G 5.1
Session: G
Parallel Session: 5.1
Research Domain: Higher Education Policy; Management, Leadership and governance
Graham Gibbs
University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom
Disciplinary And Contextually Appropriate Approaches To Leadership of Teaching
While ‘teaching-intensive’ universities in the UK have made significant progress in implementing
institutional ’learning and teaching strategies’ (Gibbs et al, 2000) progress has been much less
extensive in research-intensive institutions where the collegial organisational culture can mitigate
against bureaucratic and corporate approaches to management. Previous case study visits (Gibbs,
2000) found that while there were some examples of institution-wide strategic development of
teaching, in many contexts what teaching development could be seen, was the result of initiatives
within departments. Furthermore, institution-wide initiatives tended to emerge from successful
initiatives from within an individual department, rather than the other way round.
This study focussed on departmental leadership of teaching in research-intensive universities. It
involved a sample of 11 world-class research-intensive universities in eight countries, and in each
two departments were identified that performance indicators demonstrated were excellent at
teaching. Detailed case studies were undertaken in each of these departments to identify the role,
if any, of departmental leadership in creating and supporting the excellent teaching. Case studies
involved extensive examination of documentation about the department, its teaching and any
recent reviews and interviews with a range of representatives from the department including the
head/chair; senior academic staff; and group interviews with teachers and with students.
Four conceptual frameworks were used to analyse the case studies, concerning whether change
was planned or emergent; what form the organisational culture took (McNay, 1995); what
conception of leadership of teaching was held by the head or chair (Ramsden 1998); and what
form of dispersed leadership was evident (McBeath et al 2004). There were marked differences
between departments that emphasised fine tuning of largely traditional methods under the
autonomous control of individual academics and departments where a radical innovation had been
planned and implemented as a collaborative venture to tackle a problem. Effective leadership of
teaching was found to take different forms in such different contexts. While department size was
not found to be related to the form of leadership of teaching, academic discipline was found to
have a profound affect. Change was much more likely to be emergent than planned in Humanities
and Social Science. No examples of emergent change were found in Science. An entrepreneurial
organisational culture and approach to change was much more common in Professional subjects.
Conceptions of leadership of teaching of the heads studied here were much more sophisticated
than those reported by Ramsden (1998) who studied departments of varying degrees of teaching
excellence. This finding provides strong support for the notion that sophisticated conceptions of
leadership of teaching are associated with teaching excellence.
References
 Gibbs, G., Habeshaw, T. & Yorke, M. (2000) Institutional learning and teaching strategies in
English higher education. Higher Education, 40, 351-372.
 McBeath, J., Oduro, G.K.T. & Waterhouse, J. (2004) Distributed leadership in action: a study of
current practice in schools. Nottingham: National College for School Leadership.
 McNay, I. (1995) From the collegial academy to the corporate enterprise: the changing culure of
universities. In T. Schuller (Ed.) The changing University? Buckingham: SRHE & Open University
Press
 Ramsden, P. (1998) Learning to lead in higher education. London: Routledge