student feedback and leadership - Office for Learning and Teaching

Part A: Developing a Distributed Leadership Model - Secton 3: Building Leadership Capacitymay be seen as academics ‘following’ student needs, on the other hand,it provided a solid base upon which ART members could explore waysin which they may lead improvement in the student learning experience.The initial attention of ART members was more focussed on the need forinfrastructure and systems improvement rather than improvementsto teaching practice such as:1. the support of a consistent systems approach to enable data on studentfeedback to be compared. This requires data to be disaggregatedsufficiently to provide useful feedback. For example, in the SET servicecourse data on student feedback from large classes with a mix ofstudents from different disciplines, needed to be disaggregated intostudent-discipline groupings.2. the need to encourage students (especially first year students) to acceptresponsibility 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 learningand teaching.An interesting observation made by the Facilitators was the approachtaken by the members of each ART members that followed their disciplinaryexpertise. The Maths and Geospatial ART members commenced their planningphase by using their mathematical skills to analyse the CES data, the BusinessART sought to establish a Benchmarking process typical of Business, whilethe Property and Construction ART members used their construction expertiseto focus on teaching spaces. As will be demonstrated later, the issueof disciplinary influence on leadership behaviour and approach in respondingto student feedback became important again in Cycle 3 as a challenge fordisseminating ideas for improving student feedback between disciplinesbecame evident.An observation made by the ARTs was the need to ensure that studentfeedback is collected in an appropriate form and in a manner that does notlead to students feeling they are being over-surveyed as this in itself couldhave negative effects on their feedback.3.1.5 ReflectReflection on the implications of action in this cycle for leadershipin enhancing student learning and teaching through responding to studentfeedback identified the importance of an integrated approach in which topdownpolicy action is supported by bottom-up implementation. This ledthe Project Manager to articulate a theoretical model of leadership in whichleadership is defined as a consequence of the actions of others, as distributedthroughout the organisation with some staff taking leadership in relationto specific aspects of their work or interest and not in relation to others,and as supported by systems and infrastructure. Two of these factorswere demonstrated in this cycle with the third emerging as an issuethat was taken up in the second cycle.Page 41