Joy, freedom, and benefit--the reasons we are at our colleges and universities. The joy of learning, the freedom to grow, and the benefit of education are all basic human rights, or at least they ought to be. We believe that both honors and faculty development affirm, support, and sustain those rights. We married in 2000, at the beginnings of our…

Leading by doing takes an unwavering and visible commitment to an intentional, continuous improvement process. Teams at every system level distribute leadership to support effective practice so outcomes improve. Using a practice-based approach to improving mathematics outcomes, the Kentucky Department of Education (KDE) facilitated a continuous…

Flexibility and readiness to change are not necessarily valued or recognized traits in higher education. Yet higher education is in a period of dramatic change, because of rapid change in scholarship and society. With this change in mind, I reflect here on the role and effect of scholar-administrators as agents of change.

In recent years, quality assurance (QA) in higher education has received increasing attention by academics, learners, institutions, and governments alike. Many open universities (OUs) have taken steps to re-define or re-orient their systems and practices to integrate quality. While there is a growing body of literature on QA best practices, there…

Monica Higgins is the Kathleen McCartney Professor of Education Leadership at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE), where her research and teaching focus on leadership development and organizational change. Drawing on a background that combines organizational behavior, business, and education, she works with senior education leaders…

The focus of this study is to examine seven municipalities that, in different ways, are working to recruit more men to work in preschools. The aim of the study is to identify different ways of working to recruit more men to work in preschools and to effect a change in the gender imbalance among the working staff in preschools. Relational agency is…

The reform of higher education institutions is no longer confined to the theoretical domain. This article describes some of the organizational developments that have occurred in Spanish public universities over the past decade. It does so from the perspective of the academics who staff universities, considering their perceptions on the nature and…

In a complex, multisite initiative, a well-developed theory of change can help an organization's leadership make strategic decisions about program elements, organizational direction and priorities, as well as provide structure and accountability for evaluation. This article describes the multistep process used by the evaluation team of a large…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of a training intervention designed to develop and encourage the use of coaching skills in a small arts-based organisation and assess the factors that appear to have influenced this impact. Design/methodology/approach: The programme, its effects and factors that influenced its impact were…

This article uses resource-dependence theory to analyse how academic mid-level leaders in Finnish universities respond to their changing post-reform management environments. The 2010 university reform and subsequent university-specific management reforms have created new positions and roles for academic leaders. By identifying critical resources,…

Small, private, liberal arts colleges are in a time of crisis. Many of these colleges are undergoing significant changes as a result of the external forces driving declining enrollment and increasing operating costs. At the same time, the average age of college presidents is increasing and average tenure is decreasing. In response, this intrinsic…

In "Applied Research for Sustainable Change," Sharon M. Ravitch and Nicole Mittenfelner Carl draw on twenty years of teaching and research to offer an incisive guide to practitioner-led qualitative research. They make the case for "local knowledge generation"--inquiry-based, school-level research that can contextualize…

Research clearly shows the lasting effects of early developmental experiences on children's later success and well-being; however, the early childhood field struggles to provide consistent high-quality care and education across a fragmented delivery system. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the programs for young children age 0-3. In 2013, the…

The terms "outcome" and "impact" are ubiquitous in evaluation discourse. However, there are many competing definitions that lack clarity and consistency and sometimes represent fundamentally different meanings. This leads to profound confusion, undermines efforts to improve learning and accountability, and represents a…

Clay Christensen predicted half of colleges and universities would go bankrupt or close within a decade. Each year brings more financial trouble: a quarter of all private nonprofit institutions experienced deficits in 2017. More than two-thirds (68 percent) of financial officers at four-year private colleges reported their tuition discount rate…