Sharing Practice and Celebrating Student Education at the TIPS Festival of Learning and Teaching 2025

Since the start back in June 2020, TIPS has been a place for collecting and sharing of examples of practice in student education from across the University of Leeds. As it says in the 'welcome to TIPS' email that goes to everyone who joins the community,

TIPS (short for Teaching, Innovation and Practice Sharing) offers what it says on the label: a collection of bite-sized information, tips and tricks, shared by colleagues, for colleagues.

As a Community of Practice, TIPS is a supportive group for anyone involved in teaching and developing others, in facilitating learning and in dealing with the everyday challenges of education practice. Five years on from its establishment, TIPS now has more than 1000 members from across the University of Leeds, who are supported through the online community space, events, workshops, and networking opportunities. We have plenty to celebrate in the TIPS space - which gave the team behind TIPS the perfect reason to organise the first (and we hope, inaugural) Festival of Learning and Teaching in TIPS, or FeLT TIPS for short, which ran 23-26 June 2025.

What was the aim of the Festival?

We wanted to celebrate all things learning and teaching at Leeds! Our aim was to create a space where colleagues could showcase their inspiring practice and have multiple ways to get involved, try out something new, and learn more about the work taking place in student education across our campus. By promoting interdisciplinary exchange and collaboration, we hoped to be able to foster a renewed sense of community and belonging in TIPS and celebrate this fantastic community of practice. Recognising there was no way that we could deliver the Festival on our own, we turned to the community and invited colleagues to propose workshops and events that would form part of a Festival programme and would provide them the opportunity to share their work and inspire others. And the community responded! We want to take this opportunity to thank everyone who contributed to the Festival by running sessions: we literally could not have done this without you and we are very grateful to you for investing your time and energy in TIPS.

FeLT TIPS round-up

Across the four days of the Festival, 305 attendees came to 31 sessions that took place across campus and online. The programme featured community events, 'open house' sessions where colleagues could discover different teaching and learning spaces across campus, workshops that featured sharing practice and discussion and 'come and play' sessions where attendees could explore novel spaces and different technologies in a hands-on way. Clear themes emerged from the workshops that colleagues ran, revealing interesting areas of practice that are really thriving at Leeds. These included: active and experiential learning; artificial intelligence; decolonising the curriculum; digitally enhanced learning; open education; pedagogies in physical spaces; students as partners; sustainable curriculum; and transformative learning. You can explore the 2025 programme fully on the FeLT TIPS webpages.

Thank you again to our facilitators who made the programme possible and to our attendees from TIPS and beyond for making the Festival a success. We hope to see you at FeLT TIPS 2026!

 

The FeLT TIPS team: Aline Gaus | Rachel Haworth | Helen Morley | Maria King | Ryan Prescott | Robin Smith