This talk is about how leaders can foster cultural change in teaching across entire institutions. It uses thirty years of experience in how to raise the teaching agenda in a research-intensive institution.
The lecture is both conceptual and practical. It offers insights as well as tangible actions possible to implement by any leader in higher education. And, it illustrates how the process of cultural change in higher education organizations can be measured even though it is very hard to monitor.
Lessons to learn:
- we have to rid ourselves of the idea that academics don’t like leaders, they appreciate good leaders and dislike bad leaders just as much as anyone else,
- we have to lead through those academic values that constitute the ethos of our organisations (to counter them will not work),
- we have to understand that cultural change means influencing peoples ways to talk to each other (patterns of interaction),
- we can influence people’s ways to talk about teaching by applying a few things in our organisation,
- we have to understand that we will mess with people’s professional identities, therefore the process will be unpredictable and sometimes chaotic, and
- we need patience, it will take time – a lot of time.