Teaching excellence has been at the forefront of policy worldwide (O’Leary & Savage, 2020). In the UK, the Teaching Excellence Framework, ranking tables and scrutiny from the Office for Students, alongside the continual lens on student fees and post-pandemic student experiences, place quality assurance (QA) and quality enhancement (QE) as key drivers (Fletcher, 2018). The continuous conundrum of how we measure teaching quality and define teaching excellence remains on the tip of many tongues. Senior managers, governors and the sector want reassurance via metrics, but these may not truly reflect teaching excellence or encourage positive staff wellbeing.
To improve staff engagement with peer observation of teaching, Hartpury University moved away from an evaluative model towards creating a coaching model, the Teaching Development Scheme (TDS). As the scheme has evolved over seven years, it has tried to do both QA (via a threshold pass) and QE (via a coaching approach), but staff have suggested they couldn’t fully trust the developmental nature if judgement could still be an outcome. To truly deliver a coaching model we need to be able to rely on alternative, existing QA mechanisms to satisfy governance.
To enhance coaching skills in the scheme, 17 mentors from the TDS were supported through a three-month leadership and coaching qualification. Mentors undertook self-regulated online study, weekly catch-ups, launch and culmination events to create a sense of community, share experiences and reflections, and engage in coaching conversations. We undertook a longitudinal, mixed methods study to evaluate and explore the mentors’ experiences of the staff development and their perceptions after one year. This involved the use of interviews pre and one year post completion of the continuing professional development (CPD), content analysis of the online discussion and a pre-post questionnaire. Current findings highlight four questions we feel institutions and practitioners could explore.
