Slides from a workshop for new teachers, run on behalf of the Society of Biology and the Higher Education Academy at Charles Darwin House, London, in May 2014.

1. Dr Chris Willmott
Dept of Biochemistry,
University of Leicester
cjrw2@le.ac.uk
Teaching Innovations as Career Development:
Turning new teaching ideas into education
publications
Workshop for NewTeachers (May 2014)
University of
Leicester

2. Roles within UK Higher Education
1. Teaching-focused?
2. Teaching and some Research?
3. Research and some Teaching?
4. Research-focused?

3. Purpose for session
• Advice for developing pedagogic publication portfolio
• “Proper” education research = as labour intensive
(and quite possibly takes longer to achieve) than
bench science
• Turning things you were doing anyway into
publications
• Accounts sharing good practice = “quick wins”
• Illustrate using some of my experience
• Workshop: doing v describing v deconstructing ?

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

5. Generic v Bio-Specific Journals?
• Generic education research journals have higher
kudos
• Generic journals have higher “impact factor”
(but still too low for REF purposes)
However…
• Bioscience-specific journals have more “impact” with
colleagues within the 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

6. Bioscience-specific journals
JBE
Society of Biology
School science as well as HE
Bioscience Education
HEA
Higher Education only

7. Bioscience-specific journals
BAMBED
www.bambed.org
CBE Life Science Education
www.lifescied.org
Advances in Physiology Education
advan.physiology.org

8. Practitioner to practitioner papers
• These journals accepts variety of formats, but each
has case study or teaching tips section(s) – may have
different names
• Bioscience Education: Short communication
• JBE: Case studies
• Advances in Physiology Education: Illuminations
• CBE-LSE & BAMBED: all short articles on
innovative teaching

9. Bioscience Education
Short Communication
• “Describe potential teaching materials or approaches
and their uses…
• “… good ideas… generated and evaluated… may not
warrant a full paper…
• “… succinct yet sufficiently informative to enable
readers to repeat the teaching approach…
• “… where possible… supported by preliminary data”

10. Bioscience Education
Descriptive account
• Fuller reports than Short Communication
• “Detailing educational practices that have been “tried
and tested” and which include evidence of appropriate
assessment and evaluation”

11. JBE
Case studies
• “... supported by preliminary data which is of
insufficient breadth to support a full paper, but is
novel enough to warrant rapid publication.
• “...can also describe a novel teaching/learning aid or
method that can be related to the curriculum, and
implemented in a classroom environment.
• “... Emphasis… on the nature of the practice, with a
clear description of the implementation procedure,
and an evaluation of its success.
• “... should have been trialled”

12. Advances in Physiology Education
Illuminations
• “... a succinct description of something
you have used in the classroom, for
teaching, or in the laboratory.
Laboratory Sourcebook
• “… detailed descriptions of practical activities that
can be used for hands-on exploration in student
laboratory settings.”

13. CBE-LSE
Articles
• “... should describe how the study
was designed and conducted to yield
generalizable claims and should be
applicable beyond a single course
• “… systematic collection and analysis of educational
data and include rigorous reflection”
• NB Requires evidence of ethical approval

14. BAMBED
Articles
• “Articles are welcomed on innovative
teaching techniques and practice in all
areas related to [biochemistry and
molecular biology education], which
include assessment of the effectiveness…
• “… articles providing details of simple, tried and
tested, laboratory experiments are especially
encouraged”
• NB Ethical approval encouraged

15. Illustrative examples
• Give some examples from my own papers
• “Meta-narrative”: more on background context and
rationale than may have been in publication

16. Tentative steps…
• Appointed lecturer January 2000
• Semester 1, Autumn 2000
• Year 1 Biochemistry lectures (n=5)
• Gone too fast, knew I only had about 25 mins
material for final lecture, needed “filler”
• Developed Amino Acid and Protein revision bingo

17. Revision bingo
KM Competitive Glutamate Zwitterion -sheet
Proline -helix Lineweaver-Burk Ornithine Kcat
Michaelis-Menten Cysteine Tyrosine Vmax Non-competitive
Tubulin Glycine -galactosidase Tryptophan Henderson-
Hasselbalch
Serine pK Lysine -mercaptoethanol Haemoglobin

18. 5 x 5 grid
Verbal clues
– multi-layered
e.g. “This next answer is an amino acid… it is unusual
amongst the amino acids found in proteins as the
side-chain is actually bonded to the backbone
nitrogen… Because of this it has reduced flexibility
and it is not usually found in alpha helices… The
single letter code for this amino acid is P.”
Revision bingo KM Competitive Glutamate Zwitterion -sheet
Proline -helix Lineweaver-Burk Ornithine Kcat
Michaelis-Menten Cysteine Tyrosine Vmax Non-competitive
Tubulin Glycine -galactosidase Tryptophan Henderson-
Hasselbalch
Serine pK Lysine -mercaptoethanol Haemoglobin

19. All same game card
Objective:
revision > winning
- but offer small prize
Revision bingo KM Competitive Glutamate Zwitterion -sheet
Proline -helix Lineweaver-Burk Ornithine Kcat
Michaelis-Menten Cysteine Tyrosine Vmax Non-competitive
Tubulin Glycine -galactosidase Tryptophan Henderson-
Hasselbalch
Serine pK Lysine -mercaptoethanol Haemoglobin
Fun way of doing a quick test
Flexible: - duration of a game
- number of participants
- content (adapted for different topics)

20. 1st HE Education paper
• Wrote up exercise
• Two elements: (i) Activity itself (‘off the shelf’)
(ii) Practical tips for adapting
• Published in BAMBED
• Note - descriptive, no significant evaluation

21. Activity: what is plagiarism?
• Presented with worksheet
• Study the paragraph, below, taken from
Pharmacology (4th edition, 1999) by Rang, Dale &
Ritter.
During the last 60 years the development of effective and
safe drugs to deal with bacterial infections has revolutionised
medical treatment, and the morbidity and mortality from
microbial disease have been dramatically reduced.
• Look at each of the seven essay extracts and decide
whether or not you consider the author is guilty of
plagiarism.

22. Activity: Plagiarised or ok?

23. Plagiarism: Origin of exercise
• Same semester, two students identified as copying
chunk from textbook
• Their defence – it had been cited in text so “ok”
• Many students are “accidental” plagiarists:
- Not understanding the rules
- Not enough time
(poor time-keeping)
- Poor study skills
• Exercise to develop understanding
• Prevention better than cure,
better than confirmation of guilt
Nick Newman

24. Plagiarism session
• Exercise followed by tutor-led discussion of
appropriate and inappropriate use
• Leading into practical tips on avoidance of
accidental plagiarism
- advice on good note-taking practice
- advice on referencing
- warning re Turnitin

25. Published in JBE
• Willmott CJR and Harrison TM (2003) An exercise to
teach students about plagiarism Journal of Biological
Education 37:139-140

26. Why JBE?
• Pragmatic: Had published in BAMBED, Bioscience
Education and CBE-LSE did not yet exist
• Intended audience: plagiarism is an issue in
secondary as well as higher education
• Content therefore applicable to wider audience
• Interactive
Learning
section

27. Unexpected consequences (1)
• Editor at JBE asked me 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 discussed again in TES
• Leicester Mercury picked it up
• Times Higher picked it up from Mercury
• Invited to write piece for Higher

28. Unexpected consequences (2)
• Resonated with felt need elsewhere
• Lots of emails of thanks +/or permission to adapt
(including other disciplines)
• Not generating “citations” but evidence of impact
• Colleague in student development turned it into
online self-study exercise

29. Plagiarism avoidance
• Original activity adapted by Stuart Johnson into
self-directed tutorial using Adobe Presenter
• “Don’t Cheat Yourself” now uses different example
for Bioscientists
http://tinyurl.com/
plagiarism-biology
• now also
16 other subjects
http://tinyurl.com/
plagiarismtutorials

30. Writing scientific reports
• Article describing series of tutorial activities
developing students’ knowledge about structure of
scientific reports
• Note: 1st issue of Bioscience Education (2003)

31. Essay writing
• Essay writing remains a cornerstone of assessment
• Students may have received little specific guidance
or feedback on exam essays:
- tend to take place at or near end of module
- reticence re haggling for marks?
• Rare opportunity to see genuine work produced by
other students
http://tinyurl.com/essayhand10

32. Essay writing
• Activity involving three phases:
• Stage 1: students peer-review genuine exam
essays written by previous cohort
• Stage 2: write essay under exam conditions
• Stage 3: peer-mark each other’s essays

33. Essay writing: Stage 1
• Students read set of exam essays
• In groups, rank answers according to formal
marking criteria
• Each group reports back on ranking, these are
compared with ‘real’ order
• Tutor-led discussion on strengths and weaknesses
• Other advice on exam technique

34. Essay writing: Stage 1 - issues
• Number and range of essays?
- six = a good number
- less = insufficient spread of quality
- more = take too long,
distinctions becomes subtle
• Handwritten or typed?
- handwritten
- layout and legibility as learning
outcome
- photocopy once, remove marker’s
comments (but record elsewhere),
re-photocopy

35. Essay writing: Stage 1 - issues
• Right to use previous students’ essays?
- initially with essays from archive
- collected permission from cohort and used their
essays
- institutional policy on students’ IPR?

36. Essay writing: Stage 2
• Students plan essay on specified topic
• One week later
• 45 minutes, exam conditions
• Formal exam booklets
• Candidate numbers only
(nb peer-marking)
• Extra MPH for dyslexics etc
http://tinyurl.com/independentessay

37. Essay writing: Stage 3
• Peer-evaluation of essays
• Tutor-led discussion of key issues & common errors
• Essays distributed to groups (not their own)
• 45 mins to read and offer feedback on as many as
possible
• No writing on script, feedback accumulated on sheet
of coloured paper circulated with essay
• Essays collected back in and passed to tutor team
for summative marking
• Returned with peer and tutor feedback

38. Essay writing: the paper
• Willmott C (2007) ‘You have 45 minutes, starting from
now’: helping students develop their exam essay skills
Bioscience Education 9-C2
• Included:
- description of task and rationale
- practical advice if seeking to replicate
- qualitative comments from students demonstrating
enjoyment and perceived value of task
- combined data from 2 cohorts comparing their
ranking order with “real” (i.e. staff) ranking
• Suspected not enough for “full paper” so submitted as
Short Communication

39. Experimental design
• QAA Benchmarking statements (2007, p2):
“students should develop competence in comparing
the merits of alternative hypotheses and receive
guidance in terms of how to construct experiments
or to make observations to challenge them”
• 50 minute introductory session for Yr 1 students:
Can you smell fear?

40. • Students watch short clip describing an experiment to
investigate whether you can smell if someone is afraid
• Having watched the clip, they discuss:
- what was good about the design of the expt?
- what was wrong with the experiment?
http://tinyurl.com/terrorface1
Experimental design

41. Brainiac Science Abuse: The Smell of Fear
Sky1, 07:00, 28th January 2009 (http://tinyurl.com/brainiacfear)
Experimental design

42. Good aspects of Brainiac expt?
• - included a negative control (no fear, no sport)
• - all subjects carried out their activity for same time
• - all subjects were “sniffer” by same person
• - all subjects were same gender
• …but little else is good

43. What was wrong with this expt?
• only one “sniff-er”
• only three “sweat-ers”
• was not the same person on crane/running/relaxing
• distance nose-to-armpit not same in all cases
• may have been other explanations for the observed
differences, e.g.
• natural body odour differences between the three
• use of deodorant
• eating of smelly foods
• olfactory fatigue/adaptation may have occurred

44. Design a better version
• work with those sitting near you to design a
better experiment looking into whether it is possible
to smell fear
http://tinyurl.com/armpitsniffing1

45. A more scientific approach
Prehn-Kristensen et al (2009), PLoS ONE 4(6): e5987
http://tinyurl.com/anxietypaper

46. Experimental design
• Paper offering the exercise “off the shelf” (slides
downloadable via Slideshare) and advice
• Good idea, supported by some qualitative data, but
not substantial evaluation
Willmott CJR (2011) Introduction
to experimental design: can you
smell fear? Journal of Biological
Education 45:102-105

47. Sharing uncovered treasure
• Scope for papers in which you share
advice on (discipline-specific) use of
resource generated by third party
• e.g. Willmott C (2006) Never again shout
“That WOULD have been useful for my teaching” at
the TV Bioscience Education 7-C1
• Introduces readers to TRILT, the Television and Radio
Index for Learning and Teaching
• Developed by British Universities Film and Video
Council, widely available to Unis, but underused
• Short Communication with tips on usage
http://tinyurl.com/gold2013a

48. Two opportunities
• Over time teaching activities evolve
• Ethics dimension in Yr 2 module for Med Biochemists
• Wanted novel assignment not course essay
• Initially developed task producing websites about
ethical topic
• Became obsolete as blogging services such as Blogger
and Wordpress emerged
• Fall in cost of digital cameras and availability of
editing tools allowed for replacement
• Students now produce short videos on bioethics

49. Two opportunities: two papers
• Both the original web-authoring task and the video-
production activity became publications
Willmott CJR (2014, in press)
Teaching bioethics via the production
of student-generated videos
Journal of Biological Education
Willmott CJR and Wellens J (2004)
Teaching about bioethics through
authoring of websites Journal of
Biological Education 39:27-31

50. Two opportunities: two papers
Both papers included:
• Practical advice on running similar task
• Pre- and post-intervention surveys. Self-reporting
- knowledge of bioethics
- interest in bioethics
- knowledge of web-authoring/film-making
- interest in web-authoring/film-making
• Example feedback demonstrating student satisfaction
• Web-paper included analysis of topics identified as
involving bioethics before/after
• Video paper noted student-generated films available
to public = “Students as Producers”

51. 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

52. “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

53. Collect evidence
• Develop your own portfolio of evidence
- Electronic? Physical? Both?
• Valuable for: - Publications
- Professional accreditation
- Promotions

54. 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?

55. “I’m worried about my data”
• Started evaluation?
• Spotted how you may have done something better?
• Don’t panic, it may not be fatal
• Can’t ‘do that extra experiment’
• Be honest, be self-critical
• “Warts and all”
www.generalmonck.com/biography.htm

56. Ethical approval
• Increasingly likely to require approval
• Research involving human subjects
• Straightforward, generally uncontroversial
“light touch”
• Find out how approval process works in you HEI

57. Current issues/ Horizon scanning
• Students as Partners?
• Flipped classroom?
• Emerging technologies?
• Research-led teaching?
Plus old chestnuts
• Feedback
• Assessment

58. Developing your own projects
Chance now to reflect on possible publications
• Is there anything you are already doing that
could be turned into a paper?
• What additional things would you need to make
it publishable (e.g. evaluation)?
• Is there anything you could develop next
academic year? Maybe planning over summer?
• Willing to share?
• Collaboration? Use in more than 1 institution
supports case activity is generalisable

59. Other publication
• Blogs?
- about pedagogy?
- as a specific resource?
• Slideshare?
• OERs?
• Conference presentations?
- HEA STEM?
- HEA Annual?
- Institutional T&L events?
- Education section of Learned Society?

60. Conference publication
• Conference presentations sometimes collated into
official “proceedings”, considered relatively low-grade
publication due to lack of peer-review
• Selected talks sometimes included in Special Issue of
journal

61. Community of Practice?
Actual communities:
• Learning and Teaching at institution?
• PedR group in the discipline?
• Conferences
Virtual communities:
• Become active in online conversations
e.g. HEABIO-PEDR list
https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/

62. Summary
• Getting started in Education Research 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

63. Any questions?
E-mail: cjrw2@le.ac.uk
Twitter: cjrw
Slideshare: cjrw2
Delicious: chriswillmott
Blogs: www.bioethicsbytes.wordpress.com
www.biosciencecareers.wordpress.com
www.lefthandedbiochemist.wordpress.com
University of
Leicester