Workshop: Building Leadership Capacity for Systemic, Scalable and Sustainable Change in Undergraduate Biology Education; Spring, 2019

Indiana University, Bloomington IN

Investigators

Abstract

There is an increasing need for building campus leadership capacity to facilitate institutional change that improves undergraduate Biology student learning, retention and graduation. While the approaches for making these improvements are well-known, their application on campuses is still not wide-spread. To facilitate implementation of these improvements, campus leaders play critical roles. In particular, those leaders with decision-making authority over budget, personnel and policy (e.g., deans) can either be gatekeepers or gateways to promoting the success of these efforts. A recent review makes the case for the need to develop shared leadership models in higher education to more effectively solve the increasingly complex problems facing colleges and universities. However, there is no clear definition of the skills required to lead using this type of model, nor are there manuals, workshops or other resources to help leaders develop these competencies. The proposed workshop will bring together positional leaders to reflect on both their experience and the current leadership development literature to define the set of distinctive competencies required to lead scalable, sustainable systemic institutional change. These competencies will be defined and then used as the basis for building resources that will be geared toward developing these competencies in positional leaders across the country. The set of competencies will be published in a summary article and used to create a plan for the development of leadership program resources. Participants will also contribute to the development of resources that can be made widely available for higher education leadership programs offered through higher education associations and other organizations. This will develop leaders who can more effectively implement, scale and sustain institutional change efforts geared towards improving undergraduate Biology student access, persistence and graduation of underrepresented minority students. This work may also lead to additional workshops to develop corresponding competencies for faculty, staff and students who are participants in campus change projects. Finally, this work will contribute to the development of new research questions regarding how well leaders who have been exposed to the new resources exhibit the competencies and use them to more effectively lead campus change efforts. This award is supported by the Division of Biological Infrastructure in the Biological Sciences Directorate and the Division of Undergraduate Education in the Education and Human Resources Directorate. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.