A necessary synergy of best practices: teaching and academic management at university level

Abstract

Educational quality is a top-order issue both in the national and international context. The debate in the academic community is focused on defining, in a consensual way, what are the main challenges that need to be addressed in order to achieve educational quality and how, from the global and local community, we can provide responses in a more efficient and timely manner. We will focus the debate on the Higher Education subsystem in the context of the Dominican Republic, starting from the aspects on which there is a higher level of consensus in the educational community at a global level and continuing with those less studied in the local context. The incidence of the effectiveness of teaching in educational quality is irrefutable, for which the establishment and development of domains and competencies of university teachers is decisive. However, little has been studied about the impact of academic management on teaching practices in the university context. This work aims to demonstrate the correlation between management and teaching practices, for the quality of higher education. Therefore,
we intend to clarify, what is meant by effective teaching in Dominican universities? What is meant by good teaching practice at the university level? Is it enough to have good teaching practices to achieve the quality of education in the Higher Education subsystem? What dynamics and styles of academic management foster good teaching practices at the university? Is the performance of teachers and academic managersevaluated with comparable intention, frequency and emphasis in the university context of the Dominican Republic?