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The Southeast Ohio Teacher Development Collaborative (SEOTDC) represents a regional professional community-of-practice with leadership as a key component of educator and organizational capacity building. This chapter highlights the work of this collaborative partnership among five teacher preparation programs in Appalachian Ohio that responds to regional contexts in planning and delivering professional development. Individuals from representative public and private institutions of higher education, state and local educational agencies, and school districts engage in action planning to improve teacher preparation, professional development, and mentoring processes for educators. This is accomplished through recruitment, retention, identification, support, promotion, encouragement, and involvement in a variety of SEOTDC initiatives. Professional development to build educator capacities is considered in terms of people and their contributions, the synergies that are created during the process of collaboration, and organizational arrangements that are designed to support renewal, reform, and personal and interpersonal development. After setting the context within which SEOTDC operates, the chapter identifies concerns, solutions, and outcomes related to four collaborative initiatives.

Louisiana State University (LSU)’s Office of Strategic Initiatives (OSI) is an award-winning office devoted to developing effective, educational approaches that incorporate guidance and exploration, increase students’ academic standing, and support measures to improve the institution’s diversity, predominantly in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) departments. Through the incorporation of three main factors, Mentoring, Education, and Research, OSI has developed a holistic development model that offers students strategies to overcome those factors that affect their persistence in STEM. OSI houses several programs with a diverse population of students ranging from the high school to doctoral levels. Although varied in student population, these programs unite under the holistic development model to provide support and opportunities to students at each critical educational juncture. OSI’s holistic approach has successfully supported over 135 high school, 560 undergraduate, and 100 graduate students. Of the 560 undergraduate students served, 51% were underrepresented minorities and 55% were women. The undergraduate initiatives have garnered 445 bachelor’s degrees, with 395 degrees from STEM disciplines, and an impressive overall graduation rate ranging from 64% to 84%. Through all of the remarkable work performed in OSI, the greatest accomplishment has been the capacity to offer students from mixed backgrounds tools and strategies to thrive at any point in their academic career.

In 2005, a qualitative study was undertaken to explore the educational events, personal experiences, and job circumstances that a selected group of non-MLS library directors working in small Texas communities believed were significant in contributing to their professional development. Face-to-face interviews were conducted with 17 female library directors working in Texas communities with populations of 25,000 or less using open-ended questions, and interviews were recorded and transcribed for later analysis. Four major topic areas relating to the professionalization of non-MLS library directors were identified from the data: (1) job satisfaction, including library work as spiritual salvation, librarianship and the ethic of caring, making a difference in the community, and pride in professional identity; (2) professional development, including hiring narratives, continuing education and lifelong learning, mentoring and professional development, and the importance of the MLS degree; (3) challenges facing small community library directors, including gender-based discrimination, resistance from local governing officials, and geographic isolation; and (4) guidelines for success, including understanding the community, becoming part of the community, making the library the heart of the community, business and managerial skills, and people and customer service skills.

Over the past decade the policy debate over improving U.S. public education has focused on market solutions (charter schools, privatization, and vouchers) and teacher evaluation through high stakes standardized testing of students. In this debate, teachers and their unions are often characterized as the problem. Our research offers an alternate path in the debate, a perspective that looks at schools as systems – the way schools are organized and the way decisions are made. We focus on examples of collaboration through the creation of long-term labor-management partnerships among teachers’ unions and school administrators that improve and restructure public schools from the inside to enhance planning, decision-making, problem solving, and the ways teachers interact and schools are organized. We analyzed how these efforts were created and sustained in six public school districts over the past two decades, and what they can teach us about the impact of significant involvement of faculty and their local union leadership, working closely with district administration. We argue that collaboration between teachers, their unions, and administrators is both possible and necessary for any meaningful and lasting public school reform.

Academic and research libraries have made many efforts to diversify their workforces; however, today the profession remains largely homogenous. We recognize that diversification cannot be achieved without creating inclusive and more equitable workspaces and workplaces. This requires rethinking our assumptions and behaviors as individuals and as a profession, questioning entrenched structures that maintain the status quo, and developing practices that keep these critical questions in the forefront as we do the difficult work of redefining our infrastructure in order to create equitable and socially just workplaces. To inspire a different type of dialogue, we offer actionable information and tools – strategies, ideas, and concepts from outside our profession. In this chapter, the authors present strategies used by corporations, industries, organizations, or fields outside of academia that have contributed to substantially diversifying their workforces and discuss how they could be integrated into our own workplaces. While these efforts are imperfect, incomplete, or have mixed results, we focus on strategies that demonstrate outside-the-box thinking for our profession, practices that will require academic and research libraries to rethink their operations, the behaviors and structures that support them, and thus the way library management and leadership are practiced. We are hoping that providing strategies outside our profession, as well as guidance on applying these strategies, will create reflection, dialogue, and innovative ideas for our own institutions.

It has been widely projected in the library literature that a substantial number of librarians will retire in the near future leaving significant gaps in the workforce, especially in library leadership. Many of those concerned with organizational development in libraries have promoted succession planning as an essential tool for addressing this much-anticipated wave of retirements. The purpose of this chapter is to argue that succession planning is the wrong approach for academic libraries. This chapter provides a review of the library literature on succession planning, as well as studies analyzing position announcements in librarianship which provide evidence as to the extent to which academic librarianship has changed in recent years. In a review of the library literature, the author found no sound explanation of why succession planning is an appropriate method for filling anticipated vacancies and no substantive evidence that succession planning programs in libraries are successful. Rather than filling anticipated vacancies with librarians prepared to fill specific positions by means of a succession planning program, the author recommends that academic library leaders should focus on the continual evaluation of current library needs and future library goals, and treat each vacancy as an opportunity to create a new position that will best satisfy the strategic goals of the library. In contrast to the nearly universal support for succession planning found in the library literature, this chapter offers a different point of view.

The Partnership for Improvement in Rural Leadership and Learning (PIRLL) grant had a goal of improving school leadership in rural and remote locations across South Dakota. The work included recruitment and training of aspiring principals as well as capacity building for practicing principals. The two key elements used to meet this goal were development of a customized principal preparation program and providing On-site mentoring and professional development for practicing principals. A desired outcome was to increase the capacity and availability of school leaders who would be culturally responsive to the needs of students and remain in high-needs schools in South Dakota.

Women remain under-represented in leadership positions in both clinical medicine and medical education, despite a rapid increase in the proportion of women in the medical profession. This chapter explores potential reasons for this under-representation and how it can be ameliorated, drawing on a range of international literatures, theories and practices. We consider both the ‘demand’ for and ‘supply’ of women as leaders, by examining: how evolving theories of leadership help to explain women’s’ leadership roles and opportunities, how employment patterns theory and gender schemas help to explain women’s career choices, how women aspiring to leadership can be affected by the ‘glass ceiling’ and the ‘glass cliff’ and the importance of professional development and mentoring initiatives. We conclude that high-level national strategies will need to be reinforced by real shifts in culture and structures before women and men are equally valued for their leadership and followership contributions in medicine and medical education.

This chapter examines a recently launched initiative for developing institutional leadership for scholarly approaches to and the Scholarship of Graduate Student Supervision (SoGSS) at the University of British Columbia (UBC). This initiative is led by the Dean, Associate Dean, and former Associate Dean of the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies and is supported by a team of National Teaching Fellows and a graduate student. It involves a customized graduate student supervision (GSS) leaders’ cohort within the International Faculty SoTL Leadership Program at UBC. The initiative arose from institutional concerns about quality assurance and strategic supports for the enhancement of GSS in UBC’s multidisciplinary research-intensive context. The following were noted: (1) widespread discrepancies in the ways that GSS (sometimes referred to as mentoring) is being taken up and exercised across campus; (2) lack of strategic leadership for GSS within units and related professional development initiatives; and (3) inadequate faculty assessment and evaluation protocols (e.g., formative for professional development purposes or summative for tenure, promotion and reappointment purposes) for discipline-specific GSS practices.