Supporting Faculty to Support Students: Re-Inventing the Leader Scholar Community Experience (Poster 6)

• In Event: Scaffolding for Local Change-Making: Innovative EdD Supports Across Contexts

Abstract

The Leader Scholar Community (LSC) experience, a cornerstone of our program, has been instrumental in student success (Buss & Allen, 2020). In an LSC, one faculty member acts as an instructor-chair (IC) and supports six to seven students as they develop, conduct, and write their dissertations in practice (DiP) over the final two years of the program. However, with unexpected program growth, many new LSC ICs were brought on board. Most of these new ICs were unfamiliar with the program, the concept of DiP, and mentoring EdD students, which posed challenges for both faculty and students. This shift threatened the effectiveness of the LSC innovation. This poster presents insights into how we re-invented the LSC experience to better support faculty as mentors, thereby enhancing their support for students.

Literature on mentoring EdD students emphasizes its critical role in student success, including their overall experience and dissertation completion (Elmore, 2021; Johansson & Yerrabati, 2017; Mullen, 2021). However, faculty often lack the necessary preparation to be effective mentors, and supporting EdD students differs from supporting traditional doctoral students (McConnell et al., 2021; Ewbank, 2016; Geesa et al., 2022; Geesa et al., 2023). Effective faculty mentorship can involve opportunities for faculty to be mentored by colleagues and to learn through a process of trial and error (Polkinghorne et al., 2023; Richards & Fletcher, 2019) and should address the values and methods pertinent to scholarly practitioner doctoral research (Ewbank, 2016).
Drawing from literature on faculty mentorship and the PLC experiences in our program, we undertook a re-invention of the LSC experience. We used Rogers’ (1995) theory of diffusion of innovation within organizations as our framework. We focused on the last three stages of innovation within an organization:

1. Redefining innovations: Adapting the innovation to meet the organization’s needs
2. Clarifying: Implementing the innovation in a manner that provides clarity for users
3. Routinizing: Integrating the innovation into the organization’s routine activities (Rogers, 1995).

During the redefining phase, we engaged current and past LSC ICs and reviewed survey data from both students and ICs to identify effective practices and areas needing improvement. Using this information, we instituted monthly LSC IC meetings and introduced the role of an LSC IC mentor to provide additional support. After restructuring the LSC experience to incorporate these supports, we entered the clarifying stage as we ran the revised model for a year. We observed that while meetings and mentorship were beneficial initial steps, LSC ICs faced individual needs and required further support throughout the four-semester LSC experience. Consequently, we added resources to LSC course shells as repositories of relevant information.
In the routinizing stage, we continue to engage with LSC ICs and students through focus groups and surveys to identify further enhancements. Our goal is to establish a high level of support for both faculty and students, ensuring that the LSC innovation becomes a routine part of our program’s activities.
Through this poster session, participants will gain valuable insights inro effectively supporting faculty, enabling faculty to better support students

Authors

• Amy M. Markos, Arizona State University

• Josephine P. Marsh, Arizona State University

• Ray R. Buss, Arizona State University