Slides from keynote presentation at Discovering Teaching Excellence at Leicester event, July 2017. The talk outlines some lessons I have learnt about getting started in publication of pedagogic research and other education-related publications.

1. DiscoveringTeaching Excellence (July 2017)
Dr Chris Willmott
Dept of Molecular
and Cell Biology
University of Leicester
cjrw2@le.ac.uk
TurningTeaching Innovation Into
Pedagogic Publications

2. Why publish education papers?
http://tinyurl.com/squarepeg1
• Education publications unlikely to be REFable
- education journals have low (or no) impact
factor
- fall between “Unit of Assessment” & “Education”
• Pedagogy specialist going to be safer than 2*
researcher
• Career development
- evidence for CV
- internal promotion
- external accreditation
(eg HEA Fellowships)
- TEF?

3. Generic v Discipline-Specific?
• Generic education research journals
- have higher kudos
- have higher “impact factor”
(but still too low for REF purposes)
However…
• Subject-specific
- more *impact* with colleagues within discipline
- willing to accept teaching innovation papers as
well as more formal education research
- “This worked well for me, it might help you too”
- good place to start publication

4. Demise of Discipline-specific
www.tandfonline.com/loi/rhep20

5. Bioscience-specific journals
BAMBED
www.bambed.org
CBE Life Science Education
www.lifescied.org
Advances in Physiology Education
advan.physiology.org
JBE
www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjbe20

6. Practitioner-to-practitioner papers

7. Starting a new project
• Existing teaching activity obvious place to start
- what evidence do you have/what do you need?
• De novo? Choose something that interests you
- ideally a “hot topic”
• More than one institution? More than one discipline?
- increased value, increased complexity
• Questionnaire-based evidence
- worthwhile research instruments hard to design
• Do you need ethical approval?
- probably!

8. Ethical approval
• Research involving human subjects
- includes any questionnaire work
• Generally uncontroversial, “light touch”
• Approval process
www2.le.ac.uk/institution/ethics/approval

9. Publication checklist
• Is your activity readily adaptable for use by others?
- check it is not entirely context-dependent
• Is your activity well described?
- good innovations often poorly explained
• Is it in right format for the journal?
- check house style rules
• Is there anything similar/identical in literature?
- check for existing work
• Is there some evaluation?
- needs to be SOME, even if not extensive

10. “I haven’t got any evidence”
• Likely that you are actually already sitting on a
gold-mine of potentially interesting data, e.g.
- Exam performance?
- Module review and feedback forms?
- Completion rates? First destination data?
• Quantitative data?
• Qualitative data?
• Triangulation?*
http://www.rumrill.net/brian/pics/pics5/pics5/DarthVader/darth_vader_closeup.jpg
* Triangulation = synthesising evidence of
different types and from different sources,
in order to arrive at conclusions

11. Collect evidence
• Develop own portfolio of evidence
- Electronic? Physical? Both?
• Valuable for: - Publications
- Professional accreditation
- Promotions
http://tinyurl.com/ev1dence17

12. Evidence, what evidence?
• In addition to the items detailed above, keep a
conscious look out for
• Emails?
- From students?
- From colleagues?
• Corridor conversations?
- Capture as soon as you can, verbatim if
possible
- Ask to repeat in an email
• Formal peer evaluations?

13. “I’m worried about my data”
• Started evaluation? Spotted potential flaws?
• - May not be fatal
• - Can’t ‘do that extra experiment’
- Alter for second go?
• - Be honest, be self-critical
• - “Warts and all”
www.generalmonck.com/biography.htm

14. Current issues/ Horizon scanning
• Students as Partners?
• Flipped classroom?
• Emerging technologies?
• Research-led teaching?
• Gamification?
Plus old chestnuts
• Feedback
• Assessment
http://tinyurl.com/hor1zon17
http://tinyurl.com/ch3stnut17

15. Other publications: THE, etc
• Don’t be afraid to pitch to Times Higher,
The Conversation or similar
• For The Conversation contact Alex Phillimore
ap507@le.ac.uk to broker contact

16. Other publication: Blogs
www.lefthandedbiochemist.wordpress.com
www.bioethicsbytes.wordpress.com www.biosciencecareers.wordpress.com
www.biologyonthebox.wordpress.com

17. Anyone for listicles?

18. Sharing on other platforms
• Slideshare

19. Community of Practice?
Actual communities:
• LLI and other Institution-level events
• PedR group in discipline?
• PedR Conferences
(or section within discipline conference)
Virtual communities:
• Become active in online conversations
- e.g. JISCMAIL PedR lists
- LinkedIn discussion groups
- Tweetups #LTHEchat #HEAchat

20. • Twitter
Unexpected consequences (1)

21. Unexpected consequences (2)
• Asked to run workshop on plagiarism at
Association for Science Education conference
• Timetabled against Patrick Moore
• Audience n=1 (plus chair)
• She was journalist for Times Educational
Supplement – wrote it up
• 4 months later she self-plagiarised in TES
 Leicester Mercury picked it up
Times Higher picked it up from Mercury
 Invited to write piece for Higher

22. Summary
• Getting started in education publication may not be
as much of a stretch as you imagine
• Start with ways to turn something you are already
doing into a paper by adding some (albeit minimal)
evaluation
• If unlikely to have enough for a “full paper” try for a
Short Communication/Case Study/Illumination
• Be active in pedagogy in other ways: conferences,
blogs, discussion lists

23. Any Questions?
E-mail: cjrw2@le.ac.uk
Twitter: cjrw
Slideshare: cjrw2
Delicious: chriswillmott
Blogs: www.bioethicsbytes.wordpress.com
www.biologyonthebox.wordpress.com
www.biosciencecareers.wordpress.com
www.lefthandedbiochemist.wordpress.com