Teaching Leadership and Teaching Leaders
Welcome to our inaugural “Leadership” feature topic.  Our purpose in creating this 
topic is to provide a forum for instructors, scholars and leaders in all fields 
and who advance the growth of those who currently lead others.  Fifteen “Leadership” 
manuscripts will be included in this issue.  While our frames of reference may 
differ, one unifying focus is teaching:  how instructors teach future leaders; what 
leaders do to teach others; and the pedagogical grounding for both. Let me share 
briefly the interesting scholarship in this issue.

McFadden, Eakin, Beck-Frazier, and McGlone synthesize many theories of leadership 
and help us understand how we can meaningfully present this synthesis to aspiring 
leaders.  Edgar Schein has noted that a culture is built, in part, by what a leader 
models or teaches.  In this vein, Barbour and Harrell demonstrate how leaders build 
teams based on the types of conversations they provide during stages of teaming.  
Additionally, several scholars suggest we ought to develop leaders whose focus is 
improving schools.  While Quinn shares researched-based strategies principals can 
employ to influence teacher retention, Olson notes from her research how principals 
can increase teachers’ leadership capacity.  Houle proposes that if we teach leaders 
to conduct their own action research projects, they will make decisions necessary 
to improve schools; and Mansberger argues for university instructors to help current 
leaders move beyond technical know-how to engage followers to a higher moral purpose 
by teaching emerging leaders how to organize people and resources.  

In the university classroom, Poppink teaches her future school leaders to understand 
curriculum development by first understanding the underlying assumptions about 
knowledge, learning and teaching.  Marcellino crosses boundaries of education and 
business leadership to share results of a university classroom study, that team 
contracts and instructional monitoring help provide foundational support to emerging 
teams and their leaders; and, Brazer, Sparrgrove, and Garvey help us to understand 
that university instructors will increase their use of video and recording technology 
to improve performance-based assessment if the instructors perceive the technology 
to have utility and ease-in-use.  From Anderson’s research on conflict management, 
we learn that principal preparation programs ought to intensify conflict training 
with school-based activities.  Friedland discovered that graduate students more 
easily learned supervisory skills with an integrated process of reflection and 
feedback, knowledge and reality-based experiences.  When developing authentic, 
field-based experiences for teacher-leaders, however, Bauer, Haydel and Cody 
discovered that students have a difficult time negotiating the demands of a 
performance-based program, representing a significant challenge for reculturing 
the graduate experience.  

Margaret Mead stated, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed 
citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has."  We hope 
that this resource provides an opportunity for thoughtful and committed scholars 
and teachers of leadership and leaders to share their work.  If you teach leadership 
and leaders and want to make a difference, please consider contributing to our next 
issue.