MHS Teaching and Learning

 Firstly I would like to welcome all our students back to the University, as this is the first blog since the start of term.  I hope that you all had a good holiday break. We are all trying to make great changes in the way that you are being taught and I hope that you can use this blog as a method of providing feedback to me and others who are responsible for the teaching that you receive.

We have now got to the time of year that the Operational Performance Review or OPR is carried out.  This is a yearly event when the President and members of the Senior Executive Team review the performance of each Faculty in a meeting with the Dean, Associate Deans, Head of Faculty Administration and Heads of Schools.  Each Faculty is asked to provide fairly extensive documentation on their activities from the last year and their performance is evaluated against the operational and strategic plans.  The meetings are fairly daunting as each person with responsibility is asked questions on their area.  We are then asked to produce an action plan to rectify any problems, in addition to being praised if our performance has been good.

This meeting is due to take place on Monday October 20^th. So how do I feel about it with a week  to go?  I have mixed feelings, I think that over the last year the teaching and learning activities in the Faculty have improved and many of the new management systems that we introduced last year have worked well.  We are also progressing well with the implementation of the Review of teaching and learning.  But…..we do have the problem from the results of the National Student Survey and I imagine that we will be questioned fairly extensively on this.  Nevertheless, we will soon have action plans in place to make the improvements that we clearly need to do and I am confident that this will lead to a better performance next year.  I will report on this in greater detail next week with an honest appraisal of how we did under questioning.

I would also like to draw your attention to the Dental School who are setting a very high standard for each School to follow.  They have now started a podcast, that is produced by Nick Grey and Richard Oliver.  If you want to listen to this, then follow this link. 

http://www.cyberears.com/index.php/Show/audio/5394

While a lot of the “discussion” is dentally focused this provides a great focus for the School and adds to the Collegial atmosphere that they generate. They have also featured on Radio Lancashire, which broadcasts to Lancashire only, so they have not yet made it to the world stage. I am going to be encouraging other Schools to do the same,  I also appreciate that this requires considerable effort but these efforts are paying off for the School. 

This is a fairly short Blog today, as I am busy preparing for the review, next weeks will be far longer.  We are also soon going to start on posts devoted to updating you on the core activities of the Faculty learning and teaching team and interviews with “Faculty figures”