This week I spent much time reflecting and applying one of the concepts I learned about in The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Conflict Resolution training. The training focused on healthy conflict (and how this is productive and allows for the sharing of ideas, and people and organizations to move forward), and high conflict (where forward progress ceases to happen due to binary thinking, emotional responses, and a failure to collaborate). The job of leadership is to recognize when people are in high-conflict situations, engage their rational, intellectual brains, and begin healthy conflict resolution.
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One of the frames this training used to think about healthy vs. high conflict was a metaphor of an elephant (the emotional way of thinking) and a rider (the rational viewpoint). In healthy conflict, the elephant and the rider are in-synch and working together. In high-conflict situations, the elephant is running rampant, and the rider can not tame the elephant for productive conversation and decisions to happen. A rider with no elephant may be robotic and not be growing and learning because they are not challenged enough with the passion for pursuing difficult decisions with heart and empathy. My job, as a leader, is to hear concerns and emotional responses, and then find ways to activate reasoning to make conversations about concerns productive.

Change is constant. In higher education right now, there are lots of changes—a change in student engagement due to COVID, changes in questioning the value of a degree, changes in media and marketing strategies to recruit and retain students, and changes in course scheduling/offerings—just to name a few. Within universities and schools within universities, there are operation changes, academic policy changes, faculty and staffing changes, and degree requirement changes that faculty are often faced with. Education should be about continuous improvement and constant learning, and both improvement and learning require change. With change often comes conflict, and this can be healthy conflict or high conflict depending on how change is approached and how it is reflected upon.

In my leadership role, I am learning that people handle change differently. Some are resistant to any change and prefer the way things were before. Others approach change with skepticism, allowing change but questioning the purpose and reasoning for changes. Still, others readily move towards change with complete acceptance. If all three different ways to handle change can reach a state of healthy conflict, an organization will move forward as a stronger unit. If, however, one of the ways of handling change is not represented, then an organization can still move forward, but may not do so in a healthy way. I relate this to when I was pursuing my educational leadership doctorate, and the idea that you need people that are ready to jump on board with you, and it’s nice to be surrounded by the “yes” crowd, but there are other times when deep contemplative thought exercises are required for the right decision to be made—and for these types of decisions you need your resistors to poke holes in thinking and challenge you to think in different ways.

Right now, as a leader, I think I have resistors, skeptics, and my “yes” crowd. I am still learning how to have all groups work together, assuming everyone’s intent is the same (a better learning experience for students). I am also still learning the best way to help individuals accept their emotional responses and move towards thinking rationally from multiple viewpoints and perspectives about change. Engaging others in reflective processing after a change occurs needs to start being a part of my practice, and I’m trying to figure out how often and where this best fits. Should reflective processing happen before, during, and after a change? Is it dependent on the type of change? Is reflective processing more productive at different points for specific types of changes? 

Is there a loophole in the contract? The contract states that published and unpublished scholarship is the baseline for evaluation. Can work still be of quality and contribute to the profession’s advancement if it is not published? Can published work (through a blog), or other non-peer-reviewed means contribute to the discipline? After serving on the university-wide promotion committee, these are the questions that I am left with.

If I have a following on a blog and write about my field, am I contributing to advancing the discipline? I blogged consistently during my sabbatical but then stopped abruptly when the summer semester started. I stopped because I was trying to learn a new role while also balancing the teaching and program coordination I was responsible for in the summer. I had the summer and fall semesters to adjust to my new role as Graduate Chair of Education for the Childhood Education and Care Department.

Now, I want to get my thoughts on this new role and the development and learning that has occurred and is continuously occurring. I have decided to do this by blogging my thoughts again, and if this counts towards contributions to the discipline—well, all the better!  

The new role I found myself in starting in May of 2022 was graduate chair. This graduate chair role was constructed based on data from our state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) accreditation visit. It was, therefore, a new role at the university that had never existed until now. The evaluation and report from this visit indicated that our past model allowed program coordinators in each licensure area to set the standards and make decisions autonomously. This created “complex distributed leadership…with unclear decision-making challenges and responsibilities.” The recommendations from DESE were to create a governance structure that led to clarity in decision-making and united licensure program areas. One of the ways this governance structure was addressed was through the creation of this new role, Graduate Chair(s) of Education. Two graduate chair roles were created, one for the Childhood Education and Care Department and one for the Secondary Licensure Department.

When reflecting on the first semester in this role, the two largest take-aways I had were: (1) how collaborative this role can be and (2) how to best frame changes in terms of DESE guidelines and regulations—as this produced the most buy-in and understanding the need for change. This new Graduate Chair role led to many collaborative partnerships with: the Graduate Chair for Secondary Licensure Areas, the Department Chair, Lead Faculty, the Deans, the Office of Field Engagement, and the Office of Student Engagement. Collaboration and partnering with multiple positions within the School of Education and the Graduate School, I think, was the only way a new position like this could carve a place for itself and begin to establish its importance.

The other way the importance of this role needed to be highlighted was by framing how the School of Education was making changes based on the DESE evaluation findings. When changes were communicated without this framing, there was a lot of pushback and discussion that did not always lead to forward progress. When reflecting on why this was, it was because people were questioning the reason or purpose for change. In teaching, we always have students that question, “when will I need to know this?” or “why are we learning this?” so it shouldn’t be surprising that we always advocate for a purpose for learning to be shared with students. All leadership decisions I learned need this same purpose and framing so that changes can be understood, appropriately questioned and discussed, and forward progress and learning can be made.
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In my first full semester as a leader, my two biggest lessons and learning opportunities were the purpose for decision-making and collaborative working relationships and discussions. I can’t wait to see how this spring semester progresses and what new learning opportunities will present themselves—especially since the role is a little more concrete!