas we were more comfortable with and this would help convince the team of the value of what we did. Then other measures would fall into place. Also now all the team had started to think about evaluation, impact and data collection we were starting to change the culture of the team.

Six months after we had put this in place, I felt it was appropriate to review the team objectives and relate these more fully to the KPIs or critical success factors as we were calling them.  Although we were more on track in some of the evaluation areas, in others I was not convinced we were demonstrating impact.  At David Baume’s workshop at SEDA on evaluation we looked at Kirkpatrick’s levels of evaluation (1994), which are, as paraphrased by Baume:

1. Did people like it?
2. What have they learned from it?
3. Have they applied what they learned to their practice?
4. Have results improved?

This reminded me of where we were earlier this year. As Baume notes, we spend a lot of time on 1 and 2 – the kind of “happy sheet” culture.  This may not be a problem, but we need more than this. I had sat as an external member on a review of a team similar to mine at another University and that “so what” question which is begged by data from levels 1 and 2 struck home in terms of my team. Do we know what the “so” is?

In order to address this we spent a few mornings as a team over a two month period trying to work out what was the essence of the team, how we could couch this in some clear objectives and then how would we know we were successful. What did success look like? How could we get there? And how would we know what to do to get there? Although at times tortuous, most of these sessions were positive in refocusing the team, who at our own admission have a tendency to take too much on and say yes to everyone, and getting them to think about how we could clearly talk about what we did. At the end of the two months, we agreed the following objectives:

1. Recognition:  Collaborate with staff and students to celebrate and publicise successes
2. Expertise: Demonstrate expertise through thought leadership, developing practice and/or research informed practice
3. Development opportunities: Create and promote opportunities for staff to engage with new learning and teaching techniques and dialogue around their practice
4. Team: Exemplify good practice by actively participating in knowledge sharing and cross-skilling within the LDC team and collaboratively contributing to the LDC environment

I know many of you may be thinking this sounds awful and managerial but the way we did this was fun, it acted as a reward for the team, united us in common thinking and ensured that we were able to describe the work of the team to others clearly without falling back on a couple of tried and tested activities (usually the MA in Academic Practice and our work moving to Moodle, both of which are great in themselves but don’t demonstrate the breadth of what we do).  It also enabled everyone to see what they gave to the team and pitch their work in relation to these broad, common purposes.

But the key question still was – what are our success factors and how do we capture much of the intangible work we do, the serendipitous meetings, the coffees that I am always telling people to go and have, the vital trust building 1-2-1s we do, the emotional intelligence and shoulder to cry on work.  We have always held these kind of interactions dear to the work that we do but nothing seemingly could help us to measure them.

This was where our consultant told of us a genius idea which has truly helped us embed the culture of evaluation and measurement in our work. Lego. Or actually to be more precise – lego timesheets. The idea came from a developer who wanted an easy way to quantify his work on different activities. You can read about his thought process here.  We suddenly realised that this could be a low maintenance, easy way to measure those serendipitous meetings and “intangibles” with Schools.  By attributing a different colour to each thematic area of our work (determined in our KPIs), and a green lego base to each School we could see easily how much time we were spending in School and on what activity.  Each block represents half an hour and staff from across the team add blocks to their Schools on a daily or weekly basis – whenever they can.  The results are then recorded each month.

The lego idea has worked for the following reasons:

• It is a quick, simple and easy way of recording things that usually cannot be recorded
• It is fun – no really – people have built all sorts
• People like doing it and can immediately see how much time they have been spending with Schools and on what activities
• Staff from the Schools come into the office and notice the timesheets – they prompt comment and discussion.  Some Schools have even been shocked at their figures, so much so they go and work to get the sheets more populated
• It keeps evaluation and measurement in our minds as we can all see it in the office and so is helping to change the culture

The downside of course is that is still does not work on those third and fourth levels, but what we have been able to do, by encouraging staff to think differently as well as engage in something that is more creative, is free their time from mechanistic measurement to get them to then capture elsewhere good case studies or stories where these conversations or activities have influenced practice.  And what we need to do now is ensure more ways of getting this data but having a more organised way of capturing the “coffee conversations” has been massively beneficial.

But…. so what? What have we done with all this information?

Well, a number of things. Firstly, we created easily a “10 things about the LDC” document that gives information at our finger tips from the data we have collected. It is a snapshot of our work and attempts to get to the impact question. The support team within the team were able this year for the first time to create a report which comprehensively captured the range of what we do as a team – you can see our Critical Success Factors report online.  This not only brought the work of that team to the forefront but also made all staff in the team see how important this work is.  This report has been disseminated within the institution and was given to our new VC.  It contains a range of data and measures and attempts to capture the “so what”.

We are also building on this by collecting a set of case studies and examples of the impact of our work on practice. Now we are more focused on this activity we are more attune to possibilities. This would be an activity that we would do anyway but we are just focusing on how we can use this in multiple ways.  Our case studies about Moodle adoption are at http://www.city.ac.uk/ldc/learning-technologies/moodle/Moodle%20Case%20Studies.html

We have also changed our services and offerings.  Based on evaluation we have made some changes to our professional development programme and will make more next year.  We have gone for a more bespoke model, with some central activities and include built-in follow-ups and sessions with attendees to ascertain what changes they have made to their practice and why.  The frequent question that we now feel more comfortable asking is, ok but “so what”?

On a strategic (or tactical level, depending on how you look at it!) the University has also undertaken a zero-based review of all services, to ascertain staffing levels and service offerings.  In contributing to this activity we were able to provide data that we were comfortable with and had measured ourselves. Having a comprehensive set of metrics, agreed KPIs, an awareness of and practice of an evaluation and measurement culture, was enormously helpful in meeting with the ZBR team to describe what we did and why. It also helped us determine in those conversations where our remit stopped and started in relation to other areas.

We are planning a longer activity around user journeys as part of an extended user needs analysis piece of work to ascertain the real impact of what we do on a few staff members, so we can see in practice their challenges and needs and how we can better support them.

In all appraisals, the four objectives were matched with appropriate objectives for that staff member and everyone had to complete an extended development plan that included how they would measure success and how they would know they were successful.

We’re still learning with this. It is not perfect and I think at times we try to make it too complicated. It will be interesting to see what happens this year in terms of us evaluating and measuring success. We also need to marry the perhaps insular nature, or better still ensure our measuring does not become too insular, with that drive to collect examples, case stories and data.  We need to continue to resist a culture that is mechanistic in terms of measurement and just measure for measurings sake but we need to remain mindful of our obligations or requirements to provide evidence for the value of our work, in ways which are required by others but is still in line with our values. We also need to still trust our gut instinct – measurement data may not give us the entire picture – and is only one way of supporting our work. Although we can continue to question and interrogate we should feel more motivated and confident in our work and our abilities if we know we can demonstrate that we are giving value and making a difference. And ultimately that is all any of us can hope for.