I received Senior Fellowship of Advance HE a year ago. In the months after the recognition arrived, I found myself thinking less about the certificate and more about how I had actually told the story of my practice.
When I began supporting colleagues on the University of Northampton’s Pathway for Senior Fellowship those questions sharpened. I wanted to show, in simple terms, how I had structured my own case studies, and how my colleagues might do the same. As I talked with participants, I realised I kept coming back to the same elements: the context, the change, the evidence, the collaboration, the sharing and the forward trajectory.
Those elements became the basis of a framework. I wanted a memorable way of capturing them, and that is how SEED-IN emerged.
SEED-IN is a developmental framework for planning, evidencing and narrating the impact of a particular enhancement or change in relation to the Professional Standards Framework (PSF). It is built around six prompts:
Situation: identify the context, challenge or need that led you to make this change.
Enhancement: define the specific change or intervention you led in response to that situation.
Evidence: gather evidence of the impact of this change, and evidence from the literature that informed it.
Development through collaboration: show how this change was further developed, adapted or extended by (or through working with) others.
Idea sharing: map how you have shared this change and what you learned from doing so.
Next steps: articulate how you will sustain, adapt or scale this change over time.
In practice, each element can take many forms.
A Situation might be a specific module, programme, tutoring context or a wider challenge or opportunity such as progression, belonging or assessment workload.
An Enhancement could be a new form of feedback, a change in assessment design, a refreshed approach to tutorials or a redesigned learning activity.
For Evidence, colleagues might draw on student feedback and testimonials, attainment and retention data, NSS responses, internal surveys and external examiner comments, alongside evidence from the literature and sector guidance that informed their choices.
Development through collaboration captures how this particular change grows when others are involved, for example, co-design with colleagues or students, cross-team projects, or fine-tuning the approach through peer observation.
Idea sharing might include presenting this change at internal or external conferences, writing it up as a case study or blog, or sharing the approach in programme meetings and cross-university networks.
Next steps often involve extending or adapting the change, widening its scope to other cohorts, integrating it into policy or strategy, or altering aspects of it in response to what has been learned.
In my experience, the first E (Enhancement) is usually the part colleagues are most excited to talk about. But it only becomes a compelling PSF-aligned story when it is serviced by the rest of the letters when it is presented as grounded in a clear situation, supported by evidence, developed by and/or with others, shared thoughtfully and carried forward into purposeful next steps.
On paper, SEED-IN looks like a neat sequence. In reality, practice is rarely that tidy.
That is why I now describe it as a wheel you can enter at any point. Sometimes a colleague begins with a very clear educational problem or opportunity. Sometimes they start with evidence and work backwards to make sense of what changed. At other times, they are already collaborating widely or sharing an idea and need help connecting that activity to a fuller PSF narrative. SEED-IN allows for all these starting points, while still encouraging a rounded account of one specific enhancement and its impact. It can be used both to plan new enhancements and to make sense of work that has already taken place, rather than only as a way of writing up case studies.
For colleagues working towards Associate Fellowship and Fellowship, the framework can help identify and shape everyday practice that demonstrates engagement with the PSF dimensions in a more coherent way. For those pursuing Senior Fellowship, it helps foreground leadership of enhancement, collaboration and dissemination, and how these build over time. For colleagues considering Principal Fellowship, SEED-IN can also be used to map longer strategic journeys, tracing how particular situations, enhancements and partnerships develop into sustained institutional or sector-level impact.
In my own Senior Fellowship application, I did not have SEED-IN as a named model. Looking back, though, my strongest case studies are those that now map cleanly onto it. They begin with a real educational need, describe a deliberate enhancement, present evidence that something shifted for students or colleagues, show collaboration, explain how learning was shared, and then point towards what came next for that change.
So far, this has been a practice-based experiment rather than a formal framework. It has been shaped through my own Senior Fellow journey and through conversations with a small number of colleagues who are exploring how to narrate impact in ways that feel authentic and purposeful. The next step for me is to evaluate SEED-IN more systematically, for example, by exploring how colleagues across different PSF descriptors use it to plan and write, and whether it affects their confidence in articulating practice.
The metaphor behind the name has grown on me. A seed holds potential, but only if it is placed in the right conditions. In the same way, many of us are already doing rich work in learning and teaching; the challenge is to help those ideas take root, grow, and be seen.
If you were to sketch SEED-IN around one live piece of practice, whether you are thinking about AFHEA, FHEA, SFHEA or PFHEA, where would your starting point be on the six-point wheel, and what kind of impact story would you hope to grow?
Dr Maged Zakher is Deputy Head of the School of Strategy, Management and International Business at the University of Northampton, and a Senior Fellow of Advance HE. He is Faculty Lead for Learning, Teaching and Student Experience and his work focuses on collaborative and creative learning and teaching.