Passionate about providing exceptional education, Alison believes university is more than excellent teaching and learning. Students are making the transition into adulthood and employment and she is outstanding in equipping them to flourish on this journey through specially created modules and activities. Alison has brought the technique of ‘spaced repetition’ into mainstream Physics classes. She employs a custom-built web-app to provide a personalised ‘practice-plan’ throughout term, reducing students’ tendency to cram before the exam. This has had outstanding success, demonstrating a ‘degree class’ difference in performance across the full ability range, providing support for students who lack confidence to raise questions in class.
In response to the pandemic and the urgent pivot to online learning, Alison co-founded a national discipline network, PHYSICS-LTHE, to share good practice and meet learning objectives in innovative ways. Attracting over 500 staff this network has built a lasting community and provided not only a solution for current times, but inspiration for future transformative pedagogy. Alison leads the Physics curriculum for the Leeds-Southwest Jiaotong University (SWJT) School of Engineering in China, taking her passion for excellent pedagogy to a country where didactic teaching is the norm. She has harnessed the Chinese passion for technology by running online collaborative quizzes, inspiring students to engage in peer-assisted learning.
For her transformative teaching she has been recognised as a Senior Fellow and awarded a prestigious University Teaching Fellowship. Alison has had extensive impact on Higher Education (HE) Physics, as a member of the small team to create the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) Benchmark Statement for Physics, and as a Degree Accreditation Assessor for the Institute of Physics. Her commitment to excellence led Alison to launch an Education Research Group in the School of Physics at Leeds to learn first-hand through her own research and that of her staff and PhD students. Acutely aware of the need to promote student wellbeing, she now leads a consortium of Physics departments across the UK and Ireland to research factors affecting students’ sense of belonging and academic success. This has been recognised beyond Physics and she was awarded a personal ‘Excellence and Innovation’ Fellowship to expand her work to other disciplines.