Blessed and Humbled: a celebration

A little over a month ago, just before 10 am on a decidedly damp day, my wife and I arrived at the venue for a one-day conference and evening meal. There was nothing unusual about the subject matter in terms of my being there: it was on ‘Partnerships in multidisciplinary studies of disordered materials and biomaterials’ – right at the core of my ‘nomadic’ scientific interests, which I’ve written about often (e.g. here and here). No, the profound difference here, and what rendered the conference unique, was that it had been organised by a friend and ex-colleague (Gavin Mountjoy) specifically as a means of “celebrating the scientific career of [yours truly] at his retirement”. What follows is a brief personal reflection on the day.

The formalities of registration and the ubiquity of accessing Wi-Fi at a modern conference are thankfully followed by …

…the first chance for all of us to meet, greet and start the process of catching up over a drink and some biscuits.

I am, and will remain, immensely grateful to Gavin for coming up with the idea and translating it into reality; it really was very kind of him, and given how busy I know him to be I dread to think how many hours he must have spent on it. However, the closer I got to the day itself the more trepidation there was alongside the enthusiasm for catching up with past members of my research team and with friends and research partners throughout my career. As one of the former members of my team noted in the emailed reply to Gavin’s invitation, which I got to see afterwards, and in her typically discerning fashion: “That's a long day for him to be the centre of attention, he may do some grumbling!” As is so often the case, no sooner had I collected my copy of the timetable and my name badge – yes, amusing in the circumstances – than the nerves disappeared and I found myself enjoying again the ebb and flow of coffee-fuelled, science-oriented conversation. What struck me almost immediately was the spread in those able to be present: 

° in terms of scientific background, with a fairly wide range of the sciences represented together with a few who’d not really call themselves scientists at all;
° geographically in that they were folk there not only from all over the UK but also from The Netherlands, Japan and as far afield as Beijing in China (an ex-postdoc in my team who’d flown over just for this event – with a gift to enhance my tea drinking life!);
° with regard to their various pathways in life, with some from my old research team having stayed in science and others moving into new fields of endeavour. It was an especial pleasure to meet spouses/partners for the first time, and in one case their lovely six-month old baby;
° and in terms of time. The latter, time, gave some unexpected and delightful twists. For instance, it was lovely to be able to introduce people to each other who, simply because they’d worked with me at different stages in my three decades as an academic research scientist, had never before met. Hearing recent co-workers describe me as, in essence, calm, wise and measured – which was very flattering – and then folk from the earlier days of my research team pointing out that this didn’t quite match their memories was glorious. Thus, although it was a little frustrating to have insufficient time to spend with each and every one of these wonderful people, there was something rather special that emerged from the conversations within small groups. After all, that’s the way we’d often spent the long hours waiting for data to come in (or the x-ray or neutron source to be repaired and be switched back on); science can be a very social pursuit (see also here). If nothing else, this offered evidence of change and perhaps of growth. If so, that’s a good thing I think; either way, it was very amusing. 

The simple pleasure of spending time with people ought never to be under-estimated; this is as true for scientists as for anyone else.

The talks, delivered by people I admire, trust and like, included much on the area of work I have written about before (e.g. here, here and here). One of the nice things about the topics covered, speaking for myself you understand, was that research was admixed with thoughts on science ethics and philosophy, with the need to communicate our work effectively through engagement with diverse audiences, and with more than a little time spent on the importance of supporting what one might call the community of scientists. It was good to hear about research developments since my departure from the scene and I took great pleasure in the thought that these kind folk still had before them so much of what I have been privileged to enjoy of the excitement of discovery and the camaraderie that can accompany it. Interestingly, my blog posts were cited far more than I would have anticipated; I found this a little curious, but also gratifying. However, out of all these riches I took away as a key point, and one I hope is diffused throughout my blog: it’s people, real people, who do science. Indeed, the speaker I have known for the longest time, since the early ’80s in fact, said as much and I’m grateful to him for encapsulating the thought so well.

The talks were a real pleasure to listen to (this, left, on synchrotron x-ray methods by Silvia Ramos, late of the Diamond Light Source); Julian Jones asked me to pose for a picture with him before the talks got underway – and then edited it into his slides on bioactive glasses, along with a cute Simpson-esque image to mark our meeting in 2002.

It is inevitable, perhaps natural, to hear decisions, events and outcomes described through the lens of post hoc rationalisation. There is a risk that history gets re-written. What may seem, looking back, to have been associated with a logical progression of thought and planning might in truth owe more to serendipity and ‘trial and error’, and to have relied upon individuals and the team as a whole being able to discern and sift the useful from the rest. Having said that, we can learn from the generic lessons revealed through hindsight – and we should value them accordingly. Apart from the central importance of the fact that it is people who do science, I also believe that one needs to be as open and generous with one’s co-workers as one is with ideas; sharing matters. Moreover, honesty and integrity are of course ideals always worth striving for – in professional life as elsewhere. Out of these things come the ethos of a research team, and of the partnerships and wider community in which it operates. However well or poorly I have learned or lived up to these tenets myself, I count myself as fortunate to have worked alongside many who themselves have shown a deep appreciation of their worth. My own contribution and legacy, whatever that is judged to be, will disperse and diffuse – as it must: I am moving on to new things, content in the knowledge that excellent people continue the work. 

One of many images captured by Gavin or my wife during the day: this one was taken after the dinner and captures the group who worked so well together during about 15 years of research on bioactive glasses (see here). The four ‘principal investigators’ are central to the front row – Julian Jones, Mark Smith, me and Jonathan Knowles; we were once described in connection with one of our funding bids as The Dream Team: a label that’s hard to forget.

And this brings me to the title of my post … at the end of the meeting, prior to the entirely enjoyable evening meal that was still to come, I was given the chance to say a few words. I had prepared nothing; my hope was that the events of the day would put words into my mouth. What came out as my heartfelt thanks to everyone was pinned to the two words ‘blessed’ and ‘humbled’: blessed to have been able to get to know and to work alongside some utterly amazing people, and humbled that they had given of their time (and money) to participate in this day of celebration in my honour. Those same two words still hold true as I complete this reflection. A day of celebration? Yes, certainly; but to my mind it was a day that celebrated us all, and did so through the relationships that bind us together across the globe, through time and in umpteen other ways.

Taken by Gavin, the event's originator and organiser, this image captures many of those who participated.

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I recently completed a series of posts in which I reflect on a few themes associated with my life and career as a research scientist and university academic; these may be found at:

1) The Girt Pike – beginnings and transitions.
2) Do Labels Last a Lifetime? – people and other influences.
3) Nomadic Research: random walk or purposeful journey? – a timeline in research.
4) Tools of the Trade – instruments and gadgets.
5) Suitcase Science: travelling in hope – tales from a travelling scientist.
6) Why so many? – gender balance in the research team
7) Committees: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly – making things work: discussion, consensus and decision?
8) Large-scale Facilities for Small-scale Science – the big ‘toys’ I’ve helped to build and to nurture
9a) Experiments in Teaching and Learning – teaching at a university (part 1)

9b) Flipping Lectures – teaching at a university (part 2)

Flipping Lectures

(Reflections on a life in science: #9b teaching at a university)

This is the second instalment of my end-of-career reflection on undergraduate teaching and learning – or, rather, on a few of the ‘experiments’ I undertook in that context.

Final year projects are often regarded as the highlight of a student’s time with us and I was fortunate in having a leading role in defining their ethos. They offer the scope for genuinely open-ended high-level research, albeit necessarily time-limited and confined to areas in which there’s a suitable academic guide. Although still applicable to the minority of students, it has always encouraged me to see how many of them achieve enough work of a high enough standard to find its way into co-authored research journal papers. For the four-year masters-level degree programme, wherein the project constituted half of the final year and was therefore a ‘big deal’, a particular innovation was the introduction of ‘role play’ into their summative talk. I set the whole thing up as though it was a research conference: abstract booklet, tight timetable … and the pièce de la résistance: bringing someone in to film the whole thing and then using the footage to provide feedback. From its inception, this conference model had the effect of encouraging students to raise their game. One of the most common student feedback comments established that this was simultaneously the scariest and also the most exhilarating part of the whole exercise. Even now, a decade or so later and after successive generations of our external examiners have praised the practice, my old department remains almost unique in offering the experience.

Getting a pat on the back is usually fun, and my one-and-only entry into the Faculty awards process yielded sufficient prize money to purchase the camcorder, microphones and other kit needed to consolidate the longer-term use of video-recording as a teaching and learning tool. However, whilst I gladly left all that kit behind me when I retired, I made sure to bring home the mugs presented to me in the annual awards made on the basis of student nominations.

In some senses however, the role-play idea only really took flight in the context of the group projects undertaken by our three-year BSc students. Groups of six or so students would each settle on a topic to work on and then elect a Project Manager who would ‘pitch’ the idea to me – in my role as CEO you understand. Once we’d agreed the overall scope of the work they would define their objectives in writing, including work allocation frameworks, a rational Gantt Chart and so on. From that point onward I would interact only with the Managers (- unless something went horrendously wrong, which was exceptionally rare); progress was monitored via the minutes from their weekly meetings. Key to embedding this role play was to convey the idea that the group succeeded, or didn’t, as a group: at assessment, marks were given to the group rather than to the individual (- again, with rarely-invoked safeguards). Furthermore, peer assessment played a part; for instance, a group’s presentation at the end of the whole thing – also recorded for feedback by the way, subject to all the appropriate ethical permissions – was evaluated by the other groups. There was an unmistakable ‘buzz’ to these group projects. A fairly natural development became possible about three years ago when an admirable colleague (George Dobre) secured pump-priming funds from the Institute of Physics to create links between our students and industry and other external organisations. The whole group project concept is now set within joint work with a variety of places ranging from the aerospace industry to the NHS and local museums.

The group projects also provide me with my final example, which deals with the matter of teachers learning from their students. A group had decided to work around the topic of science in movies, and they expanded on this by designing a demonstration experiment projectile motion to illustrate one particularly poor bit of ‘Hollywood physics’. They trialed their experiment in a local school and with their first-year peers, and got some very positive feedback. I was so taken with what they achieved that I began to incorporate and develop the use of movie clips, snippets from newspapers etc. in my own teaching in order to try to spark discussion and analytical appraisal. Within a year I was extolling its virtues at teaching conferences. Somehow, a journalist in the USA heard about it and wanted to incorporate the idea in an article he was writing. Thankfully, the student group’s project manager was still around, by then as a postgraduate research student, and we jointly participated in a 45-minute ’phone interview with the journalist. The story made the front cover of the magazine, which was nice – but the bigger story remains centred on the long-term contribution made by my students on the way I presented physics to their succeeding generations. Such fun.

Science News was, and I believe still is, an American science magazine published by the Society of Science and the Public. The group project manager whose team kicked this whole thing off contributed hugely to the interview; she is now a lecturer in physics herself (here).

My innovative swansong was a move away from the more conventional lecture, which was an experiment unnervingly described as ‘brave’ by several colleagues. Having made audio recordings of my lectures for several years so that students could download them for revision (and perhaps for other good-natured purposes - see YouTube clip here) it was a natural step to volunteer to join the small team spending a year testing out the proposed new system for video-recording lectures. The trial went well; it was relatively easy for the lecturer to use once we’d ironed out the bugs, and my students loved it. Interestingly, the fear that students would simply not attend lectures, in favour of simply watching online, never materialised: evidently, the ‘live show’ is still worth getting up for. With a couple of years of video-recorded lectures in the digital bank, a tempting new experiment became feasible: FLIPped lectures. This is an approach which, in essence, has students study the next bit of the syllabus at their convenience in advance of the timetabled ‘lecture’ slot, and then use the face-to-face time they have with the lecturer to explore aspects they couldn’t fully understand, work through related problem-solving exercises and so on. My students had been asking for more supported/guided problem-solving work for quite a while, but the traditional timetable simply couldn’t accommodate extra sessions; FLIPping the lectures not only made this possible, but re-enforced the value of personal study and of studying alongside friends. There was additional support via small-group Peer Mentoring sessions (here) for those who wished to avail themselves of it. This was a scheme I introduced into the department a few years earlier within which, after some training, more experienced students held learning support drop-in sessions for their early-years peers. As for any novel approach, and arguably especially for a scheme that dropped altogether the teaching philosophy endemic to most of their education hitherto, there were a few sceptical students. However, on the whole the feedback was overwhelmingly positive; this was underlined by the end-of-year results: for the first time, as far as I can recall, absolutely no-one failed the FLIPped module. I’m delighted to say that a handful of my ex-colleagues are taking this approach forward within their own teaching; it’s good to know that there is a positive legacy.

This screenshot from my university’s e-learning web pages reveals a further legacy in that a few minutes from one of my own lecture recordings is still used to demonstrate the software to aspiring lecturers; quite flattering really.

I have studiously stayed away from any attempt at a review or appraisal of the more generic aspects of teaching and learning developments during my career: it’s a huge topic and would need far more space than is practicable this pair of blog posts. It is perhaps sufficient to note that I began teaching using a very conventional ‘chalk & talk’ approach – almost unaltered since before I was a student in the early ’70s – within which the technology was limited to the occasional use of an overhead projector. Students took handwritten notes; there were almost no handouts and neither were copies of the notes or other support material available on the internet (which simply wasn’t available then, any more than PCs were). However, as I pointed out in the first instalment of this two-part reflection, as ICT capability and capacity developed so it became possible to explore and exploit its potential, and by the time I retired video-enabled FLIPped approaches could readily be realised – along with a fast-emerging use of smartphones and …


Earlier posts in this series:
1) The Girt Pike – beginnings and transitions.
2) Do Labels Last a Lifetime? – people and other influences.
3) Nomadic Research: random walk or purposeful journey? – a timeline in research.
4) Tools of the Trade – instruments and gadgets.
5) Suitcase Science: travelling in hope – tales from a travelling scientist.
6) Why so many? – gender balance in the research team
7) Committees: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly – making things work: discussion, consensus and decision?
8) Large-scale Facilities for Small-scale Science – the big ‘toys’ I’ve helped to build and to nurture
9a) Experiments in Teaching and Learning – teaching at a university (part 1)

Experiments in Teaching and Learning

(Reflections on a life in science: #9a teaching at a university)

More than six months ago I promised a colleague that I would record a few reflections on my three-decade academic career. With this post I hope to complete what was originally envisaged as three or four posts, but which has evidently grown to nine. Given that my work with undergraduate students has been such a major part of my career, it’s perhaps not too surprising that this turned out to be a longer post than the average post, much longer. One post has therefore become two, with the prosaic sub-headings 9a and 9b …

Teaching (and learning) has always had a special place in both my heart: from the school teachers who inspired me (here), and despite those who did not, through to the final university lecture I delivered earlier this year, and to my continuing outreach and public engagement activities (pick almost any of my posts, e.g. here). There must be a focus however, and in the context of this post I intend to concentrate on my teaching as a university lecturer – one of the many aspects of my job that I loved. I’ll try to highlight a few examples of the sort of innovation (experimentation, or 'playing' in other words) that I have stumbled upon during my three decades as an apprentice to several masters, including my students. In one sense, nothing has changed: after all, the fundamentals of Physics at the undergraduate level are largely the same now as they were at the start of my career. There have been changes to the syllabus of course. These are usually introduced to cull material considered as ‘redundant’ in order to provide ‘space’ for new topics – and skills – as their perceived importance emerges, or to rework the way in which the material is handled. Some of the more noticeable changes are arguably those associated with modes of delivery and of study. In part, although not central in my opinion, this is driven by a change in the culture of the profession. One might contrast my first lecture, when I had been thrown in at the proverbial ‘deep end’ a couple of weeks after taking up my junior lectureship, to the more overtly constrained nature of today’s three-year probationary period in which extensive training, monitoring and mentoring support is provided within a ‘lightened’ workload. This supportive environment is potentially of significant benefit; it was not, however, a part of my own experience. Thus, my motivation owes almost nothing to formal training programmes but rather a lot to a cocktail of inspirational colleagues, a desire always to be doing something new, and for want of a better description, a fear of being seen to do a bad job. In other words I pick up on interesting ideas, I don’t like intellectual stagnation and I had a need to battle ‘Imposter Syndrome’. It is also important to note the fact that, irrespective of one’s motivation, much of this change has been technology-enabled in one way or another.

The manifestations of these driving forces need not be confined to the lecture theatre or teaching laboratory of course. Indeed, the very first memory I have of raising the eyebrows of more ‘traditionalist’ colleagues was when I introduced Earl Grey tea and ‘proper coffee’ into my weekly small-group tutorial sessions with first year students, and encouraged them to bring along biscuits or doughnuts. We also had a habit of rushing through the set-piece assignments in order to get to some more interesting contemporary science. Years later, one particularly successful graduate who had been a part of this regime recalled her introduction to Earl Grey tea with such fondness that I donated my teapot to her when I retired; she is herself now a talented physics lecturer, so perhaps the habit will live on in some way. On the larger scale, I remain proud of the fact that I used what influence I had accumulated by the mid ‘90s – so, about a decade after arriving – to establish a large and well-situated room in our department as a ‘study room’ for our students, and to equip it with decent furniture, a suite of PCs and copies of key textbooks. Even in the face of a change of building and the intense pressure on space that exists nowadays, I am delighted to be able to say that the Study Room is still going strong. In truth, it has become so integral to the working life of our students that it would take a brave person indeed to close it down.

The Study Room as it looks in its present form (during the Easter vacation when its use drops off for a week or two). Amazingly, despite several moves, the compilation of cartoons on the walls have survived from when I pulled them together almost 20 years ago (from here); they depict events associated with science and technology as seen through the eyes of newspaper cartoonists from the ‘60s onwards.

However, the principal focus of this post was to be innovation in teaching. My first really bold step started in the late '80s and was associated with exploring computer-aided learning of basic maths. and of scientific programming (in Fortran 7, should you be interested). A novel hypertext software package, Guide, written by someone at my own university, became available and I was keen to explore its potential. I possessed the lecture notes and a pile of textbooks, but had precious little time available to turn them into the student-paced self-learning tools I envisaged. I invoked then a scheme I have since used many times in various guises: to recruit a suitable group of motivated students to work as a team in order to pull everything together under my guidance. For two or three successive Summer vacations, and using small amounts of money I had managed to obtain from one organisation or another (e.g. the Nuffield Foundation), I paid these small groups first to draft and then to ‘polish’ the material. It worked wonderfully well: the project students, several of whom wanted to go into teaching as a profession, gained some great work experience and I ended up with working software packages. The programming course was successfully deployed immediately and continues to be used to this day, albeit within a more modern hypertext framework (HTML), and further developed and modified by my several successors. The maths. package never really saw the light of day: almost as soon as it became ready for ‘field- tests’ our course design changed in such a way as to render it redundant and I took on new teaching duties. C’est la vie. It survived for a few years as an online tool for those students who wanted to use it for their own purposes. These were the very first examples at my university, and amongst the first in the country, of an entire lecture module being presented in this way. The key reason it was appreciated by our students was the freedom it gave them to work at whatever pace suited their abilities: the autodidacts and those already competent at part or all of the syllabus could race forward, whilst those needing to go over things more slowly could do so – and I was released to focus my efforts on those students needing the most help. It saved me absolutely no time overall, far from it, but I remain convinced that the learning experience was improved for the student. For anyone tempted to suggest that this was a forerunner of today’s MOOCs (Massive Open Online Course), I can only say that I sincerely hope not: in my opinion, a key element to a university education is ‘social’ – learning with and from others, working within a team and so on, and I would always want to preserve this.

There have been exciting ideas and plans that have left only an ethereal legacy, or none at all, which is par for the course. One such project, which I led during the late ’90s but which never did come to fruition, was called Refreshing Physics (see here). This was predicated on the use of context-led learning: presenting physics not subject-by-subject in the traditional sense but through the context of ‘real-world’ phenomena and experimental data. For example, using natural phenomena such as earthquakes and storms as the setting for the physics of waves and vibrations, electric fields, angular momentum etc. (see here). Part of the philosophy was to make the transition between school ‘A’-level Physics and first year university work a lot smoother than is typically the case; we aimed to ensure that undergraduates were more enthused by Physics and less intimidated by it. Moreover it was a key tenet that we establish a strong advisory input from those companies and organisations that employ graduate physicists. Lauded by everyone we showed it to, from government ministries to professional bodies like the Institute of Physics, and by the educators we presented it to at conferences, we nevertheless failed to raise the financial backing required to explore it fully and to test it out. We found ourselves in a funding ‘Catch 22’, with our own University saying we needed to get external funding and the external organisations saying they expected, as a minimum, pump-priming funds from our university. To this day I remain utterly convinced of the value of this teaching and learning approach, but I have long since resigned myself to the fact that it’ll not happen – certainly not on my watch.

One of the very first things the Refreshing Physics team organised was an all-day meeting between some of our undergraduates and year 11/12 pupils (then called sixth-formers) and their teachers in order to understand better what the school-university transitional problems might be and how we might mitigate their negative effects.

The second installment will be uploaded in about a week ...

Earlier posts in this series:

1) The Girt Pike – beginnings and transitions. 

2) Do Labels Last a Lifetime? – people and other influences. 

3) Nomadic Research: random walk or purposefuljourney? – a timeline in research. 

4) Tools of the Trade – instruments and gadgets.

5) Suitcase Science: travelling in hope – tales from a travelling scientist. 

6) Why so many? – gender balance in the research team

7) Committees: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly– making things work: discussion, consensus and decision?

8) Large-scale Facilities for Small-scaleScience – the big ‘toys’ I’ve helped to build and to nurture