student feedback and leadership - Office for Learning and Teaching

Part A: Developing a Distributed Leadership Model - Secton 3: Building Leadership CapacityThe importance of the Plenary sessions as a forum for ARTs to share theirprogress, engage in discussion and obtain the support of senior leaders wasidentified as an important advance. The major outcome from the second plenarywas discussion of the need to develop increased opportunities to disseminateknowledge about changes being made and positive outcomes that were resultingacross the university. The comment was made that the project was providing thelink to develop change processes that can be shared with other schools to leadtowards a cultural change across RMIT.3.2.5 ReflectReflection on the Leadership issues that emerged in this cycle suggest a secondelement in a leadership model for enhancing student learning and teachingpractice through responding to student feedback. This COLLABORATIVELEADERSHIP element is illustrated in Figure 10.Figure 10 Distributed Leadership Model Element Two: Collaborative LeadershipA collaborative approach includes all relevant services across the universityin leadership designed to develop joint problem-solving. The importance ofjoint collaboration was also demonstrated in the ARTs experience of developingmeaning by sharing individual experiences. This led to the identification of smallchanges to teaching practice that had significant effects for the students.It was recognised that while collaboration requires time for trust to be developedand blame removed, once the move to a more collaborative teamwork approachoccurs it is easier to attach meaning to student feedback and develop strategiesto improve the student experience. This involves a more shared systemsapproach that links various student service providers and academics, an issuethat emerged as a central factor in improving student feedback.Page 47