student feedback and leadership - Office for Learning and Teaching

Part A: Developing a Distributed Leadership Model - Secton 3: Building Leadership Capacity
may be seen as academics ‘following’ student needs, on the other hand,
it provided a solid base upon which ART members could explore ways
in which they may lead improvement in the student learning experience.
The initial attention of ART members was more focussed on the need for
infrastructure and systems improvement rather than improvements
to teaching practice such as:
1. the support of a consistent systems approach to enable data on student
feedback to be compared. This requires data to be disaggregated
sufficiently to provide useful feedback. For example, in the SET service
course data on student feedback from large classes with a mix of
students from different disciplines, needed to be disaggregated into
student-discipline groupings.
2. the need to encourage students (especially first year students) to accept
responsibility for developing leadership in their own learning.
3. the need to maintain a balance in the School between financial returns
(increase with large classes) and resources available for quality learning
and teaching.
An interesting observation made by the Facilitators was the approach
taken by the members of each ART members that followed their disciplinary
expertise. The Maths and Geospatial ART members commenced their planning
phase by using their mathematical skills to analyse the CES data, the Business
ART sought to establish a Benchmarking process typical of Business, while
the Property and Construction ART members used their construction expertise
to focus on teaching spaces. As will be demonstrated later, the issue
of disciplinary influence on leadership behaviour and approach in responding
to student feedback became important again in Cycle 3 as a challenge for
disseminating ideas for improving student feedback between disciplines
became evident.
An observation made by the ARTs was the need to ensure that student
feedback is collected in an appropriate form and in a manner that does not
lead to students feeling they are being over-surveyed as this in itself could
have negative effects on their feedback.
3.1.5 Reflect
Reflection on the implications of action in this cycle for leadership
in enhancing student learning and teaching through responding to student
feedback identified the importance of an integrated approach in which topdown
policy action is supported by bottom-up implementation. This led
the Project Manager to articulate a theoretical model of leadership in which
leadership is defined as a consequence of the actions of others, as distributed
throughout the organisation with some staff taking leadership in relation
to specific aspects of their work or interest and not in relation to others,
and as supported by systems and infrastructure. Two of these factors
were demonstrated in this cycle with the third emerging as an issue
that was taken up in the second cycle.
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