How to Evidence Excellence in Teaching and Learning – Reflective Goal Setting

November 3, 2017Uncategorized, Vice Chancellor's Award Standard

Cheryl Travers (School of Business and Economics) was delighted this year to be one of the recipients of the Vice Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching and Learning. In the post below, Cheryl explains why she is passionate about innovating and improving the student learning experiences.

Arriving at Loughborough more than 24 years ago now, I was passionate about finding ways to deliver innovative, developmental, transferable and impactful student learning experiences. I wanted to give Psychology away to our students, to maximise their potential as employable, successful, resilient and happy future leaders and members of society. Over the years I have eagerly shared my approach and enthusiasm for learning and teaching with other faculty across campus to aid their own personal and professional development, as well as provide ideas for advancing androgogy. In addition, I have sought to spread the word via other means, e.g., online materials (https://youtu.be/yfT8_t9c8JE), regular contributions to SBE blogs and in house magazine ‘Inspire’, the media, key notes at SBE client conferences, and TEDx talks to reach a wider international audience. (https://youtu.be/8oSEQ7f6QRQ and https://youtu.be/q52A0aCFcq0). The impact for me, personally, has been a very satisfying and fulfilling learning and teaching career to date, sprinkled with a number of learning and teaching related awards (SBE Teacher of the Year award (2012), USA Academy of Management ‘Management Education Division’ award for ‘Most innovative contribution to management education’ (2014); Loughborough RiTA award (2016); BPS Division of Occupational Psychology Academic Contribution to Practice (2017) in addition to the VC excellence award this year). I am very proud of the academic, professional and international recognition I have received for my teaching and research.

I feel my most influential and far reaching contribution has been the design and dissemination of my Reflective Goal Setting (RGS) model, which was created to; support the transfer of learning across a range of UG, PG and Executive Education programmes; turn our students into highly interpersonally skilled and adaptable goal setters; and to enhance students’ employment and leadership potential. The resulting data gathered on their goal experiences has provided evidence for the ongoing impact of RGS and has resulted in a number of outputs so far (e.g. Travers, C.J. (2011), Unveiling a reflective diary methodology for exploring the lived experiences of stress and coping, Journal of Vocational Behavior, 79 (204-216); Travers, C.J. (2013),Using Goal Setting Theory to Promote Personal Development, Ch 36 pp 603-621 in New Developments in Goal Setting and Task Performance, Ed Locke and Gary Latham (Eds), Routledge; Travers, C, Morisano, D, & Lock, E. A. (2015). Growth goals and academic achievement: A qualitative study. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 85(2), 224-241). Currently we are carrying out evaluation and impact research on this model and the findings so far suggest that it can have far reaching impact for individuals, their teams and the organisations within which they work.

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