In September 2024, I started a seven month sabbatical or study leave. I was able to apply for this after so many terms of consecutive teaching. In my case, this was the first time I had stepped away from teaching being my main endeavor for 16 years and it was quite a shock to the system. My plan was to retain my education leadership roles (TEL leader, deputy programme director and CTEL advisor) but have no modules to teach or students dissertations to supervise, meaning I could focus all my time on research projects and PhD student supervision. I am just over half way through this period of study leave now and I wanted to take a moment to reflect on my experiences. I have documented some key insights I gained over the first few months.

Panicking on the approach and on landing!
As I approached study leave I was panicking about getting all my teaching activities done before I was official excused from them. I had timed my study leave to enable me to set up all module websites for the degree (around 50) before I went so that no one had to cover this work. Perhaps unsurprisingly I had taken on too much and the last few weeks felt overwhelming at times. Everything got done, as it always does, and then I took a few weeks to settle into my study leave, starting to draft papers and look at funding applications I wanted to work on. Whilst I thought this might relieve my sense of overwhelm and panic, it just gave rise to a different cause for the panic - what if I could not do this? I have been very fortunate in my education work, I have worked hard and achieved the things I set out to achieve in my teaching, but what if I could not do this in research. After all, I only had seven months, and research papers (well, peer review) and funding applications take a huge amount of time. I would like to say that this panic subsided but it has not gone yet. As small successes started to appear (four small funding applications being successful and a few papers accepted), it has started to reduce but still remains bubbling away under the surface.

Journaling helped imposter syndrome.
I have never been someone who has experienced much imposter syndrome. On reflection I think this is because I have generally focused on things I knew I could do and I have, at times in my career, fought for a place at the table and doing that has given me confidence in my abilities, along with a lot of hard work to develop my skills. However, when I found myself, for the first time in almost two decades, with actual headspace to think about research, I suddenly felt like this might not be something I could really do. There is plenty of evidence to the contrary, but in those moments where I felt imposter syndrome creeping in or I was worrying about slow progress, I kept a journal, completing it at least once a week. I had three sections that I wrote in: 
1. Key tasks I had completed since the last log
2. Gratitude points or successes
3. Things I need to park and forget about

The act of writing down what I had done made me realise I was progressing a lot more than I was giving myself credit for. It also reminded me how grateful I was for the time away from teaching to think about research and say yes to opportunities that previously I would have had to turn down. I still have lots of applications and projects to complete before my study leave finishes but I feel more confident the time will not have been wasted now and I am already wondering if I can keep this journaling up when I return to teaching.

Teaching is great...
So this one may not be a surprise but taking time away from teaching has reminded me how much I love it. I love the creative process of designing teaching in the first place. I love actually delivering lectures and small group teaching. I am also someone that quite likes marking too. In fact there is very little about actual teaching that I don't like. 

but administration and bureaucracy breaks us.
I am missing teaching but I am not missing all the associated activities like timetabling, dealing with extension requests, academic conduct discussions and staffing debates. I know that all these come with the joy of teaching; they are unavoidable but they are also an absolute time sink and require a lot of effort for very little reward. There must be ways to reduce this burden and allow staff to focus on the actual teaching (answers on a postcard please).

A change really is as good as a rest.
So far on my study leave I have not worked less. I have worked more outside of the office which has given me more flexibility but my partner still often needs to come and fish me out my study late at night to ensure some semblance of non-work time in my day. The culture of overworking academia is engrained within me but it is also that I genuinely want to be working. I am excited by what I am working on. Of course, I have always been excited by research - you cannot do it if you are not excited by it, but so often that excitement has been tempered by, quite honestly, administrative exhaustion. When I have been working late previous it has been simply because I could not get through the workload if not.

The next step is going to be adjusting to a return to teaching and what challenges that brings. 

Since March I have been working at home, as has most of the UK in the Covid-19 pandemic.  Reading this title you may be wondering if I have taken leave of my senses to say long live the pandemic, but I am hopeful I have not (although I admit I have been talking to my dog more than usual and teaching my parents to Skype nearly finished me off). Of course, I do not mean the pandemic should continue but I do think some of the effects of the pandemic on Higher Education could be positive and here are my thoughts on the top two benefits.

Recognition that online learning is still learning
For many years, the sector has considered online or distance learning to be the runt of the educational litter. There has been an implicit (and often explicit) view that it is a cheap, easy alternative to face to face education. The pandemic has meant that many universities have been transported into the world of online learning overnight. Academics and professional services alike have been thrown in at the deep end - everyone has flapped around trying to keep their heads above water and, although many have coped admirably, online learning doesn't look so easy now. 

Good online teaching and learning is hard to design, deliver and excel in - arguably more so than face to face because you cannot rely on synchronous communication and that all important feedback in the lecture theatre or seminar from the students' facial expressions. No university in the UK, or the world, does this better than the experts at the Open University (although most topical debates on the pandemic and online learning have chosen to ignore them in favour of input from the Russell Group). The OU uses careful design and meticulous planning to produce their courses and the quality is outstanding. The OU model won't work for many universities but what it teaches us is that excellence can be achieved in this mode of learning, and whilst it should be aspired to, it isn't easy or a second class citizen.

We clearly cannot achieve excellence in online teaching and learning in a reactionary situation like this. Not only does it cost a lot of money to do what the OU do but it takes an infrastructure most universities do not have and expertise that is not always there. That is not to say other universities won't do a great job here - I am confident we will at King's College in the Psychology Department - but it is important to recognise that this pandemic is the start of the journey, not the end.

So now we have been forced to open our eyes to the potential of online learning we need to start to reflect more carefully on what it means to teach and learn in all modes and make sure we identify our weaknesses and develop ourselves until we can do better. This inevitably requires investment and universities are in financial difficulties, as are many sectors at this time, but we have a moral responsibility as educators to deliver a quality education and in this strange new world that includes online education. The pandemic is the springboard but I hope HE can now finally see online learning for what it is and play the long game.

Autonomous learners
My dissertation was drafted in full one month before the deadline, which was luck more than judgement, but it turned out to be a blessing because the day I gave a draft to my supervisor, my Dad had heart attack and I left university to travel home. Ever since then I have set deadlines ahead of real deadlines and organised my life like a military operation because, well, you never know what is round the corner. When I started working the OU years ago as a tutor I remember being so impressed at how the students organised themselves, with nothing but an A3 study planner, they seemed to be entirely independent - it was inspirational to observe. I have seen some equally impressive scheduling from King's students from time to time as well but for many the structure of face to face education reduces the need for students to show the same level of autonomy over their learning. They look at a timetable and turn up or they are asked a question in a seminar and that drives them  to look into something more. Online learning takes that enforced schedule away for many and reduces the natural interactions that occur during teaching to spur you on.  It puts the student back in charge of their learning and this is no bad thing. I hope that those students who have experienced this come out of it richer - more in charge of their learning, owning it more. This will help them in any return to face to face teaching but it will also be a useful skill to take into the working world.

This week I have been reading an interesting article about teacher agency. The article by Priestley et al. (2014) defines agency as  "an emergent phenomenon, something that occurs or is achieved within continually shifting contexts over time, and with orientations towards past, future and present which differ within each and every instance of agency achieved". They point out that agency contains three components or dimensions:
1. Iterational - dependent on the individuals professional and personal history.
2. Projective - forward facing i.e. about achieving something in the short or long term future.
3. Practical-evaluative - within a cultural, structural and social context that must be considered when necessary judgements are made.

The authors of the paper seem to be basing much of their ideas around school teachers rather than those found in Higher Education. They described the current context of education as one where agency cannot always been achieved because of constrained curriculum and policies. They suggest that even where the tide has turned and teachers have more room to move in terms of curriculum, they are in a context which constrains them by the backdoor, for example, through  school inspections.  This description chimed with the experiences my mother shared during her almost 40 year teaching career in primary and secondary schools, but what about Higher Education?

Well for a while, I found myself feeling a little bit smug about it. I felt that no one really dictated my curriculum to me, I was free to decide what topics I taught and in what order and largely to what depth, provided they sat within the framework dictated (15 or 30 credit points). The framework provided me with a lose structure and I was quite happy to get creative within that space. I felt I had the ability to achieve agency in that space. But then over the period of few days a few things made me realise that this agency-permitting perception was more of a smoke screen.

The first incident was a chance conversation in the corridor about the student numbers of the degree programme that I teach on at King's College London. This programme did not exist in 2015 when I started there. We had a first graduates this summer. The programme has been hugely successful, in no small part due to a very dedicated teaching team having the flexibility of starting from scratch to build an effective degree which did very in the NSS and supported the universities TEF case. We started with around 100 students per year and our fourth intake includes nearly 180. The number mentioned in this conversation was 300. I have given up pointing out the issues with increasing numbers without resource and how unless increases are managed well, quantity can very easily damage quality. But this made me think about my agency - I cannot possibly continue with the assessment strategy and practice I have won awards for with 300 students. I cannot, for example, even with a great team of markers, turn around 600 assignments in 4 weeks (the College assessment policy). Increasing student numbers can constrain us unless resource is properly given.

The second incident relates to the Open University where I have been a tutor for almost 14 years. In that period the OU has undergone many changes, some of which I think were brilliant for the students (e.g. electronic submission of assignments and online alternatives for tutorials), whilst others were a loss (e.g. scrapping summer schools). The latest targets that the university has set mean that the module team running a module I teach on are constantly under pressure to get more students to pass. This is a demanding final year module. The university wants 75% to pass - not unreasonable you might think and in a conventional setting I would agree, but where a student can do any module they like, sometimes having never studied a topic before and they can do so whilst working full-time, raising a family and studying another two modules as well, that target becomes pretty optimistic. Even more so when you realise only 62% of students reach the exam on the module.  Now I admit to having a slight bias here because I designed the module and the assessment originally and no one likes to see their 'baby' discarded. But I have felt this about other modules where I have little personal interest so I don't think my biases fully explain how I feel about this. The module team responses to tutors are thorough and considered but they are along the lines of ''we have no choice, we have to do this to get to the targets or at least look like we are trying. I can sympathise with this and I think targets like this, along with module evaluations, NSS an TEF are all factors which can constrain teacher agency in higher education.

Reflecting on these two examples (and there are many more I could give), I feel less smug about teaching in Higher Education rather than schools now. I feel we are just as restrained by our context as school teachers may be fixed curriculum. 

I think teacher agency is important in and of itself because it can bring, for example, innovative education and contribute to a highly effective community of practice. But I also think that teachers who lack agency will not be able to provide the quality education students deserve because they will become puppets on the stage rather than genuine actors. I have no idea how we stop that happening though.