Assessing distributed leadership for learning and teaching quality: a multi-institutional study

ABSTRACT

Distributed leadership has been explored internationally as a leadership model that will promote and advance excellence in learning and teaching in higher education. This paper presents an assessment of how effectively distributed leadership was enabled at five Australian institutions implementing a collaborative teaching quality development scheme called the Peer Assisted Teaching Scheme. The Scheme brings together expertise from teams of academics, coordinators, and institutional learning and teaching portfolio holders to the shared goal of enhancing learning and teaching quality. A distributed leadership benchmarking tool was used to assess the Scheme’s effectiveness, and we found that (i) the Scheme is highly consistent with the distributed leadership benchmarks, and that (ii) the benchmarking tool is easily used in assessing the alignment (or otherwise) of teaching and learning quality initiatives with distributed leadership benchmarks. This paper will be of interest to those seeking to assess implementations of distributed leadership to improve teaching quality and leadership capacity.

KEYWORDS:

• Collaborative professional development
• higher education
• peer assisted teaching scheme

Acknowledgement

The authors acknowledge the support from the Australian Government’s OLT National Senior Teaching Fellowship scheme and a small grant from the Council of Australian Directors of Academic Development to develop and trial Peer Assisted Teaching Scheme nationally. The authors also acknowledge the contributions of the Peer Assisted Teaching Scheme coordinators from the Australian institutions who implemented Peer Assisted Teaching Scheme in their respective institutions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The authors acknowledge the support from the Australian Government’s OLT National Senior Teaching Fellowship scheme and a small grant from the Council of Australian Directors of Academic Development to develop and trial Peer Assisted Teaching Scheme nationally. The grant is directly awarded to individual academic, which is not part of grants under the Open Funder Registry.