At Northeastern University London, we are a small, fast-moving institution with strong pedagogical passion. We were a new start-up institution not long ago, in 2012, and are building up our institutional structures in an entrepreneurial spirit. We have been increasing our teaching-qualified proportion of faculty at up to 10 percentage points per year, from 54% in 2022 to 87% in 2026. The vast majority of our new Fellowships have been achieved through Advance HE’s Direct Route.
How did we do it? We have two key takeaways:
- Know your own journey; don’t copy others. A slimmed-down, PSF 2023-focused approach without labour-intensive study resources works very well for us.
- Prepare for a change in demographics and keep the approach flexible.
We continue to use these two principles, with regular evidence-driven reflection, even after over 80 successful awards across the Associate Fellow, Fellow and Senior Fellow categories in three years.
Start with your needs: who are you supporting for Fellowships and why?
Efficiency, and respect for candidates’ time and priorities, is one of the pillars of our provision, with the flexibility given for the more reflexively oriented to explore the literature more widely for themselves. Fortunately, the Professional Standards Framework (PSF) allows a range of approaches as successful routes to Fellowship.
We have had extensive conversations about how much support to provide for candidates in our context. Our fast-paced organisational change, and the presence of both the UK and US educational systems in our daily work, often means that up-to-date teaching practice develops in pockets of individual excellence to match the requirements of each student demographic. Therefore, we have not found it necessary to provide extensive reading lists or similar materials to support our programme. Faculty tend to be happy seeking their own focus and materials, and we find this approach also fosters the initiative and creativity inherent in our University strategy.
However, to add extrinsic motivation, we have academic promotion criteria that require a Fellowship at a level appropriate to the career stage, which drives a different type of interest in Fellowship. Against this backdrop, while many faculty and staff enjoy the process as an opportunity for reflection, it can also be a more pragmatic career exercise for some candidates.
Support and materials: perhaps “less is more”?
We use the same “guided-autonomy” approach I have always used with students: generous and structured support in interpreting the requirements and background philosophies (in this case, the PSF and the basics of reflective writing), but otherwise, candidates are free to use whatever cases, literature and ideas speak to them and their interests.
We decided on a three-pronged support system:
- Interactive workshops (September to December);
- Draft review (January to March);
- Fees supported by the University for awards appropriate to colleagues’ career stages.
Ad-hoc 1:1 support is also available as needed, mostly used by Senior Fellow and Principal Fellow candidates.
Fortnightly scheduled sessions encourage conversation, but to maintain an efficiency to our tightly resourced offering, we keep a laser focus on applying the PSF to all discussions.
Got nice feedback from a neurodivergent student on your flexible assessment? Let’s talk about how you can use that for even better experiences for diverse groups of learners (V1) and toward equity of opportunity (V2).
Struggling to fit your course plan into the institutional teaching and learning guidelines? Let’s think about the iterative steps you have taken (K3), how you feel about quality assurance having an impact on your decisions (K5), and how you know it works (D2.3).
Once a candidate is ready for a draft review, we assign a trained reviewer to look through the draft, with the PSF closely in mind. The reviewers are mostly recent Fellows themselves, and their feedback is not only wonderfully encouraging about candidates’ practice, but also detailed and targeted toward achieving the award.
It helps with buy-in if the approach is clearly explained to candidates. Our support isn’t a “how to teach well” package, but a “how to achieve a Fellowship” package that we hope ultimately supports both goals. One participant summarised it as follows: “Since NU London is small and diverse, it was most enlightening to have discussions with educators from a variety of fields, and with a variety of experience levels. It was interesting to argue pros and cons of different methods, and which styles work for different classes, and I genuinely believe this has influenced my practise over the past year. The draft-checking was also extremely useful, since it is clear that the panels have very particular criteria”.
What happens to your scheme in the longer term?
Where Fellowships are voluntary, it is likely that your cohorts will display their own priorities clearly. For us, the initial cohort of candidates in 2022 was made up of passionate educators. They saw the Fellowships as personal development and formal recognition of expertise in teaching, and tended to regard student contact as the most impactful part of their role.
Over time, and now with Fellowship as a requirement for promotion, we have also encountered some more “transactional” perceptions of the awards. This is a positive part of our journey: we have arrived at a laudable proportion of qualified faculty, and the challenge now is maintaining the enthusiasm, perhaps with fewer candidates each year, or candidates with different objectives.
However, the PSF 2023 sets a high bar that motivates deeper approaches to Fellowships. The Framework requires reflection across many dimensions, from the deep motivations for one’s own pedagogical decisions, to discussion of literature or evidence and its explicit impact on one’s personal practice.
It is not likely that superficial writing will result in a successful award, and we infuse this message throughout both the workshops and the draft reviews.
Next steps
Given that 87% of colleagues are now qualified, we expect the annual cohort of new candidates to reduce in size, from a peak of 30 awards in 2025. This brings the challenge of maintaining a cohort experience at each category but also brings positive energy.
For example, so many recent Fellows have volunteered to help with draft reviews that we are now trialing two draft reviewers for each candidate, not only giving candidates a broader perspective, but also helping faculty to network in deep, personal ways across subject and Faculty boundaries. This also supports the succession planning for the scheme, so that the Fellowships provision is not dependent on a few active individuals.
It follows that we never run the programme in exactly the same way two years in a row – an approach that is closely reflective of our institutional character and journey. For future years, we continue to seek to provide positive and career-enhancing experiences for faculty, as described by one participant: “The workshops have made me re-think many aspects of my work as a higher education professional, and enhanced my awareness around a number of issues concerning the impact that I, as a teacher, can have on my learners. A *very* worthwhile experience.”
Marianna Koli, Faculty Director of Social Sciences and Professor in Higher Education and Economics at Northeastern University London.