Polishing for impact: Demonstrating educational leadership

For tenure, promotion, awards, or other career milestones, you need to demonstrate how educational leadership aligns with your teaching philosophy. This work may include mentorship, collaboration, curriculum development, pedagogical innovation, scholarly contributions, institutional service, or other efforts that influence teaching and learning beyond your own courses.

For many review processes, strong teaching alone is not the only consideration. Reviewers are often looking for evidence that your teaching practices, ideas, and contributions have influenced learning, teaching culture, curriculum, colleagues, or educational practices beyond your own classroom. Educational leadership helps demonstrate how your work contributes to broader teaching and learning communities.

These contributions can occur at multiple levels, including within courses, programs, departments, faculties, institutions, disciplines, or broader teaching and learning communities. In teaching philosophies and dossiers, this section helps demonstrate how your work influences students, colleagues, programs, departments, or broader teaching cultures.

This resource is part 2 of the Polishing for impact series, designed to help you transform your initial teaching philosophy draft into a compelling narrative:

Strategies for Success

Educational leadership in postsecondary education is often collaborative and relational, emerging through partnerships, shared initiatives, mentorship, and collective efforts to improve teaching and learning. The strategies below can help you identify, articulate, and demonstrate how your contributions have supported teaching and learning beyond your own courses.

Know your audience

Different audiences prioritize different types of leadership:

  • Faculty colleagues: They look for local impact, such as mentoring students or sharing new methods with their peers.
  • University committees: They want to see how you contribute to campus-wide initiatives, such as acting as a peer reviewer or presenting at the Festival of Teaching and Learning.
  • External or national audiences: These reviewers look for leadership that influences the broader postsecondary landscape through publications or keynote presentations.
  • Disciplinary or professional communities: These audiences may value leadership connected to accreditation, professional practice, clinical or studio instruction, curriculum reform, field-based learning, or discipline-specific approaches to teaching and mentorship.

Define your approach to leadership

Just as you have a teaching philosophy, you have a leadership philosophy. Before describing your leadership activities, clarify what educational leadership means in your context. Your statement should help reviewers understand not only what you have done, but why the work matters, how you approached it, and how others were able to learn from, use, or build on your contributions.

Key concept: Educational leadership is not defined by a title or formal administrative role. It is demonstrated through visible contributions that strengthen shared teaching and learning practices, made clear through evidence, reflection, and communication so others can adopt, adapt, or extend them.

Consider the following questions as you describe your approach:

  • Your values: What do you value in educational leadership in postsecondary education? For example, do you emphasize collaboration, mentorship, access, disciplinary renewal, student partnership, evidence-informed practice, or institutional change?
  • Your approach: How do you lead? Do you model excellent teaching, mentor others, convene conversations, support colleagues, build partnerships, or advocate for meaningful change in your faculty
  • Your influence: Who has been affected by your leadership? Consider students, colleagues, teaching teams, programs, departments, professional communities, or broader teaching and learning networks.
  • Your impact: How do you know your leadership made a difference? Consider examples such as adoption by colleagues, changes to curriculum or assessment, improved coordination, student feedback, peer recognition, invitations to share your work, or resources used beyond your own course.

Educational leadership may include activities such as:

  • Leading curriculum review, program renewal, or accreditation processes that strengthen student learning and program coherence.
  • Chairing or contributing to committees focused on teaching, curriculum, assessment, academic integrity, accessibility, generative AI, or other emerging priorities in teaching and learning.
  • Developing departmental or faculty-level approaches to educational challenges such as assessment in an AI-rich context, experiential learning, large-enrolment teaching, or inclusive course design.
  • Creating resources, guides, frameworks, or professional learning opportunities that help colleagues adopt evidence-informed teaching, assessment, or technology practices.
  • Leading initiatives that advance equity, accessibility, belonging, Indigenous engagement, or other institutional commitments within teaching and learning environments.
  • Coordinating multi-section courses, teaching teams, or shared instructional practices to improve consistency, communication, and student experience across a program.
  • Facilitating communities of practice, cross-disciplinary collaborations, or faculty learning initiatives focused on improving teaching and learning.
  • Leading or participating in Teaching and Learning Enhancement Fund (TLEF) projects or other educational innovation initiatives.
  • Engaging in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) by investigating teaching and learning questions and sharing findings through presentations, publications, resources, or collaborative inquiry.
  • Supporting graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, academic teaching staff (ATS) instructors, or early-career faculty through mentorship, orientation, peer support, or professional learning.

Show the impact

Strong statements do more than name leadership activities; they explain your role, the change you supported, and the evidence of influence or impact. Demonstrate educational leadership through influence, collaboration, mentorship, and contributions that strengthen teaching and learning communities. Focus on contributions where you can clearly articulate your role, actions, and impact rather than listing activities alone.

  • Mentorship success: Describe how your mentorship supported the development, confidence, teaching practice, or career progression of students or colleagues.
  • Programmatic changes: Highlight contributions to curriculum redesign, policy development, assessment reform, accreditation work, or teaching initiatives that improved student or instructor experiences.
  • Scholarship: List presentations, publications, workshops, educational resources, communities of practice, or collaborative initiatives that influenced teaching beyond your own classroom.
  • Collaborative impact: Describe how your contributions supported collective teaching goals, strengthened departmental teaching culture, improved coordination across courses or programs, or helped colleagues adopt new practices or approaches.
  • Student impact: Show how your leadership contributed to student learning, belonging, engagement, mentorship opportunities, or broader improvements in the student experience.

Examples of leadership language

  • “I contribute to teaching culture within my faculty by…”
  • “My approach to mentorship emphasizes…”
  • “Through curriculum redesign work, I collaborated with colleagues to…”
  • “I support teaching and learning communities by…”
  • “I view educational leadership as a collaborative practice grounded in…”

Self-Check

Use this checklist to ensure your statement is ready for your intended audience:

  • Is it clear? Have you articulated the foundational beliefs that drive your leadership?
  • Is it evidence-based? Have you provided concrete examples of how you’ve influenced others?
  • Is it authentic? Does the narrative reflect your genuine commitment to the U of A teaching community?
  • Is it grounded in practice? Does the narrative reflect your actual leadership approaches, contributions, and educational values?
  • Is your impact visible? Have you clearly explained how your contributions influenced students, colleagues, programs, or teaching cultures beyond your own classroom?

Putting it into practice

Educational leadership often begins through small but meaningful contributions to colleagues, students, programs, or teaching communities.

  • Look back at your last two years. Where have you shared your teaching insights, approaches, or lessons learned with a colleague, even informally?
  • What teaching challenges have colleagues sought your advice or support on?
  • If you were to mentor a new instructor in your department, what is one piece of advice or resource you would give them? This is the core of your leadership ‘why’.
  • Think about a committee or project you’ve worked on. How did your involvement specifically improve the experience for students or other faculty members?
  • In what ways have your contributions influenced teaching practices, curriculum, assessment, mentorship, or learning environments beyond your own classroom?

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