Teaching and Learning
This section presents questions that provide a focus for discussion of optimal pedagogies that enhance teaching and learning. Since student levels and learner state is directed related to choice of optimal methods, the questions have been placed on an appended matrix/grid as described below.
Vertical Axis: Teaching and Learning are discussed within the framework of Leadership Identity Development (LID) research conducted by Susan Komives[1]. The LID model forms the vertical axis on the matrix. The LID stage model was chosen because leadership educators work with various levels of students and learner states. Use of the LID stage model provides a systematic way to delineate the “Who,” that is, who are the learners we teach, who are the leaders we are developing?
Horizontal Axis: The six guiding questions form a horizontal axis on the matrix. The LID model of Komives and colleagues provides a framework to discuss the learners, thus, each guiding question below will be discussed through all six stages. The seventh guiding question below will be discussed across the previous six guiding questions. The seventh guiding question forms a second horizontal axis and runs as a thread through all six questions.
Vertical Axis: Leadership Identity Development Model:
· Stage One: Awareness
· Stage Two: Exploration
· Stage Three: Leader Identified
· Stage Four: Leader Differentiated
· Stage Five: Generativity
· Stage Six: Integration
Horizontal Axis: Guiding Questions:
· What are the concerns and issues of teaching and learning at each LID stage?
· What is the role of the instructor, the teaching methodology, and approached to teaching at each LID stage?
· What are the expected learning outcomes at each LID stage (see section 5)?
· What are the roles and responsibilities of the learners at each LID stage?
· What are possible learning activities, projects, and/or experiences appropriate for each LID stage?
· What are the key philosophical and/or theoretical concepts and/or beliefs the provide support in each LID stage (see section 1)?
· What are the social and cultural contexts/issues/concerns in which teaching and learning take place across the guiding questions (see section 2)?
[1] Komives, S. R., Longerbeam, S., Owen, J. E., Mainella, F. C., & Osteen, L. (2006). A leadership identity development model: Applications from a grounded theory. Journal of College Student Development (47), 401-420.
Leadership Identity Development Model: Overview
by Susan Komives
In the Teaching and Learning Section guiding questions were framed from grounded research on leadership identity development. Leadership identity emerges in six stages. Each stage ends with a transition, which signals the leaving of that stage and the beginning of the next stage.
The first stage, Awareness, is the early recognition that leaders exist. This view of leadership is external to the self; participants do not personally identify as a leader or differentiate group roles. The second stage, Exploration/Engagement, is a time of intentional involvement, experiencing groups, and taking on responsibilities, though not generally in a positional leadership role. In this developing stage, leaders often engage in a myriad of organizations and activities such as swim teams, church bible study groups, dance, boy scouts, student council, and community service. Their involvement is often unfocused. In the third stage, Leader Identified, students acknowledge that groups were comprised of leaders and followers and the leaders “do” leadership. In this leader-centric stage, one is a leader if one holds a leadership position. Students can readily identify leaders as those in charge or those who take on responsibility for group outcomes. Students become intentional about their group roles in this stage.
In stage four, Leadership Differentiated, students recognize leadership as a process and not just a characteristic of a person. Students enter this stage with a new awareness that people in organizations are highly interdependent and that leadership is happening all around them. They are more intentional about their own role in groups, whether from a positional or contributor role. If one is in a positional leadership role, there is a commitment to engage in a way that develops others, invites participation, and shares responsibility. If students are in a positional leadership role they begin to view this role as a facilitator, community builder, and shaper of the group’s culture. There are two phases in each of stages three and four. An emerging phase clarifies the ways students try on the identity early in the stage while the immersion phase is the practicing or living-with that identify. These stages are discussed further in Komives, et al, 2004. In stage five, Generativity, students become actively committed to larger purposes and to the groups and individuals who sustain them. Students enter this stage and seek to articulate a personal passion for what they do. These passions seem to be connected to the values they identify as important in their lives. Additionally, to accept responsibility for developing others and for sustaining organizations, they recognize that younger group members were in a developmental place that they themselves used to experience.
Stage six, Integration/Synthesis, is a time of continual, active engagement with leadership as a daily process, as a part of self. Students at this stage are committed to continual leadership self-development and life-long learning. They are increasing in internal confidence and striving for congruence and integrity. Those in, or approaching, this stage seem to be confident that they could work effectively with other people in diverse contexts whether they are the positional leaders or active group members. They generally identify themselves as leaders using the term in the broadest sense and seem to believe they had found their “niche.” Even if they did not own the title of leader, they seem to have a confident identity of a person who does leadership. Students in this stage are comfortable with organizational complexity, systemic thinking, and contextual uncertainty.
The essential components that foster the development of a leadership identity include the properties of the role of adults, the role of peers, involvement experiences, and reflective learning. Each of these properties has dimension and changes across the stages of the core category.
1. What are the concerns and issues of teaching and learning at each LID stage?
Abstract by Julie Owen
Because the Leadership Identity Development (LID) model presupposes a developmental process it is tempting to want to “teach” students more complex ways of being. It must be clarified that, as with any developmental process, educators can’t make students change. We can only facilitate the creation of conditions and communities where change might occur. This is especially tempting, for example, when looking at the stage three (leader identified) to stage four (leadership differentiated) transition. It is only natural that leadership educators want students to learn to move beyond leader-centric thinking, to viewing leadership as a collaborative, relational process that can occur from anywhere in an organization.
Though we may not be able to “teach” students into stage four thinking, the development of the LID model did allow for the identification of several elements that might be useful as educators develop environments that spark students to transition from thinking of leadership as the province of the privileged few, to thinking about it as a relational process among any group of involved people. Some of these elements include: providing opportunities for students to intentionally learn theories and models of leadership; intentionally designing group processes in ways that encourage interdependence; encouraging both depth and breadth of organizational commitment; and assuring access to caring adults or older peer mentors.
This “guidelines” document examines the transition phases between each of the stages of leadership identity development model and how leadership educators can intentionally encourage essential processes that promote increasingly complex leadership identities.
(Adapted from: Owen, J. (2004). From ‘me’ to ‘we’: Facilitating relational leadership identity development, Concepts & Connections, 12 (3), 9-11.)
2. What is the role of the instructor, the teaching methodology, and approaches to teaching at each LID stage?
Abstract by Carolyn Roper
The guiding question in this section is, “What is the role of the instructor, the teaching methodology, and approaches to teaching at each LID stage?” The 2003 CAS leadership standard describes three approaches to leadership instruction as training, education, or development. The Komives six-stage LID model offers a bridge from traditional theories of leadership to today’s understanding of the leadership construct vis-à-vis the transformational, relationship, and related models. While long-standing methods and approaches to instruction may complement the first two CAS approaches and the first three Komives’ stages, didactic methods fail in the higher aims of developing leaders.
Thus leadership instructors must ponder the question of how one develops leaders; in what roles, by which methods, and with what approaches? Engaging in dialogue to find these answers is less complex if the discussants rely on the Komives’ stages as a framework for conversations about selecting methods appropriate for each stage among such choices as lecture and story telling, discussion, modeling, roleplay, observing, guiding with reflection, coaching with practice inside and outside the classroom, mentoring, service learning, and internships. One can contemplate a future ILA program that lays out a common vision of the path along which to guide students from leadership awareness to exploration to identity and (importantly) differentiation, sometimes continuing on to generativity and integration.
3. What are the expected learning outcomes at each LID stage?
Abstract by Julie Owen
In 2004, ACPA and NASPA came together to produce Learning Reconsidered, a powerful document that argues for the integrated use of all of higher education’s resources in the education and preparation of the whole student. This document introduces new ways of understanding and supporting student learning that are especially congruent with the developmental processes outlined in the Leadership Identity Development (LID) model. Learning Reconsidered presents as learning and development intertwined, inseparable elements of the student experience. It advocates for transformative education – a holistic process of learning that places the student at the center of the learning experience. Since many leadership education efforts include both curricular and co-curricular elements, the integrative nature of this document is especially useful in identifying and classifying expected learning outcomes at each stage of the LID model.
The core processes of the LID model show how one’s developing self interacts with others in increasingly complex ways which results in broadening views of leadership.
Individual learning outcomes such as self-awareness, self-efficacy, and self confidence interact with group level outcomes such as collective efficacy, collaboration, and organizational citizenship. Clear learning outcomes can be identified that document this shift from dependence to independence, and then to interdependence.
This “guidelines” document examines both intra- and inter-personal learning outcomes across the stages of the LID model, and demonstrates how they can be classified into broader learning outcomes as identified by Learning Reconsidered.
4. What are the roles and responsibilities of the learners at each LID stage?
Abstract by Dan Tillapaugh
This “guidelines” document examines the intersections of psychosocial and cognitive development and leadership identity development as it relates to learners’ self-responsibility for growth and change.
When participating in curricular or co-curricular leadership programs, every student is at a unique developmental stage. As collaborators in their education, educators want our students to grow and develop, but ultimately it is the responsibility of the learner to do so. Educators must be aware that the Leadership Identity Development model intersects student development theory and post-industrial leadership theory.
Cognitive and psychosocial development plays a significant role in a student’s ability to identify him- or herself as a leader. The more complex one’s cognitive or psychosocial development is, the higher the capacity for the learner to be in a more advanced stage of leadership identity development. As educators, we cannot “teach” our students to reach more complex stages of leadership identity, but we can provide opportunities for learners to take that on themselves.
The Leadership Identity Development model represents a movement from passive awareness of leadership to an active, participatory role for the learner to a “big picture” understanding of leadership. While educators can offer opportunities for students, it is the learner’s obligation to open him- or herself to the necessary exploratory work to grow. Some examples of this work include involving one’s self in a team or group, taking on a positional leadership role, assisting in the organization from a positional or non-positional role, developing others within the organization, and attempting to be congruent in action and beliefs.
5. What are possible learning activities, projects, and/or experiences appropriate for each LID stage?
Abstract by Paige Haber, John Baker, Thomas Matthews
This “guidelines” document examines ways in which leadership educators can intentionally promote environments and opportunities to facilitate more complex levels of leadership identity development. This will include practical and concrete activities, projects, and experiences as well as overall concepts such as facilitation and reflection.
As we focus on LID it is only natural to ask ourselves how we can help facilitate students’ leadership identity development. Are there activities or experiences we can provide students that can help them better understand their present stage or progress to higher stages of LID?
The guiding questions for column one provide us with concerns that we cannot teach students into a higher and more complex way of viewing and practicing leadership. We can create environments and opportunities that can foster leadership development. These environments and opportunities can be created both inside and outside of the classroom.
The ideas we will explore here are what specific activities, projects or experiences will help students start to view and practice leadership in a different way. A key component will be an intentional focus on reflection, allowing students to apply insights from these activities to how they view themselves and other people in the leadership process.
The key LID transition between stages three and four of the model is where most leadership educators will focus their attention. This transition focuses on a shift from a leader-centric view to a more relational view of leadership. While this may be where most attention is focused, it is important that we provide learning opportunities at many different stages and recognize that each stage has an important role in the developmental process.
6. Who are the students we will be teaching? What are the key philosophical and/or theoretical concepts and/or beliefs the provide support in each LID stage?
Abstract by JoAnn Barbour
One guiding question in this section is “Which students will the leadership program target?” Will the program target undergraduates in a degree program, a minor program or a certificate program? Will the program target working adults or nonworking adults: in leadership positions, seeking certification, seeking graduate degrees, seeking continuing education or career advancement development, or career changes? Once the group of students is identified, a second set of guiding questions will be:
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Which philosophical or theoretical focus would be most appropriate for the leader-learners in this teaching environment, age group and experience level?
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Should teaching be based on traditional pedagogy or on nontraditional andragogy or pedagogy? Which philosophers or theorists should provide grounding to the needed approach?
Underlying the various differences and contexts in which leaders are developed and leadership is taught are theories of teaching and learning. However one teaches and for whatever purposes one teaches, one ought to have an underlying philosophy and theory of learning and teaching. Additionally, whatever one’s philosophy of teaching and learning, one ought to know the traditions from which this philosophy derives its strengths. Thus, when developing a leadership program, one ought to consider the key theories and philosophies of teaching and learning that would seem to provide a scaffold for the groups of leaders and future leaders taught, whether traditional or nontraditional programs of leadership education or development.
7. Regarding teaching and learning in leadership programs, what are the social and cultural contextual issues and understandings that ought to be considered in leadership programs?
Abstract by Betty Robinson
An understanding of social and cultural context (SCC) is relevant to all areas of these guidelines and particularly important to teaching and learning. Guiding questions in this area include:
1) How might the SCC impact students' and instructors' understanding of the processes of teaching and learning and their possible roles in these processes? What methods might be employed to increase their abilities to utilize a wider array of teaching/learning processes?
2) How might the SCC impact students' and instructors' understanding of leadership (as a process)? What methods will increase their knowledge, various dispositions, and/or skills of leadership?
Guideline Learning Community proposal final.doc
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