Building Leadership Capacity for Systemic, Scalable and Sustainable Change in Undergraduate Biology Education is a project to better empower leaders to facilitate institutional change that improves undergraduate biology student learning, retention and graduation.
This project is led by Susan Elrod at the University of Wisconsin and Cynthia Bauerle at James Madison University, with Pullias Center co-director Adrianna Kezar serving as a consultant.
Pullias Research Team
Pullias Co-director
Background and goals
Institutional changes can vastly improve undergraduate biology student learning, retention and graduation rates. However, many changes known to be effective have yet to be implemented on campuses. To bring about change, campus leaders—especially those with decision-making authority over budget, personnel and policy—can play critical roles. Yet few resources exist to help campus leaders develop shared leadership models in higher education to more effectively solve the increasingly complex problems facing colleges and universities today.
To address these issues, the Building Leadership Capacity in Undergraduate Biology Education project will offer a 3-day workshop in 2019 that brings together campus 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.
After the workshop, 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.
Funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation, this project began in Sep. 2018 and will end Feb. 2020.
Funder
This study was funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation. The official title of the grant is “Building Leadership Capacity for Systemic, Scalable and Sustainable Change in Undergraduate Biology Education.”
Building Leadership Capacity