The University’s Central Teaching Laboratory has been nominated a finalist for Higher Education Academy’s (HEA) Collaborative Awards for Teaching Excellence (CATE).
The new CATE award, being piloted this year, recognises teaching excellence by teams at higher education providers. The collaborative award reflects the key role that teamwork has in promoting student success through learning and teaching.
The CTL comprises Geologist Dr Elisabeth Rushworth with scholarship interests in internationalisation and interdisciplinary team work, Dr Helen Vaughan, a physicist with scholarship interests in embedding employability skills through in-curriculum and co-curricular learning experience and Dr Catherine Cropper, a chemist who specialises in digital laboratories and engaging parents and children in STEM.
Impact across the University
HEA judged the CTL to have had impact on departments across the university, supporting new pedagogies in large group teaching, improved delivery of employability skills and the introduction of cross disciplinary modules and multi-disciplinary dissertation projects.
Students have had the opportunity to work with peers from other disciplines allowing them to develop the necessary skills to find meaningful employment in the modern STEM world.
Together they have developed and embedded the collaborative “Educational Broker Model” at Faculty level. As educational brokers they work with academic and technical staff in discipline specific departments to develop and support teaching and learning in CTL.
The criteria for the CATE award are: ‘excellent practice’, teamwork, and the team’s dissemination plan. Teams will need to have shown direct student involvement in their work and excellent practice in relation to one of the following themes: Assessment and feedback; Student retention; Employability; Staff development; Students as partners or technology and social media.
Fifteen institutions, including the University of Liverpool, have been shortlisted for the award. Six of these institutions will be awarded grants of £15,000 to disseminate their learning, and these will be announced at the formal celebration event to be held at the Merchant Taylors’ Hall, London, in late January 2017.
Further information
Full team profiles are available here. For further information on the Collaborative Awards for Teaching Excellence go to: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/cate-2016