Developing expertise in leadership for educational change in research-intensive universities

The research project which we report about in this thesis, set out to investigate the extent to which professional development opportunities for educational leaders in research-intensive universities, support them in developing expertise in leading educational change. We focused on the Educational Leadership Programme that has been organised by Utrecht University (UU) for 20 years. This programme aims at professional development for educational leaders in formal and informal roles, to develop their expertise in leading educational change and to create a network of like-minded colleagues. The main activities in the programme are a series of 24-hour residential meetings with guest lecturers, a study tour to foreign universities, and an innovative project which is carried out by the participants in their daily practice. In this thesis we reported first on a comparison of the UU programme with four other trajectories for educational leaders in research-intensive universities in North-West Europe, using the five core features of effective professional development distinguished by Desimone (2009), which are content focus, active learning, coherence, duration and collective participation. We found differences in the duration of the programmes and in the degree of emphasis on three content areas, leadership, higher education research and change processes. Furthermore, we collected information on outcomes of the UU programme at four levels of evaluation, reaction (level 1), learning (level 2), behaviour (level 3) and results (level 4) (Kirkpatrick & Kirkpatrick, 2006) as reported by participants and their supervisors. They regarded the programme as successful, and observed that participation led to more knowledge, to changes in participants’ daily education practice and – as a consequence – changes in the university. Valuable elements of the UU approach are the theoretical input during the eight meetings and the study tour, addressing participant’s questions and tasks in daily practice, and the multiple opportunities for interaction between the participants. For the evaluation at level 2, learning, we operationalised expertise educational leaders need to be able to enhance education provision, choosing as our focus curriculum design expertise and expertise in designing a plan for an educational change project. The required expertise can be regarded as adaptive expertise (Hatano & Inagaki, 1986): the ability to deal with unfamiliar situations in the ever-changing context of higher education. We created an instrument to measure the level of adaptive expertise in this domain, and then used that instrument to measure the participants’ level of adaptive expertise before and after participating in the UU Educational Leadership Programme. We concluded that participants could probably achieve even more, if the programme offered more opportunities for differentiated structured practice, individualised practice in a group setting, where participants would engage in group activities with variations tailored to participants’ level of skill, designed and guided by a facilitator, providing them with opportunities to improve their adaptive expertise in leading educational change.