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S. Brown • From Educational Development to Strategic Management
or access to one at another institution, thanks to the work
of Caroline Bucklow. Under the calm leadership of Paul
Clark, we achieved within four years a membership which
represented about 14% of eligible higher education staff,
and as conventional wisdom claims that when establishing
a professional body, achieving 5% of a target market within
ten years is a good rate of development, we were not
unhappy. Our services to members include our own journal,
a book series, fortnightly updates for members, a website
with largely member-produced practical content, regular
meetings in ten UK regions, and our very highly regarded
Annual Conference. My work at the ILT also involved
helping to set up the selection process for the National Teaching
Fellowship Scheme, which gave me the opportunity
to work very closely with senior colleagues across English
universities, particularly Professor Sir Martin Harris, and
Professor Sir David Watson, heroic figures who both supported
and challenged me. This was educational development
at a national level.
When the ILT ceased to exist following the merger with the
Learning and Teaching Support Network Generic Centre,
together with the National Co-ordination Team, to form the
Higher Education Academy, I moved on and undertook
freelance consultancy and interim management work before
taking up the opportunity to work part-time as a Visiting
Professor at Leeds Met. Very soon, I realised that Leeds
Met was exactly the kind of place where someone with my
skill set could make a difference, and I progressively became
more and more engaged.
My first big task was to lead on the development of an
Assessment, Learning and Teaching strategy, which I did
collaboratively with our university Teacher Fellows. The
hardest part of the job was gaining ownership across the
university, and taking the strategy, which was progressively
refined through a number of iterations through Academic
Committee, Academic Board, the Education Strategy Sub-
Committee of the Governors, and finally the full Governing
Body. Having succeeded in producing something which
looked as if it would work well in practice, I was then delighted
to be appointed Pro-Vice-Chancellor, Assessment,
Learning and Teaching.
In Leeds Met, which is one of the biggest student-centred
universities in the UK, here I’ve had a chance to put into
practice all the things I had been advocating over the years,
and to actually see the long-term outputs of strategic leadership.
I have had to put my reputation where my mouth
was, so to speak: you might call it whole-institution educational
development. Here I work to recognise and reward
excellent teaching, to encourage evidence-based innovative
practice, to foster cross-institutional collaboration and
to re-engineer the curriculum to incorporate approaches
suitable for contemporary student needs.
This Bildungsroman has set out to explain how I became an
educational developer, and to argue that educational development
provides superb training opportunities for people
who want to lead universities. Just about every skill that I
need now in my day-to-day work was fostered through
being an educational developer at a local and then national
level. Educational developers can not command; they work
by persuasion, conviction, and scholarly argument. They
are change agents who need to be able to analyse needs of
people who don’t recognise they have any, and help people
to come to practical solutions to problems that the problem-owners
have barely formulated. Mentoring, supportive
encouragement, and leadership by example are all necessary
means to encourage people to be innovative in
their teaching approaches, and are even more important
when helping people to start and continue to publish and
disseminate their original teaching and learning activities.
When you are trying to bring about changes in practice in
universities, fostering inclusive approaches, exploring how
best to retain students, developing students’ employability,
fostering internationalisation in the curriculum, encouraging
effective use of technologies to enhance learning, helping
people to assess large numbers of students more efficiently
and effectively, it really helps to have pragmatic examples
supported by scholarship, to help people to think
(and more importantly, practise) in the ways that you want
them to. It also helps if you’re trying to motivate people to
go the extra mile with little more than tiny amounts of cash,
and a cheery smile to incentivise them.
In my current role I am supported to go way beyond boundaries,
using all my talents to the full. Being entrusted with
leadership in the academic world requires a leap of faith by
people who believe in you, and Simon Lee, Vice-Chancellor
at Leeds Met, by investing that trust in me, to make a real
difference, helped to turn me from an educational develo-
• Sally Brown, Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Assessment,
Learning and Teaching), Leeds Metropolitan
University, E-Mail: s.brown@leedsmet.ac.uk
Reihe: Gestaltung
motivierender Lehre
in Hochschulen:
Praxisanregungen
im Verlagsprogramm erhältlich:
Peter Viebahn: Hochschullehrerpsychologie
Theorie- und empiriebasierte Praxisanregungen für die Hochschullehre
ISBN 3-937026-31-2, Bielefeld 2004, 298 Seiten, 29.50 Euro
Bestellung - Fax: 0521/ 923 610-22, E-Mail: info@universitaetsverlagwebler.de
P-OE 1+2/2008
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