https://doi.org/10.36866/pn.126.43

Professor Louise Robson
School of Biosciences, University of Sheffield, UK

Louise Robson has over 25 years teaching experience. Winner of the Otto Hutter Prize (2017) and a National Teaching Fellowship
(2021), she champions the use of digital technologies in teaching, providing an inclusive learning environment. In 2021 she was promoted to Professor of Digital Innovation in Learning and Teaching.

When I got my first academic position, back in 1996, teaching-only roles were rare, and were typically used to free up research time for other staff. Over the years, universities have started to realise the value of having teaching specialists – individuals that not only teach but also participate in scholarship, leadership and wider engagement activities. As a consequence, teaching roles have gone from being a stop-gap job, to having specific and dedicated career pathways that take an individual from junior lecturer level all the way through to professor. However, successful promotion in teaching and scholarship requires a different approach to the research orientated pathways. In this article I would like to share my experience of promotion to professor in learning and teaching.

The first thing to do is read the promotion documentation as soon as you can. Make a plan (short, medium and long term). Identify what criteria you already meet, and how you will evidence this. Make sure you build your evidence portfolio as you go (it’s not easy to go back to collect evidence). Seek more evidence if you need to. For those areas that you still need to meet, plan how you can achieve them. Talk to your line
manager and ask for support to help you achieve what is needed. Make it known you are open to positions that will help you with, e.g. leadership and wider impact – you will need to have held leadership positions, and demonstrate you have impact and influence across your institution, and often the wider HE sector. Talk to people who have already been promoted, and ask them their top tips. Ask them to look at your application, and take their feedback on board. If at first you don’t succeed, reflect, plan and try again. It took me 3 attempts to get promoted.

Next, identify something you will specialise in. In my case this was digital technologies and their role in enhancing student learning and support. Pick something that you are passionate about, that has the potential to influence the institution and HE sector. Having something you specialise in means you are more likely to be recognised as an expert in that area, and it allows you to build a portfolio of activities that evidence your work. I started by using lecture capture in my modules, and evaluating the impact. I took my scholarship work to internal and external conferences, and this led to my institution asking me to lead on the implementation of lecture capture across the institution, helping me demonstrate leadership and impact in my promotion application. I was able to provide a joined-up narrative in my application that showed I was working at professorial level in this area.

Networking and collaboration are a great way of enabling a wider impact of your work. My championing of lecture capture meant a Sheffield colleague linked me on Twitter with someone who subsequently invited me to collaborate in a cross-institution, multi-discipline paper on lecture capture (Nordman et al., 2020a,b). That paper had a huge impact across the sector, and it was used by other institutions to support staff and students. As part of my promotion application I contacted those institutions and asked for a statement, and several were very happy to provide this, evidencing my impact across the wider HE sector. This collaboration led to another paper in April 2020 around tips for a temporary online pivot (Nordmann et al., 2020c). It helped institutions plan for the 2020/21 academic year, and I could evidence this from e-mails and comments on social media about the paper.

The next key point is to share your scholarship work. You can speak at conferences, but should also consider publishing work in blogs and online magazine articles. Why not consider sharing via the National Teaching Repository. Plus make sure you publicise your talk and work on
social media, linking to your organisation and relevant groups. Participate in HE social media activities, e.g. the LTHE Twitter chat each week can be a great source of ideas and an excellent way to start networking and collaborating. Twitter posts about my work provided some great evidence I could use in my application.

Don’t say yes to all the impact and scholarship opportunities that are presented to you. Make sure that you evaluate what each opportunity is going to do for you. This sounds quite callous (we all want to help others out), but for me I was asked to do so many things I realised that I needed to prioritise what I was doing, to ensure I got the most out of what I did to allow me to evidence my standing in the field. One thing I did do was engage with opportunities at The Physiological Society, sitting on committees and eventually chairing the Education and Outreach Committee. This allowed me to work outside of my institution, and become known across the wider physiology community.

For me, these are the top tips I wish I had known at the start of my journey to becoming a professor, because they would have helped me massively. They are also, of course, tips that apply to anyone considering promotion in learning and teaching.

References

Nordmann E, Küepper-Tetzel CE, Robson L, Phillipson S, Lipan GI, and McGeorge P (2020a). Lecture capture: Practical recommendations for students and instructors. Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology. Online.https://doi.org/10.1037/stl0000190.

Nordmann E, Küepper-Tetzel CE, Robson L, Phillipson S, Lipan GI, and McGeorge P (2020b). Lecture capture: Practical recommendations for students and instructors (pre-publication). Student guide. https://psyarxiv.com/sd7u4/.

Nordmann E, Horlin C, Hutchison J, Murray JA, Robson L, Seery MK et al. (2020c) Ten simple rules for supporting
a temporary online pivot in higher education. PLoS Computational Biology 16(10): e1008242. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1008242.

National Teaching Repository: https://figshare.edgehill.ac.uk/The_National_Teaching_Repository.

LTHE Twitter chat: https://lthechat.com/.