Lead Initiative

About LEAD

Imagine a day when all undergraduate students are immersed in scholarly pursuits and empowered as critical thinkers who actively engage in their communities at home and beyond.

LEAD’s goal is a transformative advance in educational effectiveness. It seeks to provide both encouragement and new targeted resources that enable leading departments to apply discipline-specific proven best practices in pedagogy, making teaching more effective and rewarding without compromising continued growth in research excellence.

Through LEAD, we wish to provide our students with greater skills in critical thinking, teamwork and communication, expertise in disciplinary and interdisciplinary knowledge, and the confidence to contribute meaningfully to the civic process, economic growth and intellectual discourse in order to help propel advances in many areas.

Of course there are many examples of universities achieving varying degrees of success in improving undergraduate education. What sets UBC LEAD apart is its unique approach in providing new, targeted resources to departments for applying the latest proven best practices in teaching and learning, to objectively assess student achievements and to then share what has been learned with others.

LEAD is, at its core, a tribute to what is already underway in education reform at UBC. It aims to encourage and enable departments to fulfill their own educational goals, assist in rigorous assessment of student achievement, facilitate the dissemination of new pedagogical knowledge and nurture a culture of teaching and learning excellence at UBC, in Canada, and around the world.

LEAD is a bold and ambitious plan. We need to be clear about that. We invite you to learn more about it, become involved, and help shape the future of education at UBC and beyond.