Educational Administration and Supervision Commons^™

N2025 Strategic Plan, University Of Nebraska-Lincoln, University Of Nebraska-Lincoln

University of Nebraska-Lincoln Administration: Reports, Papers, Publications, and Presentations

N2025 Strategic Plan, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, February 14, 2020

Building A Culture Of Innovation: Breaking Down Silos, Dina Pacis, Patricia Traynor-Nilsen, Joesph Marron

Journal of Women in Educational Leadership

Institutes of Higher Education (IHE) are divided into colleges and within colleges are departments. Most departments work with their faculty members and have little interaction with others outside their specialty area. This paper outlines the process taken in year one of a two-year journey that one large IHE department which consisted of five stand-alone programs: Educational Administration, School Psychology, School Counseling, Higher Education Administration, and Applied Behavior Analysis took to work toward building a culture of innovation, collaboration, mission, visioning, and scholarship which brought all faculty members together. The department had been working in silos, with no common mission or …

Annual Planning For Academic Leaders, Josh Baker

Instructional Leadership Abstracts

Annual Planning for Academic Leaders Have the days of the Academic Master Plan gone by the wayside? It seems like yesterday that we were all excited to craft these guiding documents that had the exciting acronyms of AMP (our future is electrifying!) or MAP (our guide to our destination!). But were they ever used? Somewhere in my file cabinet is a pristine copy of a MAP that was created several years before I arrived. A consultant guided the creation of this document that was hundreds of pages long, and it has done nothing but accumulate dust.

If not a MAP, …

Moving Mentorship To Opportunity For Women University Presidents, Tania Carlson Reis, Marilyn Grady

Department of Educational Administration: Faculty Publications

Women remain underrepresented in U.S. university presidential positions. Mentorship is a tool used to support women in gaining access to the position. In this qualitative study, eight U.S. women university presidents of public doctoral granting universities were interviewed about their mentorship experiences. Interviews were then coded and analyzed to understand the mentorship construct. Findings from the data show an interconnection between mentorship, informal relationships, and opportunity. Participants also gained greater support from male mentors versus female mentors, and from informal mentorship versus formal mentorship programs. Mentorship connected to opportunity is imperative in building the administrative careers of women leaders.

Paths To The Baccalaureate At A Hispanic-Serving Institution: The Lived Experiences Of Latinos Who Entered Higher Education At The Community College, Brent D. Cejda

Contemporary Issues in Educational Leadership

The U.S. Census indicates that Hispanic participation in postsecondary education tripled between 1996 and 2016. If the traditional outcome measure of the six-year graduation rate is used, however, increased participation has not resulted in an increased number of Latinos who complete a bachelor’s degree. Further, typical examinations of baccalaureate completion have focused on the starting point—beginning at a community college or beginning at a four-year college or university and compare percentages of completion by race or ethnicity. Findings of such studies point to the disparity in bachelor’s degree completion rates between Latinos and other racial and ethnic groups and that …

Age Discrimination And Academic Labor Markets, Sam Allgood

Department of Economics: Faculty Publications

In a sample of Canadian Ph.D.’s, Warman and Worswick (2010) report that forty-two percent obtained their degree at thirty-four years of age or older. One implication is that those starting their academic career vary in age. As a result, academic labor markets provide a somewhat unique way to investigate the outcomes of workers of different age with similar work experience. This study uses a national sample of over 9,000 faculty to look at the relationship between age at the time a person earns their degree and income. Older individuals are less likely to attend graduate programs in Carnegie Research I …

Health Education In Rural Areas, Jody Tomanek

Instructional Leadership Abstracts

Healthcare in the United States has been on the forefront of people’s minds for the last decade. In rural areas of our country this is even more prominent. The cost of healthcare is only a small piece of the puzzle. Rural areas of our country also must worry about access to healthcare, and quality healthcare. It is not uncommon in rural Nebraska for people to travel more than an hour to have access to quality healthcare. This is something I see everyday from two different perspectives. As the Vice President for Academic Affairs at a small rural community college in …

The Timeliness Of Honors Contracts, Shirley Shultz Myers, Geoffrey Whitebread

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

With roots in a tutorial educational approach introduced by the ancient Greeks and made famous at Oxford and Cambridge, honors contracts in the United States emerged as tutorial arrangements in the late nineteenth century. Early honors programs at Harvard and other universities sought to counter an emphasis on practical training in US higher education after the Civil War with more flexible programs of study, small seminars, and tutorials (Capuana 21–25; Wolken; Repko et al. 28). This curricular reform spanned disciplines and responded to two key changes in education: the late-nineteenth-century growth of graduate education, particularly in the sciences, modeled on …

Curriculum Gone Bad: The Case Against Honors Contracts, Richard Badenhausen

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

This volume offers a timely and much-needed discussion, for in spite of their apparent ubiquity across the honors landscape, contracts are not a feature of honors education that has received much attention. For example, the National Collegiate Honors Council’s (NCHC) “Basic Characteristics of a Fully Developed Honors Program” and its companion statement on honors colleges—documents meant to guide colleges and universities in curricular innovation, engaged pedagogy, and intentional learning—make no mention of contracts. Additionally, NCHC’s 2016 Census of U.S. Honors Programs and Colleges, which captured qualities of 408 responding member institutions, asked over a dozen questions about curricular features of …

Enhancing The Structure And Impact Of Honors By Contract Projects With Templates And Research Hubs, James G. Snyder, Melinda Weisberg

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

The Honors by Contract (HBC) option is by its nature underdefined. That is to say, there are likely as many versions of the HBC as there are honors programs or colleges that use them. Some HBCs are attached to non-honors courses to augment the course content, whereas others are stand-alone mentored replacements for honors seminars themselves, following more of an independent study model. Some programs use HBCs to initiate students into the nature and scope of undergraduate research, and the deliverables vary widely. Likewise, the challenges and difficulties surrounding HBCs change from institution to institution. Because it appears natural to …

Building Honors Contracts: Insights And Oversights, Introduction, Kristine Miller

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

This book asks an overdue question: can we build honors contracts that transcend the transactional? The word “contract” itself—as both noun and verb—delimits more possibilities than it reveals. The chapters collected here expand this restrictive term by reframing honors contracts as collaborative partnerships for experiential learning. While most, though not all, of the volume’s contributors accept standard definitions of honors contracts as “[e]nriched options within regular [non-honors] courses,” they also imagine many and varied possibilities for such enrichment (Schuman 33). The subtitle’s pairing of “Insights” and “Oversights” thus suggests not that the authors have seen it all or missed the …

Honors Abroad Through Third-Party Providers, Susan E. Dinan

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

Given the challenges of promoting internationalization by expanding our institutions’ international student populations (Fischer), the development of our students as global citizens through study abroad and curriculum offerings appears more important than ever. Providing innovative and challenging curriculum options that align with the long-espoused pedagogical approaches of the National Collegiate Honors Council (NCHC)— many of which foreshadowed today’s highly touted high-impact practices such as undergraduate research, strong faculty-student mentor relationships, and study abroad—constitutes a desirable path to pursue (NCHC Board; Kuh). Yet, admittedly these valuable practices come with a price for institutions and students. For example, the increasingly popular summer …

Early Impact: Assessing Global-Mindedness And Intercultural Competence In A First-Year Honors Abroad Course, Michael Carignan, Maureen Vandermaas-Peeler

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

Within the expanding field of study abroad scholarship, recent research on honors-based programming indicates an evolving understanding of how the goals of most study abroad programs align with those of honors programs (Camarena and Collins; Frost et al.; Markus et al.). The tradition of incorporating international experiences into honors education is longstanding, and recent descriptions of related programming highlight the diversity of disciplines, locations, aims, and pedagogies across institutions (Mulvaney and Klein ix–x). One common thread, however, is a desire to facilitate not only academic but also intercultural competencies in order to prepare honors students for an increasingly interconnected world. …

The Long-Term Impact Of Study Abroad On Honors Program Alumni, Mary Kay Mulvaney

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

Note: An earlier version of this chapter was published in Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad (vol. 29, no. 1, 2017, pp. 46–67). This essay appears with permission of that journal and in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution License Agreement. This reprint includes an Afterword that briefly explains three international education initiatives that evolved from the original findings of this study.

“Study abroad enables students to experience an interconnected world and to embrace difference rather than being threatened by it; it shows them the collective heritage of mankind” (Wolfensberger 281). Indeed, study abroad is often thought to be …

Principal Instructional Leadership For Teacher Participation In Professional Development: Evidence From Japan, Singapore, And South Korea, Taeyeon Kim, Youngjun Lee

Department of Educational Administration: Faculty Publications

We investigated the relationship between principal instructional leadership and teacher participation in multiple types of professional development in Japan, Singapore, and South Korea. Using the Teaching and Learning International Survey dataset of 2013, we employed two-level logistic regression models to estimate the rigorous effects of principal instructional leadership that were separated out from teacher-level effects. We found that the influence of principal instructional leadership on teachers’ participation in professional development varied across types of learning activities and countries. Our analysis suggests that principal instructional leadership can influence teachers’ participation in mentoring, mentoring, peer observation, and coaching compared to the other …

Honors Contracts: Empowering Students And Fostering Autonomy In Honors Education, Anne Dotter

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

Although culturally mandated as a gateway to professional opportunities and wealth, college degrees are the prerogative of only half of the United States population, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (Musu-Gilette et al. v). Even those who attend college do not always acquire the training they need to achieve their goals: the lack of written communication or analytical skills directly impacts retention and completion, particularly of students underprepared for college. The National Collegiate Honors Council (NCHC) website features a “Diversity and Inclusion Statement” under its “Definition of Honors Education,” and the organization has placed equity and inclusion at …

One Hand Washes The Other: Designing Mutually Beneficial Honors Contracts, Antonina Bambina

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

At their best, honors contracts can be creative, challenging, exceptional learning opportunities for students and faculty. At their worst, they promote busywork that fails to deliver enhanced educational experiences. While I am proud of the many contracts that allowed honors students at my former institution, the University of Southern Indiana, to collaborate on customized learning and deeper relationships with course material and faculty, I also found myself on occasion having to apologize to students or faculty for the stunted, lackluster projects that one party or the other proposed. These conflicting sentiments illustrate why Richard Badenhausen urges the honors community to …

An Undeserved Reputation: How Contract Courses Can Work For A Small Honors Program, Jon Hageman

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

In the first chapter of this volume, Richard Badenhausen argues that contract courses have often suffered from ambiguous or homogenous expectations, compromising honors pedagogy and learning. Anecdotally, not many positive attributes have been ascribed to contract courses in the honors community. Contracts often require more work than courses to establish and administer to completion. Given the shortcomings and the amount of work required to implement contract courses successfully, why are they used at all? I argue that, in some cases, contract courses—or non-honors courses that move beyond regular course requirements with agreed-upon independent study work mentored by the professor—are the …

Honors Contracts: A Scaffolding To Independent Inquiry, Cindy S. Ticknor, Shamim Khan

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

Honors contracts can be valuable curricular assets if aligned with institutional goals and properly supported to overcome the challenges they sometimes present. At Columbus State University (CSU), honors contracts allow students to achieve one of our primary learning outcomes: honors graduates will demonstrate the ability to design independent inquiry projects that require critical and creative thinking. We believe graduate schools value this ability, and we know that employers in our community seek honors graduates who can work independently on extended projects, communicate effectively, and solve problems analytically and creatively. We achieve this important learning outcome by requiring a senior project …

A High-Impact Strategy For Honors Contract Courses, Gary Wyatt

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

This essay describes a strategy implemented at Emporia State University for offering high-impact honors contract courses in a collaborative environment. After considering the role of honors contract courses in our college, the chapter demonstrates the importance of guiding students and instructors in creating contract applications and shaping requirements to ensure that contract courses are true honors experiences. Our contract applications demand a collaborative effort in which students and instructors demonstrate together how core requirements will be satisfied. Each application is unique and generally involves the development of a mentoring relationship. The chapter includes examples illustrating some key value-added outcomes students …

Ensuring A Quality Honors Experience Through Learning Contracts: Success Beyond Our Wildest Dreams, Julia A. Haseleu, Laurie A. Taylor

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

In 1997, when Julia A. Haseleu started teaching at Kirkwood Community College (KCC) in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, her charge as a psychology instructor with honors experience was to develop an honors program based on learning contracts. Other faculty and administrators had attempted to offer honors courses at KCC, but these efforts had failed. Rhonda Kekke, KCC Dean of Arts and Humanities, determined that the problem was the honors course format. At small to medium-sized colleges and universities, especially two-year campuses, finding a group of honors students who are interested in the same subjects, able to work the same courses into …

Facilitating Feedback: The Benefits Of Automation In Monitoring Completion Of Honors Contracts, Erin E. Edgington

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

As we have seen in this volume so far, contract courses are an increasingly valuable pedagogical strategy for maintaining access to and demand for honors education. Administered with the “[i]ntentionality, transparency, [and] consistency” that Richard Badenhausen proposes in his opening essay (17), they can even, as Margaret Walsh suggests, help “shift [students’] focus from getting out of course requirements to getting into new and different courses to advance their capacity to learn” (40). While good reasons to offer contracts clearly exist, administering them nevertheless presents challenges. This essay considers process and pedagogy, with the aim of empowering both students and …

Honors In Practice: Beyond The Classroom, Kristine Miller

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

Six years ago, in my first week as director of the Utah State University (USU) Honors Program, a senior physics major and her frustrated faculty mentor marched into my office. The student was shy and embarrassed, the mentor surly and blunt: “Why,” he asked, “must a senior complete an honors contract in a class that isn’t fundamentally shaping her future?” Good question. Because students were required to earn honors credits each term at USU, the choice facing this student was whether to enroll in an honors general education course she did not need or to develop a contract to deepen …

Honors Internationalization At Washington State University: A Comprehensive Experience, Kim Andersen, Christine K. Oakley

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

The interconnected nature of the world economy, including the need for international cooperation in science, politics, the environment, justice, and all aspects of social development, is the reality in which higher education—and not least educational programs catering to the best and brightest—find themselves. The impact of globalization on the United States continues undiminished, and accordingly, honors programs must equip their students with the critical skills and practical knowledge needed to succeed in this global environment to the benefit of themselves, their local and national communities, and the world at large. The fundamental nexus driving the Washington State University (WSU) Honors …

Moving Honors Contracts Into The Digital Age: Processes, Impacts, And Opinions, Ken D. Thomas, Suzanne P. Hunter

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

As Richard Badenhausen argues, a foundational quality of honors education is its ability to place gifted students in direct contact with each other and outstanding faculty in honors courses. The National Collegiate Honors Council (NCHC) defines honors education as “characterized by in-class and extracurricular activities that are measurably broader, deeper, or more complex than comparable learning experiences,” built upon a “distinctive learnerdirected environment and philosophy” that is “tailored to fit the institution’s culture and mission” and designed to create a “close community of students and faculty” (“Definition”). This premise for honors education seems to spell the downfall of honors contracts, …

Making The Global Familiar: Building An International Focus Into The Honors Curriculum, Erin E. Edgington, Daniel C. Villanueva

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

Increasingly, American colleges and universities are seeking to prepare their students not only for professional success but also for life in a world whose interconnectedness and, indeed, interdependency, will require them to live as global citizens. That the term “global citizen,” or one of its many synonyms, now appears in numerous institutional mission and values statements suggests the significance that institutions of higher education attach to cultivating individuals able to navigate the transnational and intercultural complexities of twenty-first-century economics, politics, and ethics. Honors programs and colleges have enthusiastically adopted a global education orientation along with the larger institutions that house …

Keeping The Program Alive: Internationalizing Honors Through Post-Travel Programming, Kevin W. Dean, Michael B. Jendzurski

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

Every December, the world turns its eyes to Norway for the presentation of the Nobel Peace Prize, recognized as the “world’s most important, visible and prestigious prize,” according to Fredrik S. Heffermehl (xi). Since its inauguration in 1901, a pantheon of impressive individuals and organizations has assumed the title of Nobel Peace Laureate. Yet Alfred Nobel harbored a concern as he established the prize in his will: he wanted the prize to be a new beginning for its recipients, not an end to their stories. Nobel wrote, “I wish to help the dreamers, as they find it difficult to get …

Internationalizing With Intention: A Case Study Of The Mahurin Honors College, Craig Cobane, Audra Jennings

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

As an honors college in a predominantly rural, lower-socioeconomic, and conservative region of the country and in a state ranking third-lowest in the nation for the percentage of its residents holding valid U.S. passports (ChartsBin), internationalization required intention at Western Kentucky University (WKU). For most of its history, WKU had a small, underdeveloped honors program. In the early 2000s, it had fewer than two hundred active students, and only approximately ten students per year graduated from honors. Moreover, WKU had a modest education abroad office, and a small number of students went abroad each year. Of the students who did …

Transformative Learning Abroad For Honors Students: Leveraging High-Impact Practices At Global Partner Institutions, Craig Wallace

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

The substantial increase in student participation in learning abroad and the proliferation of program types have greatly changed the international education landscape in the United States and beyond, providing new opportunities for global outreach and collaboration. Creative global partnerships can help students overcome longstanding barriers to studying abroad and provide students with opportunities to enhance their undergraduate education by stacking the high-impact practice of study abroad with other transformative high-impact practices, such as undergraduate research and service learning, which are defining elements of an honors experience. Given the potential for transformation as a result of learning abroad, honors educators and …

“Let’S Get A Coffee!”: A Transformative International Honors Partnership, Leslie Kaplan, Sophia Zevgoli, Andres Gallo

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

Advocates of study abroad have emphasized that semester- and year-long programs offer greater opportunities than short-term programs for students to enhance their personal, academic, and professional development (Dwyer). But can carefully constructed short-term study abroad experiences, which are increasingly popular choices for undergraduates, have similar effects? One study suggests they can achieve important outcomes, such as encouraging tolerance for ambiguity, appreciation for diversity, and openness to experience (Shadowen et al.). Another study shows that even shortterm exposure to other cultures can enhance creativity (Leung et al.), and a third demonstrates that creative problem solving was improved by cultural study in …