Effective practice in setting up and implementing staff-student partnerships: lesson learnt from the Home : Annual Conference 2014

Effective practice in setting up and implementing staff-student partnerships: lesson learnt from the

Public Group Active 8 years ago

Tue, Sep 2 2014, 11:35am – 12:35pm

Description

The Change Agent’s Network (CAN – http://changeagentsnetwork.co.uk/), funded by Jisc and supported by the HEA, HEFCE, QAA and NUS, is a network of students and staff working on curriculum enhancement and innovation projects. Key CAN activities include facilitation of networking and peer support; development of an accreditation framework for students as change agents; formation of a new Journal of Educational Innovation, Partnership and Change and reviewing and evaluating current and past institutional projects relating to student-staff partnerships and students as change agents. This has led to the formation of a range of resources and effective practice guides for institutions wishing to set up and implement staff-student partnerships, including case studies, effective practice points/top tips, adatabase of sector resources and a “Student Partnerships Toolkit” to support institutions in change processes associated with student partnership initiatives, based on the University of Ulster’s Viewpoints change framework.

The presentation will commence with a description of the results of the review and evaluation of current and past institutional student-staff partnership initiatives (funded by Jisc, HEA, QAA and HEFCE), under four key themes: (1) Partnership set-up; (2) Partnership implementation; (3) Capabilities, development and accreditation and (4) Evaluation, impact & sustainability. It will draw out effective practice in each of these four areas with links to case studies and evaluation reports. The presentation will also reflect on feedback from institutions which have used the resources to set-up student-staff partnerships.

Participants will then break into 4-5 groups to interactively explore the practice points/top tips in more depth using the “Student Partnerships Toolkit” including sets of “Viewpoints” cards. Each of these cards contains a single effective practice point plus top tips for implementing it – there is also a QR code which links to an associated web-page for each card which provides links and resources that support the specific practice point. Each group will be facilitated in discussion and will aim to both explore the practice areas and draw out experiences, issues, challenges and ideas from the participants, helping to further build knowledge around the practice points.

The final part of the session will be in plenary and facilitators will be asked to report back key new ideas, issues, challenges and barriers/enablers for implementing student-staff partnerships. A Padlet wall will be created to allow participants to add feedback electronically.

The timings for the session will be as follows:

1) Initial presentation (15 mins)

2) Group interaction using the Viewpoints cards (35 mins)

3) Plenary reflect and review (10mins)

Participants will benefit through:

a) learning about sector effective practice in setting up and implementing student-staff partnerships for curriculum enhancement and innovation

b) sharing ideas, issues and challenges in student-staff partnership initiatives with other participants

c) learning how to use the “Student Partnership Toolkit” to help implement such initiatives in their own institutions and join the CAN community of practice

Participants will be able to access (and download) all the resources described and used in the workshop from the CAN web-site (http://changeagentsnetwork.co.uk/).