Student-Staff Partnerships in Designing Assessments – A Toolkit
This session will focus upon sharing the process of partnership-working, highlighting the benefits and pitfalls and providing insight into how to work effectively in partnership with students, moving beyond mere consultation to co-creation.
TILE Network
Date: Tuesday 10 February 2026
Time: 16:00 - 17:00
Venue: Teams
Category: Academic events
Speaker: Prof Amanda Millmore (she/her)
Abstract:
This session will focus upon sharing the process of partnership-working, highlighting the benefits and pitfalls and providing insight into how to work effectively in partnership with students, moving beyond mere consultation to co-creation.
Using the example of a student-staff partnership project for a new level 6 elective law module, where students took control of the design of module assessments, Amanda will demonstrate her six steps of partnership working:
- Determining the ambit of your partnership
- Recruiting the partnership
- Ice breaking & idea generation
- Student-led research and investigations
- Collating and actioning recommendations
- Dissemination
In the case study example, students researched and investigated assessments, then focusing on the key feedback from their peers on assessment type, weighting and timing they created assessments for a new module, including optionality within assessment. Crucially, they mapped key employability attributes to the assessments, ensuring that they were incorporated squarely within the module from the design stage.
The module is now in its seventh year, with outstanding student module evaluations, and demonstrates a real positive impact on the employability of the students, retaining the student-favoured optionality in assessment and the core of the original student-designed assessments. This toolkit approach will provide you with a six-step method of partnership working that is flexible and easy to translate into a range of student-staff partnership projects.
About the speaker:
Amanda Millmore is a Professor of Law at the University of Reading, a National Teaching Fellow (2022) and a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. She is a teaching intensive academic blending pedagogy with her legal knowledge and practical experience as a barrister.Alongside teaching Criminal law, Family law and the Law of Evidence, Amanda’s work focuses upon student-staff partnerships, employability and student support. She has a history of leading student-staff partnerships ranging from assessment co-design, curriculum design, evaluating tutoring, building a community and student support to working with students to liaise with alumni to explore research skills. Her model of partnership-working has been adopted by colleagues in their work within the University of Reading and shared sector-wide. https://www.reading.ac.uk/law/our-staff/amanda-millmore