EDU 683: Successful Leadership in Higher Education Administration

Overview

The course will provide students with theories, concepts and behaviors of effective leadership to address the challenges of organizational change within higher education and training environments. Students will study organizational functioning, models of organizations, leadership theory and how “change events” impact administration and governance. The course will also consider institutional culture and change, as well as the requisites for sustainable institutional change. Students will examine assessment issues in measuring sustainable change. Students will also consider assessment of effective leadership strategies that help facilitate change.

Learning Outcomes

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

• Describe basic models of organizational functioning and behavior that can be employed to help understand the operation of higher education institutions in an ever-changing society
• Critically analyze basic differences in ways higher education institutions are organized and how learning organizations are different from other kinds of institutions
• Describe models and theories of leadership and how they relate to various organizational contexts
• Critically analyze issues of power, politics and change and their influence on administrative leadership and organizational structure
• Identify social, cultural, demographic, economic, political, and technological components of the higher education system external environment to determine the most important changes affecting the system over the next decade
• Use information and concepts about leadership and change in higher education to make leadership decisions within an organizational context
• Describe how higher education systems are able to react, adapt or influence “change events”
• Identify leadership positions within a higher education or corporate training setting and describe how those roles function within the organizational whole
• Develop strategies to assess leadership skills and the ability to facilitate change
• Create a portfolio-ready professional synthesizing project

Required Texts
EDU 683 texts are available from the JIU/MBS bookstore