By: Dr Elizabeth Houldsworth, Associate Professor of Leadership, Organisations and Behaviour at Henley Business School, liz.houldsworth@henley.ac.uk

Group of people sitting around a table looking at paper and a laptop — Photograph from a staff development workshop at Whiteknights Campus, July 2023 © Liz Houldsworth

Overview

This entry offers an overview of a collaborative study by Dr Elizabeth Houldsworth (Henley Business School) and Emma Watton (Lancaster University Management School)

The researchers met at both their institutions to review personal development (PD) materials and to hear reports from learners on the impact of PD modules on their development as reflective practitioners. An exploratory empirical study was designed using Henley Business School students to consider the relative degree of reflective thinking displayed by learners in their PD assignments.

The approach was informed by scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) frameworks designed by Boyer (1990) and Kern et al. (2015) and, in particular, the need to ‘go public’ about the study. The collaborators reflected that the study had an unexpected positive impact on their own personal development as reflective practitioners.

Selfie photograph of Liz Houldsworth and Emma Watton. — Liz Houldsworth (left) and Emma Watton (right) © Liz Houldsworth

The project has had the following outputs, which are available for download by selecting the links:

1. A peer reviewed presentation to the Research in Management Learning and Education Conference in Banff June 2022 (abstract)
2. A peer reviewed conference presentation to Advance HE on the SoTL aspects of the collaboration (abstract)
3. Staff development workshops at Henley Business School and Lancaster University Management School. Materials from the final one, held at Whiteknights Campus in July 2023, is available for download here (PDF of PowerPoint slides)

References

Boyer, E.L. (1990). Scholarship reconsidered: Priorities of the professoriate. Princeton University Press.
Kern, B. Mettetal G, Dixson M, et al. (2015). The role of SoTL in the academy: Upon the 25th anniversary of Boyer’s Scholarship Reconsidered. Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 15(3): 1-14.

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