Student leadership and activism for social change in the US.

Deepening leadership identity development.

Reviewed by: College Student Leadership Development by Valerie I. Sessa Paige Haber-Curran College Student Leadership Development Valerie I. Sessa New York, NY: Routledge, 2017, 213 pages, $49.95 (softcover) Informed by her research on college student leaders, Valerie I. Sessa focuses College Student Leadership Development on how students can learn leadership and develop as leaders. The book serves as a resource to college students, providing a learning model for intentionally guiding one's leadership development. In acknowledging that many skills-based models of leadership exist, Sessa aims to focus less on what one should learn (i.e., skills and behaviors) and more on how one can learn leadership. Sessa has a background in industrial and organizational psychology and has experience as a faculty member in academia, a research scientist and director at the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL), and an organizational consultant. The definition of leadership presented in the book, "accomplishment of three tasks: direction, alignment, and commitment" (p. xiv), is influenced by the CCL's approach to leadership. This definition allows for individuals, regardless of whether or not they hold a positional role, to participate in the tasks of leadership through developing direction and vision, working together through alignment, and committing to the vision by making it a priority. [End Page 255] The author bases this book on research she and her colleagues conducted on college student leaders (Sessa, Morgan, Kalenderli, & Hammand, 2014). In their study, Sessa et al. (2014) sought to extend research on the leadership competencies and skills learned by successful business executives, which was conducted by CCL researchers in the 1980s (Lindsey, Homes, & McCall, 1987), by replicating the study with college students. The study focused on key developmental events that college student leaders said they experienced and key learning lessons gained from these events. Such events included tackling challenging assignments, receiving mentorship, taking a leadership course, and engaging with peers. The first three chapters in the book set the foundation of learning and leadership for the rest of the book by introducing the reader to the concept of leadership and helping the reader connect with the topic, presenting key fundamentals about learning and specifically learning leadership. Sessa emphasizes four leadership learning outcomes: learning about oneself as a leader (i.e., leader identity); learning about different ways to think about leadership and leaders, learning key leader skills and competencies, and learning formal leadership knowledge (i.e., models, theories, language). The next five chapters are framed around the ReAChS model for leadership development, which includes the four components of reflection, assessment, challenge, and support. Sessa developed the model by integrating components of CCL's Assessment, Challenge, and Support Model of leadership development (McCauley, VanVelsor, & Ruderman, 2010) and a systems analysis organizational learning model that she and a colleague developed (London & Sessa, 2006). The ReAChS model is meant to be a tool for students to "take control of [their] leadership learning and development while in college and beyond" (p. 38) and includes four components. Reflection focuses on stepping back from an experience in order to examine it and make meaning of it. Assessment involves learning more about oneself including one's strengths, developmental needs, leadership effectiveness, motivation, self-efficacy for leadership, and personality or character traits. Challenges are described as "learning triggers" that are new experiences requiring skills or perspectives that haven not yet been used or developed. Support focuses on the network of people who can assist in one's learning process. The ReAChS chapters include a range of reflection prompts, exercises, self-assessment exercises, and other tools. These interactive components invite readers to make meaning of their experience, personalize the content, and consider how they can intentionally craft their leadership development journey. There are also many examples from student leaders and excerpts from Sessa et al.'s (2014) research. The book closes with a chapter on synthesizing and communicating one's leadership story. Sessa provides guidance on creating a leadership learning and development portfolio that includes many components such as accomplishment stories; verbiage about jobs, positions, experiences to highlight on a resume; and a personal statement on leadership. The hands-on and interactive exercises can help readers better understand their own leadership learning and effectively communicate...

On campuses across the country, students and professional staff are considering student interfaith leadership as one way that students act on their core values to make a positive difference in the world. This kind of student leadership can be framed through student leadership models like the social change model of leadership development. Better Together, a national campaign for student interfaith action, draws heavily on this leadership model to offer a framework specific to student interfaith leadership. The authors of this article describe interfaith leadership using a leadership development model with which many higher education professionals are familiar.

Present day leaders grapple with a dynamic environment of evolving challenges. Prior leadership studies have afforded revisions of leadership theories in an attempt to remain relevant with the prominently shifting environment. The leadership models that underscore college leadership development programs should reflect the updated theories and practices which expose student leaders to solving complex problems they will experience. This study explores the knowledge, skills, and abilities needed for college students to be able to conceptualize and address system’s level leadership challenges. Foremost, the study examined instructional tools and methods that students found impactful for improving conceptualization and achievement of systems-level leadership skills necessary to create desired change. I utilized a phenomenological research tradition, which examined the teaching techniques, theories, and models utilized for leadership development in a university co-curricular setting. The research process facilitated a depth of understanding of how leadership development training impacts the lived experiences and affects student leaders. The hermeneutic phenomenological design enabled the exploration of similar and differentiating themes among student leaders’ experiences (Moustakas, 1964). These themes informed hermeneutic conversations as participants were encouraged to reflect on their experience during the focus groups that were one means of collecting my data (Van Manen, 2011). To uncover a better understanding of this phenomenon, this study examined individual student’s practices, and analyzed the responses from fellow students who work alongside the leaders at a large research university located in a metropolitan area of the Southeastern U.S. Since leaders’ roles and behaviors vary and depend on interactions with other students, this qualitative, interpretive method in a social construct context, seemed a most appropriate way to investigate the phenomenon of systems level leadership (Hays & Singh, 2012).

ABSTRACTThis study employs a bibliometric analysis to comprehensively explore 278 publications in student leadership from 1930 to 2023, mapping the literature in the field and revealing research trends, themes and potential areas of research. This study applied the biblioMagika tool and OpenRefine to clean and harmonise the messy data. The biblioMagika tool, VOSviewer and Biblioshiny software were used for data analysis. The United States is the most significant contributor to the literature in this field. Kristin Janke stands out as the most influential author in the field. Through co‐occurrence and thematic analyses, the study revealed changes in keywords such as ‘leadership’, ‘student leadership’ and ‘leadership development’. The results provide insights into the current landscape of student leadership research, guide future research directions, foster international collaboration and encourage further exploration in this field.

DIANE L. DIXON is managing principal of D. Dixon & Associates LLC, specializing in health care leadership and organizational development. She also has taught leadership and organizational behavior for the business of medicine program at Johns Hopkins University and holds a doctorate in human resource development from George Washington University, Washington. Does your long-term care organization need change? For instance, is your nursing home stuck in the old institutional model? Are you thinking about how you might lead that change? Are you pondering what it will take to do so? There is no quick prescription or handy tool kit for making yourself into a leader who can overcome an organization's inertia. But there are useful guidelines for developing the skills required for leading change. To start, the emphasis should be on looking to see if you're ready to be a change leader. Are you ready to lead change? A good place to begin is with introspection about your willingness to embrace new ways of thinking about yourself within the context of your long-term care organization. Before getting much further, it's important to make sense of change semantics. The use of words and phrases related to organizational change can cause confusion. “Leading change,” “change agent,” and “culture change” are not jargon, but they're sometimes misused or overused. Then, they become clichés that lose the power of their meaning. But these terms do have real significance in long-term care and health care delivery overall. Are you a medical director who, as part of the leadership team, feels responsible for improving your organization's care of residents overall? Are you a director of nursing who sees the need to improve care quality at several levels of the organization? Are you a nurse practitioner who wishes to facilitate dialogue among all the people working in your nursing home about how to improve teamwork? Are you an administrator who embraces change and understands that the organizational culture is influenced by your leadership? Are you a department manager or neighborhood coordinator who sees himself or herself continuously working with others to discover new ways to deliver quality care? Are you a consulting pharmacist who wants to be an active participant on an interdisciplinary team? Introspection and reflection are the foundation for leadership development. It's essential that you be willing to engage in these processes and accept that the first thing needing change could well be you. It is important to look through this individual lens to understand your potential leadership role in long-term care. This then can move you to develop your personal capacity to lead and forge the vital relationships required for a collective commitment to change within your organization. Leadership development requires assessments of both your inner capacities and your abilities to lead others. The two sets of self-assessment questions that I've developed are based on the work of David V. Day, PhD (Leadership Quarterly 2000;11:581–613). Your answers to the questions listed on this page may create a framework for getting started on the journey to leading long-term care change. Reflecting on the questions and taking time to answer them honestly is the groundwork for your leadership development plan. As you begin, consider your vision for your organization. The effort will lead you in the right direction for your personal development plan. Focus on your strengths and how you can further enhance them. The areas for growth you identify aren't weaknesses. They're opportunities for learning and development. Start by focusing on a few critical competency areas that will make a significant difference in your ability to lead change. Here are some suggested components of your plan: ▸ Goals: Make them specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, results oriented, and time focused. ▸ Strategies: Action plans, with time frames, used to achieve goals. ▸ Critical relationships: Interactions you'll need with mentors, coaches, partners, and others who can provide support. ▸ Accountability: Details of how you will hold yourself accountable for completing the plan. ▸ Indicators of Success: Methods of determining the impact of achieving the goals. Thinking about leading change in long-term care can be daunting in the midst of competing priorities. But don't let that hold you back at a time when the field needs leadership and change more than ever. Moving forward with your own development as a leader will help make the effort manageable and fulfilling. What's important is getting started.

Leadership continuity is essential for maintaining organizational performance, strategic stability, and long-term competitiveness. Nevertheless, many organizations encounter challenges during leadership transitions, often due to inadequate succession planning, insufficient leadership development frameworks, and the diminishing of organizational memory. This conceptual paper examines the relationship between succession planning, leadership development, and organizational memory. Succession planning enables organizations to proactively identify and prepare future leaders, thereby minimizing disruptions resulting from leadership changes. Leadership development is focused on systematically equipping high-potential employees with the essential skills, competencies, and experiences needed to step into leadership roles. Additionally, organizational memory—composed of institutional knowledge, historical insights, and experiential learning—plays a crucial role in safeguarding strategic knowledge and leadership expertise during transitions. The integration of these three components creates a robust leadership pipeline, reduces the risks associated with leadership voids, and fortifies the retention of institutional knowledge. This paper provides a critical analysis of existing literature concerning executive transitions, talent management, and knowledge retention, aiming to establish interlinks among these variables. The study emphasizes how organizations can utilize structured mentorship programs, knowledge transfer strategies, and leadership development initiatives to facilitate seamless leadership transitions. Furthermore, it addresses the obstacles to effective leadership continuity, such as short-term mindsets in succession planning, the failure to institutionalize leadership knowledge, and resistance to leadership changes. This conceptual paper adds value to both academic research and managerial practices by synthesizing insights from human resource management, strategic leadership, and organizational behavior. The findings highlight the necessity for organizations to embrace a comprehensive approach to leadership continuity, integrating succession planning, leadership development, and organizational memory into a unified strategy. The paper concludes with recommendations for policymakers, HR professionals, and corporate leaders on promoting sustainable leadership transitions in dynamic and competitive environments.

To the Editor: Calls for increased physician leadership are growing in number and strength.1–3 The recent proliferation of leadership curricula in medical schools and residency programs suggests that educators are beginning to believe that focused leadership development efforts early in medical education could produce more and better-trained physician leaders. Our own experience developing an innovative leadership education and development program in the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Medicine is consistent with study findings at the Mayo Medical School, in which 85% of student leaders felt leadership should be taught in medical school.4 We are convinced that students enter medical school with an interest in leadership and a desire to build their skills. Yet medical curricula have been slow to develop frameworks in support of these interests. To harness this enthusiasm, medical schools must actively strive to facilitate leadership education. Toward this end, we offer five evidence-based suggestions: Leadership development programs should be student focused and flexible, encourage formal mentorship, expose students to disciplines outside of medicine, be rigorously evaluated, and engage accreditation agencies to measure and promote leadership development. Two meta-analyses, covering studies from 1951 to 2001, demonstrated that leadership development programs can be effective across many disciplines, particularly when they are tailored to the needs of the trainee and reflect the objectives of the organization.5,6 These formalized approaches, which mix lessons in theory with practical experiences, should be used to help medical students realize their leadership potential. Amol A. Verma, MD, MPhil Resident in internal medicine, University of Toronto Faculty of Medicine, Toronto, Ontario, Canada; [email protected] Jordan D. Bohnen, MD, MBA Resident in general surgery, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts.

The chapter explores student-athlete campus engagement and challenges faced by athletes that may impede leadership development. The roles of athletic academic advisors, team coaches, and teammates in leadership development are outlined. Current campus initiatives directly related to intercollegiate athlete leadership development are also shared.

A major challenge facing leadership development programs is the discontinuity between their short-term nature and their long-term goals. This article describes a programmatic response to this problem: leadership portfolios. Developed for use in the Tri District Collaborative, a coalition of three high schools in Oakland County Michigan, the portfolio system enhances students' leadership abilities by extending the learning begun in the Tri District's year-long Student Leadership Academy. Although experience with the use of portfolios in leadership development remains in its early stages, they appear to hold considerable promise as a strategy for extending, enriching, and deepening a wide variety of leadership programs.

There is very little evidence of dental schools offering leadership or career development training for students. Given that tertiary students come from diverse backgrounds with differing experiences, it is important that all students learn skills that improve their employability by preparing them for a range of career paths and equipping them with the confidence to lead their profession into the future. This study mapped current leadership and career development training in dental education programmes throughout Australia, focusing on the capacity, barriers and enablers. In 2018, an electronic survey was sent to the Program Convenors of all nineteen dental programmes in Australia. Survey questions were sourced from existing literature and the current regulatory competencies. Whilst the majority of respondents (n=17, 89% response rate) indicated that their programmes included both leadership training (72%) and career development activities (88%), it is clear that the content focus, hours allocated and assessment items vary widely across the country. Further, curriculum appeared to focus almost exclusively on clinical work, which does not provide an avenue for students to explore alternative, non-clinical career options or pathways or develop their skills beyond treating individual patients. Time constraints and ideological differences were reported as the biggest barriers to implementing leadership and career development curricula. Despite an inconsistent approach nationally, it appears there is an opportunity for faculty across institutions to collaborate, potentially to develop a set of leadership and career development competencies and best practice teaching and learning activities.

Leadership plays a crucial role in creating a vision, pursuing a mission, and establishing organizational strategies. People express their leadership styles in various ways. A leader's effectiveness is defined by their performance in directing and influencing activities to achieve objectives (Dabke, 2016). This quantitative study investigated the relationship between leadership styles and skills awareness among student leaders at a state university. Utilizing a structured questionnaire, the study examined four definite leadership styles: Authoritative, Democratic, Facilitative, and Situational, alongside an extensive Skills Awareness Scale. A purposive sample of 43 student leaders, primarily under the age of 23, were included in the study. Of these, 61.9 % were female and 38.1 % were male. To examine the relationships between skill awareness and leadership methods, data were gathered and analyzed using ANOVA, multiple regression, chi-square tests, and descriptive statistics. The results of the study showed a moderate level of general skills awareness (mean = 3.341), suggesting a considerable amount of room for skill development. Although student leaders showed flexibility to many leadership styles, the authoritative approach stood out as uniquely significant. Students with more authoritative tendencies are likely to have better skills awareness, according to a statistically significant link between skills awareness and authoritative leadership (r = 0.318, p .040). No statistically significant differences in leadership styles were found by the one-way ANOVA test (p =.193), suggesting that student leaders take a flexible, nuanced approach rather than rigidly following one leadership styles. With the exception of the authoritative style, the Kruskal-Wallis test further demonstrated that leadership styles do not substantially alter levels of skill awareness. These results highlight the value of focused leadership development initiatives that support student leaders in developing their skills, especially in establishing authoritative leadership traits. The study advances knowledge of the intricate relationships between developing student leaders' leadership styles and skill awareness.

BackgroundThe format and content of leadership development programmes for physicians is a theme for discussion in the literature.ObjectivesThe aim of this study is to explore healthcare executives’ perspectives on physician...

Obama vs McCain on global health

Non-Native English Speakers and the Development of Socially Responsible Leadership During College Jiajun Liu (bio), Shouping Hu (bio), and Ernest T. Pascarella (bio) Developing leadership capacity for college students is a fundamental goal of higher education institutions (Astin & Astin, 2000). Contemporary perspectives consider leadership development of college students to be a process toward equity, social responsibility, and positive changes to the community (HERI, 1996). This process values the importance of understanding oneself and working with others for college students from all backgrounds. Further, promoting socially responsible leadership among college students is increasingly important with the ongoing pandemic and the growing awareness of racial injustice. At the same time, colleges and universities have been striving to meet the needs of diverse student populations. Since conveying ideas and working in teams are integral in leadership development, language background can be an important factor shaping college students' leadership capacities. In this study, we were interested in the leadership development of non-native English-speaking (NNES) students. NNES students are likely to be Students of Color, immigrants, or born in the US but speak another language at home (Liu et al., 2019; Nuñez et al., 2016). These students are receiving increased attention given their growing numbers in educational systems. According to the U.S. Census Bureau (2020), about 1 in 5 US residents speaks a language other than English at home. To date, there remains a dearth of knowledge regarding the leadership development of this student group. This presents a challenge to postsecondary educators and practitioners in their effort to meet the needs of these students. As such, the research question guiding our study was: Is being a non-native English speaker related to student leadership development during college? LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT AND NNES STUDENTS Perspectives on leadership development have evolved over time (Astin & Astin, 2000). Early research at the college level examined the attributes of student leaders (Astin, 1993). Later, scholars advocated for exposing all students to socially responsible leadership as a process for acquiring the values and perspectives necessary for leading positive changes. As such, leadership development should not focus on a select few [End Page 218] but on all who desire to work with others and make changes (HERI, 1996). More recent studies have explored the influence of student demographics on leadership development. Dugan et al. (2008) found that women had higher scores than men on socially responsible leadership. Hu (2011) examined high-achieving low-income students and found that scholarship awards can motivate students to engage during college and, hence, gain desired leadership development. Duckworth (2002) suggested that family values and cultural networks could influence the leadership involvement of international students. For NNES students, coming from a different language background can influence how ideas are communicated and understood. Additionally, NNES students tend to be less engaged during college due to family responsibilities and financial constraints (Nuñez et al., 2016), suggesting that they may experience difficulties in developing leadership capacity. The present study explored this possibility. CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK This study drew on linguistic capital and the social change model (SCM) for theoretical guidance. According to Bourdieu (1977), the dominant language in a society is imbued with symbolic capital—that is, linguistic capital. Individuals speaking the dominant language possess communicative codes that can help them better access legitimate resources. For those who do not speak the dominant language, their ability to gain desired resources and outcomes can be limited. Linguistic capital is related to other forms of capital. More linguistic capital can help an individual gain other forms of capital, such as social capital. The SCM conceptualizes socially responsible leadership as inherently connected with making changes to benefit the common good (HERI, 1996). It includes eight core values: consciousness of self (awareness of one's values and beliefs), congruence (consistency between actions and thinking), commitment (motivation and passion to serve), collaboration (team effort to achieve common goals), common purpose (ability to work with shared goals and values), controversy with civility (being able to accept different viewpoints and discuss the differences openly with civility), citizenship (connections to community and society through leadership activities), and change (adaptation to the changing environment while maintaining group values) (Dugan et al., 2008). In this study...