Reflection Handbook
At the Center for Leadership & Service we strongly believe in the importance of reflection.
Take it from Einstein:
"Action without reflection leads to burnout. Reflection without action leads to cynicism." -Albert Einstein
The center offers a reflection handbook that we encourage you to use whenever you want to host a reflection for your group or for yourself individually.
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Reclaiming Higher Education’s Purpose in Leadership Development
Kathy L. Guthrie and Laura Osteen
In order to develop the quality and quantity of diverse leaders necessary to create the change our global society is calling for, institutions must reclaim leadership development as a central purpose of higher education and embrace leadership development across disciplines, thereby making it everyone’s business. This volume focuses on our collective and unique capacity as higher education faculty, staff, and stakeholders to leverage and align resources with leadership learning across college and university departments and initiatives. It also seeks to educate all of us on the purposes and processes of weaving leadership development into the fabric of higher education.
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Creating Meaningful Environments for Leadership Education
Kathy L. Guthrie and Sara Thompson
As leadership educators we aim to provide students with opportunities necessary to gain knowledge and appropriate leadership skills. Valuable opportunities developed through Student Affairs and Academic Affairs collaborations which enhance learning through co-curricular and curricular experiences in leadership education will be explored. Present in these intentional environments are opportunities for students to have meaningful leadership learning when comprised of education, experience, and reflection. Specific examples from two institutions will be highlighted.
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Academic Leadership Programs in the United States
Kathy L. Guthrie, Trisha S. Teig, and Pei Hu
The Academic Leadership Programs in the United States project seeks to extend our knowledge on academic leadership programs in hopes to understand our current state and our future. We have released a report to share preliminary analysis conducted by the Leadership Learning Research Center of data from the International Leadership Association’s (ILA) Leadership Program Directory (ILA, 2016) and data captured from institutional websites detailing program type, courses, and descriptions. This information provides demographic descriptive data of leadership-related programs in the United States. This study implemented a descriptive analysis of the data contained in the ILA Leadership Program Directory database and additional data collected through Leadership Learning Research Center (LLRC) research of program websites.
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Service Learners and Their Sites: Exploring Four Primary Tensions
Steve Mills
This presentation explores the four potent tensions between service-learning students and their community agency hosts. These tensions results from naturally opposing perspectives and are reflected in the service-learners and their community host co-educators, it is prudent for service-learning educators to confront the vulnerabilities inherent in this relationship. Each tension proposed here is elucidated by targeted responses from service-learners and agency hosts, and accompanied by procedural suggestions and adaptive frames for understanding and reconciling these potentially destructive dynamics when possible. A final discussion considers the implications of a cultural shift in service-learning where the costs of this pedagogical approach are more openly and thoroughly considered.
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Translation That Transforms: Leadership and the Working Poor
Steve Mills
Translational science, at its core, is about knowledge making a positive difference in the well-being of others (Evans, 2012). This article explores how student attitudes, beliefs, and actions toward impoverished and working poor Americans were influenced by a data- and experience-driven understanding of this population. The context is an undergraduate course called ADE 4930: Leadership and the Working Poor, a 3-credit, service-learning course requiring students to become Internal Revenue Service–certified tax preparers and provide 40 hours of free tax preparation assistance to the working poor. Students translated empirical evidence and data offered by ADE4930 through three primary applications: (a) behavioral guidance related to tax preparation and the Earned Income Tax Credit, (b) attitudinal shifts about poverty related to structural disadvantages and the psychological impact of scarcity, and (c) social policy sophistication related to political compromise and the complexity of personal experience.
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Students' Perception of the Role of Reflection in Leadership Learning
Jillian V. White
Reflection covers both the cognitive process and the broad range of activities that enhance learning resulting from experience. While much of what we know about reflection is rooted in experiential learning, leadership education programs which frame leadership as an experience could benefit from a richer understanding of reflection in students' learning. The purpose of this study was to discover how students perceived the role of reflection. This study explored the function of reflection in the formal classroom setting and co-curricular experiences. Findings reveal students make deep connection between leadership learning and reflection, prefer contemplation to written reflection and struggle with forced reflections.