Variation in the Experience of Leadership of Teaching in Higher Education

This article describes ways in which heads of university academic departments and the subject coordinators of large first-year subjects experience the leadership of teaching. It examines variation in perceptions of leadership experienced by the teachers in the same subjects and departments. It explores empirical relations between subject coordinators' conceptions of leadership and teachers' perceptions of leadership, and between teachers' perceptions of subject coordinators' leadership and teachers' approaches to teaching. The authors show that there is an empirical relationship between the way subject coordinators conceive of leadership of teaching, how their subject teachers perceive that leadership and how these teachers approach their teaching. Taken together with earlier work on the relationship between how teachers approach their teaching in higher education and how students approach their learning, the results provide evidence that the experience of academic leadership has an impact on the quality of student learning.