The History of an SFHEA Application

I got SFHEA this year, and I hated it. I think this is a common experience. I got an enormous amount of support from all sorts of people to complete it, and I feel very grateful to each and every one of them. And I hated writing the document.

I’ve been thinking about why this is. I enjoy writing, so it can’t be the process of writing. I have developed a reflective outlook on my teaching, so I think it can’t be the genre of writing. I have written several books, so it can’t be the volume of writing. I got over the embarrassing demand to make clear claims about my accomplishments, so I don’t think it’s the content of the writing. My conclusion is that I have never really figured out what the SFHEA process is asking me to do. I still feel this, actually, even after getting the qualification. What I really hated was the uncertainty.

So I wrote my SFHEA application not over a pressured weekend, but over about — and gosh I wish I was joking about this — five years. Some of this is probably a journey everyone needs to take for themselves (“no, Michael, this isn’t about the teaching you do”), but some of it probably isn’t. I came to understand that while some of this looked superficially like it was about the focus or size of a case study, a lot of my difficulties were fundamentally about the overall aim of the document.

So in this blog I thought it would be useful to track through my drafts and do a short commentary on how I reworked a specific section in response to feedback and reflection. I don’t want to claim that my edits are perfect, but I wish I’d had something to help me see the process of writing more clearly when I was starting out.

I am prepared to share my final application with people who email me on the condition that they do not share it further. If it would help you to see it, please get in touch.

First Draft

The passage I’ve chosen is about my work as an Associate Director in a Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT).

The first run of the CDT taught course in 2019-20 was largely successful, but the management team recognised a significant weakness: students did not feel that they were getting useful feedback on their work. I talked with students about this and they said two things: the timeliness of feedback was poor, and written feedback was often brief.

Reflecting on this using Winstone’s HEA toolkit and Carless’ model of dialogic feedback, I considered how best to implement a systematic feedback sequence in the programme. My proposal to the management team was “Feedback Wednesdays”: each Wednesday, the module leader from two weeks prior would come into the CDT area and spend five minutes with each student talking about their submission.

This draft had framed my CDT leadership as a Case Study. This passage identified a specific piece of leadership (good), and focused on how I acted (also good). But while it drew on the literature (good), it didn’t really explain how I influenced colleagues (bad). I had interpreted SFHEA advice like “tell me what you did” to mean something like “tell me what teaching intervention you constructed”, when I think it was intended more like “tell me how you convinced colleagues to change something”.

Second Draft

The first run of the CDT taught course in 2019-20 was largely successful, but the management team recognised a significant weakness: students did not feel that they were getting useful feedback on their work. I talked with students about this and they said two things: the timeliness of feedback was poor, and written feedback was often brief.

Reflecting on this using Winstone’s HEA toolkit and Carless’ model of dialogic feedback, I considered how best to implement a systematic feedback sequence in the programme. My proposal to the management team was “Feedback Wednesdays”: each Wednesday, the module leader from two weeks prior would come into the CDT area and spend five minutes with each student talking about their submission. This would honour both the needs of students and the rhythm of the programme.

The main barrier to buy-in was staff time. Some assessment tasks were very large and took colleagues a long time to mark, and the time spent talking with students two weeks later was awkward to schedule. I proposed compromises to address the issue of time. For example, long assessments could be shortened in order to reduce marking burden, or on-the-spot feedback could be used to prevent the academic needing to return in two weeks.

This draft situated the Feedback Wednesday passage in my Reflective Account rather than a Case Study, which helped me place it within a different narrative and spend my wordcount differently (the passage is longer because I cut other passages). The main development here is an attempt to express my proposal from the perspective of colleagues, which is a substantial step towards showing how I influenced them. At the same time, the focus is really still on the intervention rather than the leadership.

Third Draft

The CDT taught course involved a series of one-week courses in advanced Chemistry and Manufacturing topics, typically with initial bursts of intense teaching followed by a piece of coursework. In reviews one summer, the management team recognised a significant weakness: students did not feel that they were getting useful feedback on their work. I talked with students about this and they said two things: the timeliness of feedback was poor, and written feedback was often brief.

Reflecting on this using Winstone’s (2016) HEA toolkit and Carless’ (2018) model of dialogic feedback, I considered how best to implement a systematic feedback sequence in the programme. (A5) My proposal to the management team was “Feedback Wednesdays”: each Wednesday, the module leader from two weeks prior would come into the CDT area and spend five minutes with each student talking about their submission. This would honour both the needs of students and the rhythm of the programme. Scores on the student evaluation question “feedback in this module has helped me develop as a scientist” doubled the following year (from X% agreeing to Y% agreeing), staying at this high level thereafter. (A3)

The main barrier to buy-in was staff time, and by this point in my career I had come to understand that I could negotiate through barriers. Some assessment tasks were very large and took colleagues a long time to mark, and the moment spent talking with students two weeks later was awkward to schedule. I proposed specific compromises. For example, long assessments could be shortened in order to reduce marking burden, or on-the-spot feedback (e.g. for talks) could be used to prevent the academic needing to return in two weeks. (A2, V5) Ultimately, my proposal was supported by the management team; the pilot of Feedback Wednesdays was adopted as a structure of the programme and also the newly-funded CDT in materials chemistry. (K3, V3)

This draft is (a minor edit of) the text I submitted, and was supported with a testimonial from a colleague. The opening text has been preserved fairly intact, but the direction of the text pushes much more strongly towards my part in changing what colleagues did. By this point I had hammered the Reflective Account into a narrative about getting buy-in from colleagues, which helped me situate this instance of leadership more effectively. I was trying to make every example latch onto a story about getting other people on board, which forced me to articulate how I talked with people.

What I wish I’d realised sooner

If I could go back in time, I think the thing I needed to hear was something like “the conversations you have with people should be a part of your SFHEA application”. I quickly stopped trying to write about my own teaching, but I had been trying to communicate the innovation rather than the implementation becuase I thought this is what I was being asked to do.  I was writing things of the form “people didn’t like X, so I suggested Y” rather than things of the form “people didn’t like X, so I suggested Y and worked with people around issues like Z”.

The burden on wordcount from talking about implementation was actually quite liberating because it helped me to understand that the scope needed to be much narrower. My guess is that I applied about three years later than I might have done becuase I was trying to evidence a volume of leadership which was incompatible with the application format. This — and I can only really see this with hindsight — likely made my drafts look very superficial to someone looking for how I interacted with colleagues. The thing I was trying to do might not have properly matched the thing they were trying to judge.

I still don’t know how I feel about the SFHEA process. My guess is that the design of the assessment means that there are few false positives, and that people who hold SFHEA deserve to hold it. But the difficulty in understanding what is being examined means that I am extremely confident that lots of people who satisfy the SFHEA criteria don’t hold it, either because their application is rejected or they decide not to apply.

So I hope this blog is useful to someone! Like I said, I’m willing to share my successful application if you promise not to share it further - please email me if you’d like it.