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Teaching leaders to mobilize adaptive work.

Article Excerpt
Abstract

Leadership theories, from "great man" theories to calls for leaders to create transformational change, portray an image of leadership as grandiose. Heroic images of leaders may suggest to practitioners that the enactment of these theories is unrealistic and leave students enrolled in leadership education courses feeling disempowered to bridge theory to practice. This article details the use of a problem-based approach in a graduate course on leadership that focused attention on how leaders can mobilize adaptive work to respond to leadership challenges.

Introduction

Much debate exists over whether leaders are born or made and contributes to the dilemma "can leadership be taught?" Gardner (1990) replies emphatically "yes." However, scholars note teaching and learning leadership requires more than formal instruction (Cronin, 1995; Gardner, 1990; Rost, 1991). In courses that convey knowledge about leadership, one would need mainly to focus on defining a domain of knowledge and then engage the students in thinking about the subject. However, teachers must go beyond courses that risk portraying leadership as an abstraction rooted in theories void of the context of a leader's daily practice; absent an understanding about what it means to participate in leadership roles and processes. As an instructor of a graduate course on leadership in educational organizations, I was faced with this instructional challenge: how could I enable students to integrate knowledge and values in leadership behavior, and equip them to use knowledge of leadership and their imagination to create new responses to leadership situations that are not clear-cut.

My years of college teaching (2002-07) have been grounded in a commitment to application: cultivating the ability of students to apply scholarship in their daily settings as higher educational administrators. Recent scholarship on teaching and learning illuminates shifts in thinking about college pedagogy; notably it emphasizes a need to rethink the relationship between theory and practice, observing that traditional application-of-theory model appears to be rather ineffective (Korthagen & Kessels, 1999). Studies of student learning are advocating "reversing the long-held strategy of first immersing students in theory and then giving them clinical experience where they are expected to draw from their previous learning" (Yohannes, 2007). Motivated by these calls to rethink existing theory-to-practice models, I sought a teaching and learning strategy that would challenge students to identify a problem facing leaders in higher education, analyze this issue by drawing upon one or more leadership theories, and explicate a position on this issue. This paper describes my use of a problem-based approach in a graduate course on leadership that focused attention on how leaders can mobilize adaptive work to respond to organizational challenges in post-secondary education. First, 1...

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