Leadership Training for Teacher-Scholars - ACS Publications

Chapter 4

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Leadership Training for Teacher-Scholars Rigoberto Hernandez,*,1 Marilyne Stains,2 Karen S. Bjorkman,3 Ashley Donovan,4 Peter K. Dorhout,5 Andrew L. Feig,6 Philip W. Hammer,7 Jennifer L. Ross,8 Jodi L. Wesemann,5 and Srikant K. Iyer1 1Department

of Chemistry, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland 21218, United States 2Department of Chemistry, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, Nebraska 68588, United States 3Department of Physics and Astronomy, College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, University of Toledo, Toledo, Ohio 43606, United States 4American Chemical Society, 1155 Sixteenth Street NW, Washington, DC 20036, United States 5Vice President for Research, Kansas State University, Manhattan, Kansas 66506-1005, United States 6Department of Chemistry, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan 48202, United States 7American Institute of Physics, 1 Physics Ellipse, College Park, Maryland 20740, United States 8Department of Physics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Massachusetts 01003, United States *E-mail: r. [email protected].

The Cottrell Scholars Collaborative (CSC) Academic Leadership Team (ALT) staged its first leadership workshop in February 2016. Its objective is to provide teacher-scholars with the theory and tools for effective leadership as well as exposure to the practice of being a leader in academia. Academic leadership is here defined to include research center directors, department heads, deans, or related institutional administrators. Our hypothesis is that this intentional approach to train future leaders will enable them to be more effective in such roles. In this article, we report the details of the first workshop, and its effectiveness as determined from pre- and post- assessments.

© 2017 American Chemical Society Waterman and Feig; Educational and Outreach Projects from the Cottrell Scholars Collaborative Professional Development ... ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2017.


Introduction Academic leadership takes many forms. It may include formal roles in university administration such as those of a department head, a college dean, and a university president or as a member of their leadership teams. It may include directors of research centers whose scope can fit within a department or extend across a college, the entire university, or even many universities. It may also include many other formal or volunteer roles both within the university and in one’s professional service. The principle of shared-governance suggests that professors should be the ones who take on most, if not all of these roles. They hold subject matter expertise in their discipline and have an understanding of the professional culture and practice necessary to provide vision and steer the mission of academic organizations. Unfortunately, one concern about academic career tracks is that they do not typically offer the requisite formal or informal leadership training to help emerging faculty leaders be most effective. Of course, there are several programs such as HERS (1), ELATE (2), and ELAM (3) that have also stepped in to bridge this gap. A second concern about the state of academic leadership hinges on the question over how the mission of colleges and universities is driven towards advancing and creating new knowledge (through research funded by the accompanying extramural research funds) or toward disseminating knowledge (in the classroom funded by the accompanying tuition and public funds.) It is the philosophy of the Cottrell Scholar faculty model that a strong integration of both of these threads is critical for the success of modern primarily undergraduate institutions (PUIs) and research intensive (RI) universities (4, 5). One approach for nudging these institutions towards integration is to motivate young faculty through research grants that require it, such as the National Science Foundation’s CAREER award and the Research Corporation’s Cottrell Scholar Award. As teacher-scholars rise through the faculty ranks, they should assume leadership roles in which they are able to impart a vision that integrates, rather than segregates, research and education. The Academic Leadership Training (ALT) (6) Workshop was conceived at a Cottrell Scholars Collaborative workshop and designed by a core group of Scholars in partnership with the American Chemical Society and the American Institute of Physics to provide targeted leadership training for emerging academic leaders who embrace the philosophy of the scholar who is committed to the integration of research and education. It is complementary to existing leadership programs in that it provides the foundation of knowledge of leadership in the context of academic culture and practices. The practical approach is highlighted through the use of targeted case studies and a mock interview to simulate the experience of an academic leader. All workshop modules are taught using effective teaching practices—such as active-learning— that have been validated and promoted by the discipline-based education research (DBER) community (7). The expected outcomes for the participating teacher-scholars are that they will be in a position to (a) be more competitive for those positions that they are applying for, (b) be more effective when they are in these positions, and (c) be effective in future leadership roles in advancing education and research at a RI or PUI institution. 36 Waterman and Feig; Educational and Outreach Projects from the Cottrell Scholars Collaborative Professional Development ... ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2017.


Figure 1. A screen shot of the entry page on the ALT Workshop Web pages, now housed at oxide.jhu.edu/ALT. In this article, we report the structure and outcomes of the first ALT workshop held on January 31, 2016 to February 2, 2016 at the headquarters of the American Chemical Society and rooted in the web portal displayed in Figure 1. The use of the backronym “ALT” is intentional as it is meant to remind leaders to stay above the details that elevated them to their leadership position so that they can do more by leading collective action. The unique structure of the workshop is summarized below. Assessment of our efficacy at increasing awareness and knowledge with respect to course objectives is also provided. In short, the workshop was successful at providing all 24 participants a significant leadership training experience. We reported on this effort at the ACS National Meeting in San Diego on March 13, 2016, shortly after the first workshop, and recapitulate that presentation with modifications here. One of us also wrote a Comment in C&E News in March 2016 advertising this effort and incorporating our support for the importance of the teacher-scholar model and the importance of teaching leadership intentionally (8).

Background The workshop was primarily aimed at mid-career teacher-scholars. In recruiting associate or recently-promoted full professors, we asked them: “You just got tenure or you got recently promoted, what do you do now? ”One might ask whether there is a need to provide additional training to this cohort, because 37 Waterman and Feig; Educational and Outreach Projects from the Cottrell Scholars Collaborative Professional Development ... ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2017.


they have already been proven as researchers and their tenured position is already sufficiently privileged that they might not need additional help. However, the driver is that tenure comes with the responsibility of leadership. Even without taking additional roles, emerging senior professors lead not just their research group, but also their discipline. The problem is that they have not really been trained to lead broadly, and they might not even realize that they need to learn to be better leaders. The business community understands that leadership is gained through training and mentorship, and this is why business schools and leadership programs have an important role generally. We can make a further analogy to teaching; it is also a skill that one is not born with, and consequently many assistant professors struggle to master it as they begin their careers. That is, just as faculty (and others) need to learn how to teach, they also need to learn how to lead. A teacher-scholar could learn leadership skills by working with mentors, by reading books, or by taking classes. The latter offers an economy of scale for both the learner and the teacher. Unfortunately, while such classes are taught by leadership institutes around the country, they are often very generic in that they teach students about leadership skills with little connection to what one does in a university setting. For example, while the case studies used in these classes are useful and informative, they are often tied to business scenarios that are not easily transferable to the academic setting. Admittedly, one strategy for resolving this disconnect is to assume that students brings their own examples with which to provide specificity to the tasks. That is why business schools typically expect students to work for a period of time between college and the start of an MBA program. In so doing, their students are able to build “real-world” business examples from scenarios through which they or their colleagues struggled. This also provides context through which to interpret the management skills and techniques that they learn in the business program, in addition to the content-matter necessary to understand technical business practices such as accounting. Thus, learning how to manage and lead is not something that one is born with; rather it must be deliberately learned through training and practice. In turn, this suggests a need for leadership programs that are tuned to the specific practices of future academic leaders using targeted case studies and materials. What does an academic leader lead? Research-active professors lead a research group and direct undergraduate, graduate and, postdoctoral students. They may hold roles in an academic administration such as those of a department head, a dean, a provost, an assistant department head, a vice provost or an executive vice president. In parallel with the tiers of college/university administration, they may serve as research center directors leading teams comprised of only a few faculty members in a department, teams that span across many departments within an institution, or teams that run across an entire campus or multiple campuses. There are other leadership roles involved in, for example, leadership in a professional society, a national or international conference, or scientific panels. The skills transecting all of these leadership roles are somewhat transferable. However, for the purpose of a workshop targeted to provide job-specificity, we narrowed our focus exclusively to leadership roles in university administration and research centers. 38

Waterman and Feig; Educational and Outreach Projects from the Cottrell Scholars Collaborative Professional Development ... ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2017.


The vision driving the ALT workshop is thus to train the next generation of academic leaders by providing them with tools, connections, and skills to advance the teacher-scholar model beyond tenure. This is a subversive vision because we are deliberately trying to reshape research centers and universities by populating their leadership positions with successful teacher-scholars as change agents. To this end, the selection criteria for participants involved verification that they had already excelled in both teaching and research, and that they were interested in advancing models for integrating teaching and research. In addition to providing content, the workshop also enables the expansion of participants’ professional network to include each other and the facilitators. The latter were professors who are presently in academic leadership positions. They are referred to as Experienced Academic Leaders (EALs), and comprised a cohort of more than 10 individuals who also benefited and contributed from exposure to each other’s networks. We hypothesize that the combination of the participant and EAL network with the training in applied leadership and interviewing techniques should make the participants more effective as academic leaders and more likely to be tapped for those roles earlier in their careers. Thus the learning objectives of the ALT workshop were for participants to: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

enhance their motivation and preparation academic leadership roles be able to use skills and tools from ALT2016 to be more effective academic leaders focus on improving their leadership strengths towards being extraordinary leaders know the range of duties and obligations required of academic leaders and be prepared to undertake them be prepared for interviews and their start as an academic leader

Together, these objectives provided a scaffold through which all of the workshop components were constructed. In passing, it is notable that the use of learning objectives is an effective teaching practice that has gained significant attention as a driver for how and which content is to be delivered and through which the effectiveness of a course can be measured (9). The ALT workshop is a teaching exercise that also deliberately modeled this effective practice both to drive the content and to engage participants from the start.

Logistics: The Workshop The workshop took place over three days at the American Chemical Society headquarters. We were pleased to see that we received more applications than we could accommodate (although this sadly meant that we had to decline several outstanding and deserving participants), and that they ranged across our target group of chemists, physicists, and astronomers. We limited our span of disciplines to those that our primary external sponsor (the Research Corporation for Science Advancement) supports, and correspondingly also to those of our facilitators and EALS. The solicitation for participants was open from September to October 39 Waterman and Feig; Educational and Outreach Projects from the Cottrell Scholars Collaborative Professional Development ... ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2017.


2015 on our website and promoted through e-mails to department heads, the community of Cottrell Scholars, social media, and other platforms. Successful participants were asked to cover their travel to the meeting and the registration fee of $750, thereby indicating their commitment to the workshop’s goals from the outset. Once they were on site, we covered their hotel rooms and meals. They also underwent a 360-degree feedback exercise conducted by Zenger-Folkman following the principles discovered by Zenger & Folkman (10) on the attributes that make great leaders. This module (discussed in detail in the Methods Section), together with the costs of supporting the travel and lodging for all of the EALs facilitating the workshop, easily cost more than $1500 per participant, which was funded through the generous support of our sponsors and the willingness of the EALs to volunteer their time. Any attempt to replicate this program would need to account for the large direct and in-kind expenses required to make it successful. On the other hand, all of the EALs reported that they had enjoyed the experience and that they had learned from the experience. This is also partially substantiated by their willingness to return as EALs in the second workshop. An early sign of the success of the workshop came from the fact that more than 40 individuals applied to take part. The attendees were, however, capped at 25 participants. At the last minute, one participant cancelled, reducing the actual participant count to 24. This cohort was diverse along many vectors. There was a nearly equal split between PUI and R1 faculty. Although aimed at mid-career faculty, one assistant professor did participate. Among the rest, there was a nearly equal split between associate and full professors. Participants represented both public and private institutions, and split between those who had never served in a formal role as an academic leader and those who were relatively recent in such a role. The gender and ethnic diversity of the group was reflective of the corresponding academic departments (11). Although there exists significant evidence that diversity generally makes working groups stronger (12–14), one of our hypotheses was that the breath in academic roles and institutions would also improve learning outcomes.

Methods: The Workshop The workshop consisted of a series of interwoven components: topical sessions, breakout activities, simulated interviews, a 360-feedback exercise, and networking events. The latter included meals and receptions in casual settings at ACS headquarters and the workshop hotel. These informal networking events included no specific content, but were deliberately built-in to allow for organic dialogue between and across participants and EALs. Such intentional socialization to enable the expansion of professional networks is typical of leadership and business school courses. The remaining components are described below in order to highlight possibly unique aspects in their implementation.

40 Waterman and Feig; Educational and Outreach Projects from the Cottrell Scholars Collaborative Professional Development ... ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2017.


Breakout Groups Participants were assigned to five groups in which they remained for all breakout activities and the mock interviews. Prior to the workshop they were asked to rank which of the four leadership positions they would be interested in applying for: A) Department Head, B) Dean, C) Provost/VP for Research or D) Research Center Director. Our first finding was that this particular cohort was most interested in Department Head positions. This is perhaps not surprising as roughly half of the participants were associate professors for whom this would be the most accessible, if nevertheless aspirational, academic leadership role. Consequently, the fifth group (E) was also assigned to Department Head positions. Each group was charged to respond to every breakout scenario—see below for examples—as if they were approaching it in the role of their assigned group. So when they reported out, each breakout reporter had a different contribution, because they had approached the task from a different perspective. Similarly, in the simulated or mock interviews, participants applied to positions according to their assigned groups: Group 1A: Mock Department Head Presentation/Vision Group 2B: Mock Airport Interview for a Dean Group 3C: Mock Interview for a Provost/VP for Research Group 4D: Mock Research Center Pitch in front of a panel Group 5A: Mock Department Head Presentation/Vision In order to add specificity to the task, they were asked to choose an institution at which their new position would be housed or with whom their center would collaborate from among the schools that were represented within their group. That is, during the first breakout, their ice-breaking activity was to learn about each other and then collectively select each other’s institutions. The connectivity network was required to be simply connected so that no pair was applying to each other’s schools. In this way, they had to interact with different colleagues in order to learn and teach about their respective institutions. It provided them with a subject matter expert on the customs and practices of the particular school that they were applying to. It also reminded them of the importance of preparation in constructing a vision that is particular to a given institution. One consequence of the simply connected network of target institutions was that some participants from R1 institutions were committed to applying for positions at PUIs and vice versa. Initially, some participants were apprehensive about such a dramatic shift, and even questioned whether such applications would be realistic or successful. Facilitators cited several successful leaders who had done precisely this in order to assuage their fears and encourage them onward. By the end of the workshop, these same participants reported that they had learned so much more because they had to research an institutional culture that was completely different from their own.



Breakout Activities and Work Products As detailed above, all participants were assigned to groups within which they solved challenges and tackled case studies leading to group-wide and individual work products. A few breakouts were geared around the development of a vision statement and the group was asked to critique constructively each other’s statements in order to make them stronger. Facilitators actively engaged with the groups in order to challenge their groupthink and to answer questions. Other breakouts included case studies in which participants were asked how to address challenging leadership scenarios from the perspective of their role (as assigned to the group) within the management structure of the institution. Towards developing the work product for the simulated interview, group 4D initially prepared their research center proposal visions entirely around the science that they intended to propose. Upon listening to these great scientific objectives, a facilitator pointed out to them that each of their visions sounded like a large single-investigator grant rather than a center. They needed to convince the panel how they would lead a team and how that team was going to be unique. That is, the vision needed to include a clear value proposition of how the center was needed to solve the grand challenge and how that center would be led to solve it, to train participants and to engage broader communities. That was eye opening for all the members of Group 4D. As a consequence, their center presentations were much better. A few participants have confirmed that this strategy played an important role in their success at raising funds for and leading research centers in the intervening time. One of the case studies involved addressing a professor in their academic unit or research center who was not happy with the academic leader’s (AL’s) administrative direction. The first question was what should the AL discuss with the professor at their next meeting so as to address the situation? After the groups had proposed their response, they were then told that subsequent to the meeting with the faculty member, they received a call from the university’s president. During the call, she told the AL that the professor was still not happy with the AL’s solution, and that the AL must fix it. The participants were then asked what they would do in the next meeting with the professor, and what they would do in their next meeting with the president. This example nicely enabled them to discuss how to manage up and down the organization and how to lead without authority (because the professor clearly was not acting as a direct report). The members of group 3C (those applying for Provost-level positions) immediately decided that their answer was to resign. They argued that they were direct reports to the president and her request indicated a lack of support from their supervisor. This is where the facilitators were key to advancing the workshop. Group 3C’s answer was easy but ineffective generally. It also provided them little practice on their leadership skills. So the facilitators pointed out to them that if they were in the role of a Provost, they would have to address hundreds of minor issues such as this, and manage several major thrusts that they were leading. They could not simply resign because of disagreement over any one of them (unless it was unethical not to resign), if they wanted to advance their institutions. Thus, they had to develop a more nuanced strategy for leading their vision in the face of opposition. 42 Waterman and Feig; Educational and Outreach Projects from the Cottrell Scholars Collaborative Professional Development ... ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2017.


Simulated Interviews Towards the end of the workshop, a 2-hour session of the five separate groups was held in parallel. Each group underwent an interview for their target academic position or research center proposal in front of a panel of EALs. Each participant, in turn, presented their vision and answered two different questions from the panelists. During the course of the session, the 10 questions that were asked were spread across the typical questions asked in an interview. Thus each participant was able to experience an interview setting directly as they answered two spontaneous questions, and they were able to experience an entire interview by listening to the entirety of the session. The session served a dual purpose: (1) it gave participants exposure to the on-the-job roles of their target position because that is, after all, what such questions are meant to probe, and (2) it gave them pre-interview training so that the first time they actually interview for a position they will know what to expect. Encouragingly, several participants reported that they had had successful job interviews for AL roles within the 8 months since the workshop. 360-Degree Feedback The 360-degree feedback exercise was conducted in order to provide a personalized leadership framework for each participant, and to serve as a platform for discussing leadership traits that form the framework of typical leadership courses. In the 360-degree process, each participant selects the members of several cohorts who will evaluate their leadership skills. The cohorts included themselves (that is necessarily a cohort of one), their reports, their peers, their managers, and an additional set of their choosing. After those data were collected and processed (anonymously), the participants sat through a session to learn how to interpret it. We worked with Zenger-Folkman, a leader in the field that has worked with the American Chemical Society to construct an 8-hour extraordinary leadership program targeted across ACS volunteers. Working with Zenger-Folkman, we constructed a 4-hour version that left out the parts that would have led to the construction of individual development plans. Our assumption was that the specificity of the remainder of our workshop would provide the basis for a more targeted experience, and would thus fill in the gaps from the material that was removed. Participants overwhelmingly agreed that the 360-degree feedback was useful and that the 4-hour session was more than sufficient in the context of the overall workshop. According to Zenger and Folkman (10), extraordinary leaders tend to display strengths in roughly 16 leadership areas. For example, one may be extraordinary as an innovator, or at communicating powerfully or broadly. The trouble is that one might only be good, but not great, at being empathetic to their team. Indeed, Zenger and Folkman found that extraordinary leaders tend to be extraordinary at only three of the 16 areas while not having any “fatal” flaws. They posited that emerging leaders should look critically at their leadership skills, identify their best two to four and work on making them great. Thus the 360-degree feedback provided a vector for participants to improve their leadership skills. The session 43 Waterman and Feig; Educational and Outreach Projects from the Cottrell Scholars Collaborative Professional Development ... ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2017.

discussing all 16 leadership characteristics also provided participants with a broader view of leadership generally.

Facilitated Sessions and EAL Panels


A significant portion of the content was delivered through lecture-style sessions generally delivered by multiple facilitators and using active-learning techniques to engage the participants. The titles of these sessions were: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Why you should become an academic leader Vision (opportunities and challenges) at the start Leadership: Finding your strengths Conflict resolution for academic leaders Engaging and motivating colleagues & staff Managing outside research: Outreach, diversity & legal concerns Friend raising and stewardship Managing up and managing down Time-management and other challenges for academic leaders Putting it all together – “Why was I here & now what?”

As summarized above, Session III was a 4-hour session (with breaks) that facilitated the interpretation of the 360-feedback. Session VII was primarily led by one facilitator interweaving content and case studies throughout. The remaining sessions were conducted through panels consisting of three EALs as speakers and one EAL as a facilitator. The EAL panels were facilitated across three primary non-overlapping questions pertinent to the corresponding topic. The questions emerged from a request to the participants about what they wanted to know about the given topic. Through a deliberate attempt to encourage the EALs to provide their practical advice to the questions, participants were essentially provided just-in-time information access to realistic problems experiences by EALs and the solutions they employ. Participants and panelists were also able to interject questions throughout the dialogue. This also included additional “spontaneous” active learning exercises for the participants in prelude to their breakout groups. (Spontaneous is in quotes because those activities were, in fact, premeditated).

Results and Discussion We conducted an independent evaluation of the workshop components to assess progress on meeting our course objectives. Before and after the workshop, Marilyne Stains (now a coauthor of this work) submitted an online survey to all the participants. Therein, she asked the participants what they knew about a particular subject and how comfortable they were with that subject. Of the 25 original participants, 23 participated in the pre-survey and 22 participated in the post-survey; 21 answered both surveys. Of these, 79% (19 participants) had not 44 Waterman and Feig; Educational and Outreach Projects from the Cottrell Scholars Collaborative Professional Development ... ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2017.


attended leadership training. The others (5 participants) had attended a leadership training course within the previous year.

Figure 2. Indices of workshop participants’ satisfaction. a) Distribution of workshop participants based on the extent to which the workshop met their expectations. b) Distribution of workshop participants based on the extent to which they would recommend the workshop to a colleague.

Overall satisfaction with the workshop, as shown in Figure 2a, far exceeded or exceeded expectations for almost all of the participants. Representative written comments included: “The conference was very much beyond what I expected. The depth, thoughtfulness, and range of the comments and suggestions by the panelists were simply invaluable. The 360 evaluation turned out to be much more worthwhile than I expected.” “The hands-on activities and discussions really challenged us to think about leadership issues in ways that were meaningful to the particular positions we were interested in (chair, dean, center, etc). The EALs were fantastic!” Moreover, all participants would recommend the workshop to a colleague with only a small fraction doing so with reservations (Figure 2b). Reservations included requests for better integration of the 360-degree feedback into the rest of the workshop, and a concern for the heavy emotional toll that appeared to be required to become a leader. In working with the independent evaluator, we identified nine overarching categories for specific measurable outcomes that spanned the concept space covered both by the scaffold of our learning objectives, the particulars of our panel sessions, breakout sessions, simulated interviews, and other activities: (a) knowledge of rewards and opportunities to advance science and the profession through academic leadership; (b) creating, articulating, managing, and adjusting a vision for your organization; (c) knowledge of your leadership skills; (d) building on your strongest leadership skills; (e) managing conflict resolution; (f) engaging and motivating colleagues and staff; (g) managing outreach, diversity and legal concerns; (h) fundraising/development activities; and (i) leading/managing above and below you on the organization chart. 45



Figure 3. Self-reported knowledge of topics related to leadership by workshop participants who responded to both the pre- and post-surveys (N=21). Error bars represent standard errors.

Workshop participants self-reported on the pre- and post-surveys the extent to which they felt knowledgeable about each of these nine topics using a 5-point Likert scale. Figure 3 presents the mean level of knowledge identified by participants who responded to both the pre and post surveys (N=21). The results of paired t-tests demonstrated that there was a statistically significant increase in knowledge for each of the nine items after applying the Bonferroni correction (p=0.006). All effect sizes (Cohen’s d) were large, varying from 1.013 for Engaging and motivating colleagues and staff to 2.489 for Leading/Managing above and below you on the organization chart. Their confidence in their ability to perform leadership related skills, as shown in Figure 4, also increased significantly. Paired t-tests conducted on each of the seven skills presented in Figure 4 were statistically significant (p=.007 after Bonferroni corrections), with large effect size (Cohen’s d) varying from 1.022 for Engaging and motivating colleagues and staff to 2.049 for Leading/Managing above and below you on the organization chart. These results speak to the effectiveness of our intervention. Namely that the use of experienced leaders (that is, the EALs) whose experience is specifically in the academic sector and whose background as professors is similar to that of the participants, can dramatically improve the leadership skills by, and willingness to serve of mid-career faculty in less than three days. This is a much shorter intervention than that of comparable university programs, which typically include weekly sessions across a semester.



Figure 4. Workshop participants’ confidence in executing leadership skills corresponding to seven of the nine knowledge topics of Figure 3. The data comes from the participants who responded to both the pre- and post-surveys (N=21). Error bars represent standard errors.

Conclusion The first Academic Leadership Training (ALT) workshop provided participants with a unique leadership experience that can accelerate teacherscholars pursuit of and successful transition into academic leadership positions. We made it specific to the academic setting by providing exposure to experienced academic leaders (EALs) in panels, as facilitators of breakout sessions, and during networking mixers. The ALT workshop was infused with active learning strategies, including frequent use of breakout sessions. Each such session was followed by a period of time in which participants had to provide reports on either their individual or group work products. The success of the workshop led us to seek and secure additional funding to conduct ALT again in early 2017. At the time of this submission, we have already received 32 confirmed registrations to the second ALT workshop to be held on Feb 26th to Feb 28th, 2017 at the American Chemical Society headquarters. What were the keys to success? Diversity of institutions, through the inclusion PUI and R1 faculty, is important because participants were encouraged to think about both types of academic institutions and thereby be deliberate about the challenges and opportunities in integrating education and research. We also believe that the 360-degree feedback provided participants with a critical perspective on their leadership strengths. Our EALs provided practical examples and unique perspectives from experienced academic leaders on each of our learning objectives. The simulated interviews were key and possibly the most novel component. They served to provide an experience of what the given job role would entail while also providing participants with preparation for how an AL interview would be conducted. The networking ties that participants built with each other also provided a key addition, though this was a national network of leadership that is likely only weakly connected to the university network that would hire the participant 47


for a leadership role. This would presumably be complementary to a similar exercise consisting of faculty from a single institution and that would necessarily provide a cross-disciplinary network useful to navigate the administration of that institution. Finally, perhaps the most important lesson from the ALT workshop is that advancing leadership strengths deliberately through mentoring and training by peers with domain expertise can prepare teacher-scholars to take on new academic leadership roles that advance the integration of education and research in the academy.


Acknowledgments We thank Gail Burd, Teri Odom and Vince Rotello for their roles as founding members of the CSC ALT planning committee. We also thank all of the EALs. This work has been primarily supported by the Research Corporation for Science Advancement. We gratefully acknowledge additional support from the American Chemical Society and the American Astronomical Society in support of the first workshop. We also acknowledge the participants and their home institutions for their financial support of the workshop through registration fees. RH acknowledges the support of the Gompf Family Chair in Chemistry at Johns Hopkins, and the National Science Foundation through grant No. CHE 1700749 for broadening participation efforts such as this.

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Leadership Training for Teacher-Scholars - ACS Publications

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