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Faculty members outline the learning outcomes and pedagogies to teach leadership to college students.
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Creating student leaders is something many institutions claim to do—one international database found there are more than 2,000 postsecondary institutions with formal curricula dedicated to student leadership—but curricular and co-curricular spaces for student leadership development lack a common practice or consensus in outcomes, according to a June white paper published in the Journal of Leadership Education.
The report’s authors, David Michael Rosch from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and Scott J. Allen from John Carroll University in Ohio, present a conceptual model for undergraduate leadership development, providing specific curricular and pedagogical approaches to meet mastery of the skill.
“The goal is to help people in higher education think in a more organized way about what they want to accomplish and how they can set their programs up to get there,” Rosch shared in a June 11 press release.
The background: Leadership, one of the National Association of Colleges and Employers’ eight career-readiness competencies, is a student’s ability to recognize and capitalize on personal and team strengths to achieve organizational goals.
Despite the common acceptance that engaged students are better prepared to lead modern organizations and communities than their less-engaged peers, there is limited evidence on how or why that is the case, according to the paper.
“We seek to advance not another new theory for leader development, but rather an argument for what leader development should be and why and how it should be taught in postsecondary education,” the authors wrote.
The model: Rosch and Allen’s model is centered on two key priorities: leadership skill mastery (defined as horizontal development) and increasing maturity in student meaning-making (vertical development).
Horizontal development includes communication and listening skills, decision-making techniques, conflict management, negotiation, influence strategies, and building and managing diverse and culturally competent teams. These skills are necessary but not always sufficient to lead practically. Mastery of conflict management concepts doesn’t mean much if a leader does not apply them in the appropriate context, showing how knowledge is paired with meaning-making.
Vertical development, therefore, is the practical application of leadership contexts using wisdom and maturity. Constructive developmental theory highlights how adults learn to take on the perspectives of those around them, confront the limitations of their own opinions and reframe their perspectives based on their environment and how context may shift.
Based on this theory, report authors argue it should be the goal of higher education institutions to not just teach leadership within textbook theory but also develop mental complexity to recognize how and when to apply tools.
Put in practice: To achieve these developmental goals, the authors borrow a model for adult learning and provide five orientations for learning—cognitive learning, behavioral learning, constructive learning, humanistic learning and social-cognitive learning.
Defining Terms
The report authors describe five orientations:
- Cognitive learning focuses on knowledge acquisition, information processing and developing internal cognitive structures. In leadership, this means mastering leadership theory.
- Behavioral learning emphasizes skill development, eliciting a behavior change in the learner.
- Constructive learning, or personal meaning-making, combines the cognitive and behavioral through critical reflection. This is not the same as vertical development, which prioritizes situation-based assessment, allowing students to identify solutions to complex scenarios with maturity.
- Humanistic learning teaches students how to self-actualize and develop personal goals.
- Social-cognitive learning guides learners through how environment and people in a culture shape learning, helping them interact with those who have more skills or experience (such as a mentor).
The ideal leadership development course integrates the five orientations into learning outcomes and facilitates educational experiences not in siloed capacities, but in ways that allow students to use all skills.
Examples of this could be a multiple-choice exam to assess theoretical concepts, role playing to teach behaviors, essay reflection on ethical leadership practices and how that aligns with the students’ career goals or past behaviors, or learning from a guest with experience in the field.
“These forms of integration are common within many academic programs across disciplines,” the authors share. “Still, we call for the architects of these programs to be more intentional in building opportunities for learning across all five orientations to ensure that each is substantially represented within the student experience.”
Some skills that can benefit deep learning of these concepts include cognitive bias awareness, mindfulness, active listening, perspective-taking capacity, dialectical thinking, reflection and reflexivity.
Professors can also consider how their pedagogy can improve learning outcomes, such as norm setting, building a community-holding environment, supporting students’ emotions and ensuring appropriate amounts of challenge and support within the classroom.
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