Using a writing partnership with a peer to support your HEA Fellowship submission

Can you explain briefly what your project is/was about?

Gaining recognition aligned to the UK Professional Standards Framework is an important achievement for academic staff, but maintaining the motivation to complete a claim, when managing workload and working at distance, can be problematic. Working in peer partnerships has proved to be one way of maintaining motivation and engaging in mutual encouragement at difficult times, or to overcome hurdles. As a means of increasing the progression rates of staff, this project sought to identify a way to encourage submission by pairing staff into accountability partnerships to encourage writing and engagement, and to measure the success of this approach.

What was your inspiration or motivation for doing this project?

A colleague and I had struggled to get through our HEA Associate Fellow and Fellow applications on more than one occasion, we agreed that working together would benefit us as we could support each other through the process. We acted as accountability partners for one another and used writing sessions to plan, outline, write, code, and check our own and each other’s submissions, committing to meet on a regular basis which was important to maintain momentum and accountability, especially during busy work periods. As much of this time was during the pandemic, there was very little we could do to meet in person, so sessions were run online and at a distance.  Working in this way allowed us to quickly learn the language of the UKPSF and develop much stronger submissions than we had previously achieved, not least because they were completed! We achieved Senior Fellowships using our method and overcame our workload and the pressures of work and home life to achieve this goal.

Having achieved recognition, we wanted to help our colleagues to do the same. We believed that our approach could help colleagues to achieve recognition, and we developed a pilot study to gather more evidence of the effectiveness of writing accountability partnerships.

How did you carry out the project?

Over three cohorts, twenty participants were matched into pairs and attended initial training in writing sprints, where claimants meet virtually and write for 20 minutes, then discuss any problems they have encountered (similar to the Pomodoro method).

This project adopted a mixed methods approach. Participants completed a survey at the midpoint of the project, which collected both quantitative and qualitative data. The outcomes of these surveys were used to inform a schedule for interviews with participants for both structured questions and probing questions.

The subsequent eleven interviews were conducted individually by members of the project team for any participant willing to take place. These interviews were recorded, transcribed and then thematically analysed.

What were the key things you learnt from it?

The themes emerging from the analysis included motivations to participate in the trial which mainly stemmed from previous unsuccessful attempts at gaining recognition and receiving feedback. There were also themes on the benefits and challenges of the trial. There were recommendations for working more in physical presence of writing partners rather than only online, and improved pair matching. The surprising theme was the impact of this approach beyond the trial. Participants reported adopting the structure of the trial to help with student learning and using the structure in their own practice for both teaching and research. Some participants used the trial structure for writing doctoral theses, research papers, book chapters and notes and slides for taught sessions.

Will you be following up on the project in any way?

This project was run as a pilot for a support mechanism that will hopefully be offered to the applicants in FASS to help achieve the aim of 100% HEA accreditation. Other support exists and this is not designed to replace that, but to supplement it and support those for whom existing structures and mechanisms are not enough. We are considering the wider impact this could have on the academic community both for accreditation purposes and also for other academic writing.

For further details please contact: Malik Refaat (PI), Carina Bossu and Paige Cuffe