Student Led-Teaching Awards Resources

Thursday 27-01-2022 - 14:42

It’s awards season again! So, we’re sharing 8 key resources from TSEP for setting up and promoting your Student Led-Teaching Awards (SLTAs) as well as some examples.

Resource 1: Building Partnerships and Winning Support

Partnership working brings together a range of organisations or groups to work together to achieve a common vision. There are many different types of partnerships, and many different reasons that you might want to develop them in order to support your work on SLTAs. Possible benefits include providing opportunities to: pool resources; develop skills and expertise; improve service delivery; achieve greater impact of desired outcomes; increase awareness; widen networks; share risks; and secure additional funding.

Resource 2: Establishing Project Aims & Objectives

Once you’ve successfully made your case for running SLTAs, it’s time to enter the planning stage. You’ll need to think about who you need to be involved in running your award scheme; what your resources are; and most importantly, what you want to achieve.

Resource 3: Project Planning

Once you’ve established your aims and objectives for your SLTA team, it’s time to get planning. Many people get hung up on project planning. Some say they don’t have the time to prepare one. Others think they are unnecessary. Some assume a project plan has to be a complex document; one that accounts for every minute of every day and so are put off creating one. This section will run through the purpose of having a project plan, what a simple project plan consists of and break down each element so that it is easily understood. To easily put project planning into practice see the project plan template in the appendix to edit and adapt and put into practice locally

Resource 4: Awards Categories & Criteria

There are a huge variety of SLTA schemes across the UK, making it difficult to make generalisations about their practice, but in order to give a snapshot students’ unions can, in some cases, receive in excess of 500 nominations and as low around 200 nominations and the quantity of award categories can run from 1 to 14. Find out more in this sections, click the picture to open.

Resource 5: Nominations

There are various considerations to make when deciding how you will collect your nominations such as if you collect nominations through online platforms or by paper ballot, if you decide to rely heavily on online communication or put what resource you have into getting students on-board and voting through face-to-face contact.

Resource 6: Communication & Promotion

When planning your awards and drafting your project plan you will also decide how to most effectively promote the awards widely and ensure the number of nominations is satisfactory. There are a variety of methods you can use to publicise and promote your awards but ensure you plan this enough in advance as your union calendar may already be pretty busy in the build-up to the awards (e.g. with NSS or elections).

Resource 7: Analysing your Data

Your student-led teaching awards grant you access to a wealth of high quality data about what your students perceive to be excellent teaching practice. The stacks of nomination forms (or the massive database if you use online submission) can be very daunting, particularly if you have limited experience of conducting research, or very little time and resource, but there are ways to make it more manageable.

Resource 8: Celebrating & Enhancing Teaching Excellence

For several years now, there has been increasing scope and interest in SLTA data being used within teaching and learning enhancement activities. TSEP set out in early 2016 to better understand this area and in order to do this reached out to those with well-established SLTA and SLA schemes to collect case studies and contribute at a workshop day help with 14 members of staff from across the sector both from Students’ Unions and institutions.