LEADING FOR LEARNING: UNVEILING THE ROLE OF DEPARTMENT HEADS AT A CANADIAN RESEARCH-INTENSIVE UNIVERSITY
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The department head plays a pivotal role in leading teaching and learning activities in\nuniversities, which has been correlated with student success, satisfaction, retention, and\ngraduation rates. The challenging nature of the department head’s role is reflected in job postings\nthat require the capacity to integrate strategic leadership into the improvement of teaching and\nlearning. Existing leadership research has largely focused on department heads’ managerial, administrative, and political duties, but little attention has been paid to the processes of how they\nfulfill their roles as learning leaders. Hence, this study investigated how department heads lead\nteaching and learning at a Canadian research-intensive university. The data from this qualitative study was collected through document analysis and semi- structured interviews with eight department heads and thematically analyzed using the software\nNVivo. University policy documents were analyzed, gaining a greater understanding of\ndepartment head leading practices of teaching and learning. All the interviewed heads have\nsupported faculty instructional effectiveness or satisfied student learning needs. Most strategies\nencompassed faculty pedagogical support, teaching assignment management, and curriculum\ndevelopment to promote student learning experience and cultivate an inclusive and collegial\natmosphere. Through an exploratory case study, this research sheds light on the vital role of university\ndepartment heads in facilitating pedagogical innovation and fostering high-quality learning\nexperiences. The interview revealed new expectations of student learning as a result of\nchangeable social trends, change resistance by faculty members, and institutional resource\nconstraints. Hence, it is recommended that universities consider providing professional\ndevelopment for improving the practices of department heads as learning leaders. Moreover, evidence indicated that shared leadership of heads enhanced departmental decision-making. However, few department heads had action plans for addressing equity, diversity, or social justice\nin teaching and learning.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.029 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".