3. 3
Division of Students
PARTNERS IN STUDENT SUCCESS
Pathway to goal…
2014-15
Identify and pilot
value
proposition for
student
leadership
2015-17
Leadership &
Career strategy
developed and
piloted
2018
More leadership
and career
development
opportunities for
all students.
4. 4
Division of Students
PARTNERS IN STUDENT SUCCESS
Value Proposition: Transferable
Skill Development
The literature on co-curricular learning, positions campus
leadership experiences as ones that provide a rich source
of personal and professional development.
• Gain transferable workplace
skills
Value to
Student
• Increased capacity to offer
students opportunities to
practice in the “workplace”
• Increased engagement
Value to
Institution
5. 5
Division of Students
PARTNERS IN STUDENT SUCCESS
WHAT IS EXPERIENTIAL
LEARNING?
CONCRETE
EXPERIENCE
REFLECTIVE
OBSERVATION
ABSTRACT
CONCEPUALIZATION
ACTIVE
EXPERIMENTATION
• Simply…learning
through doing
• Popularized by
Kolb in 1984
8. 8
Division of Students
PARTNERS IN STUDENT SUCCESS
The Leader Within
• 2 part series developed by student leadership and
career development practitioners and delivered to 100
student leaders in 2014.
1. The Leader Within: Preparing for the experience
2. The Leader Within: Making meaning from the
experience
• The sessions were
designed to facilitate deep
reflection and personal
meaning of experiences
through a number of
reflective activities.
9. 9
Division of Students
PARTNERS IN STUDENT SUCCESS
Evaluation: Year end survey
On Personal vision, mission and values:
95% reported that they reflected on their vision, mission
and values during their role as a peer leader.
100% reported that their vision, mission and values
guided them in their roles.
77% reported that they would revisit
10. 10
Division of Students
PARTNERS IN STUDENT SUCCESS
One respondent wrote:
“I wrote a statement that has been a touchstone
for me personally and professionally, It’s one that I
have revisited already because it’s given me focus
and motivation around the kind of person I aspire
to be”.
11. 11
Division of Students
PARTNERS IN STUDENT SUCCESS
Evaluation: Year end survey
On skills development…
• 100% of respondents were able to list at least 5 skills
that they had developed.
• Reported experiences that led to skill development
included: helping others, working on a team, time
management, conflict resolution, event planning
• 77% reported that they would revisit and/or revise their
areas for personal and professional development in the
next 12 months.
12. 12
Division of Students
PARTNERS IN STUDENT SUCCESS
I hope you will…
• Reflect on your role in the leadership and career
development of your student leaders.
• Re-imagine your programs as powerful experiential
learning and skill development opportunities.
• Build reflection time in for your student leaders.
• Find opportunities to partner with your career centre.
13. 13
Division of Students
PARTNERS IN STUDENT SUCCESS
More Info?
Educational Advisory Board’s
Reimagining Experiential Learning on
Campus Webinar Series
15. 15
Division of Students
PARTNERS IN STUDENT SUCCESS
2014-15
Identify and pilot
value proposition
for student
leadership
2015-17
Leadership &
Career strategy
developed and
piloted
2018
More leadership
and career
development
opportunities for
all students.
Next Steps…
Pan University Steering
committee & working groups
Expanded Pilot group of
positional leaders
Staff/coordinator training
development
Reflections & Co-curricular
record development
Evaluation & Assessment
Editor's Notes
Hello!
Who works with student leaders? I mean the broad definition, residence dons/assistants, porters, peer mentors, ambassadors etc.
Who identifies themselves as a leadership educator?
Who identifies themselves as a career educator?
We at York are on a journey of creating an evidence-based theory informed leadership and career strategy and have identified it as a key student success priority for us. We are at still at the beginning of our journey but have made some huge strides this year – namely identifying the value proposition for student leadership and stitching together student leadership education with career development which currently are organized and run quite separately.
So before I get into it, let me provide the context...
In 2013, under Vice Provost, Students Janet Morrison’s leadership, the Division of Students unveiled a 5 year strategic plan.
The plan included
a refreshed vision, mission and values to guide the division
4 student success priorities that were identified and developed with our student demographic in mind with the goal of positively impact success and retention
3 enablers to position staff and departments to do their work effectively and efficiently
And an accountability framework through the Balanced Score Card framework
We began our work on the final student success priority (Student Leadership and Career Development) this year…. This is the work that we are sharing with you to you today
The overall goal of the strategy is to create more leadership and career development opportunities for all students, and I emphasize all students.
Currently, our leadership education programing, while excellent, it serves positional student leaders and a handful of non-positional student leaders and doesn’t do a great job of encouraging the non-involved students.
Here’s the thing, while our leadership education has a significant impact on 1000 students we have 55000 students at York, most of them commute and spend less than 5 hours a week on campus outside of classroom time, they are busy, they have jobs and most of them have family commitments outside of school.
So before we could even begin building and testing a framework, we thought that we needed to ask the question “what is the value proposition for student leadership and specifically leadership education that will not only engage more students but will compel them to be involved.
Quite simply, we think that the value proposition for leadership and co-curricular experiences is transferable skill development.
In fact much literature on co-curricular learning, positions campus leadership experiences, such as those found in student government, peer mentorship and ambassador programs, as ones that provide a rich source of personal and professional development.
The value to the student lies in the gain of transferrable workplace skills. Here is where we hope to engage the non engaged student that is, encourage students to invest in their skill development through involvement outside the classroom. Our students want jobs….
The value to the institution lies in an increased capacity to offer students opportunities to practice and apply their classroom learning in the real world. Just as important though, we have an opportunity to enhance the student experience and retention through increased engagement.
The experiences is bolded for a reason….experiences are central to experiential learning theory, which we have landed on as our theoretical guide….
.
Simply, Experiential Learning is learning through doing
We have adopted Kolb’s framework
Dr. Strange referred to this in his keynote
Kolb’s model defines learning as “the process whereby knowledge is created through the transformation of experience
In EL, the learner is an active player vs. a passive empty vessel waiting to be filled by someone more knowledgeable….
Kolb describes learning as a cyclical process that moves through 4 phases:
Concrete experiences serve as the basis for experiential learning
Through the reflective observation phase, the learner begins to make personal sense of the experience and reflects on the experience from various perspectives
This reflections leads to abstract conceptualization, whereby the learner creates sound hypotheses, implications, and/or strategies for actions from their observations.
In the active experimentation phase, the learners are provided an opportunity to practice their hypotheses, implications and/or strategies in new experiences, which in turn itself, becomes a new concrete experience
So instead of being a cycle it is more a spiral…where knowledge builds
Before we leave the theory then…. The process of reflection and making meaning of an experience results in learning. Personal story, internal process
Here are my kids….Serena and Adrian
Pictures mark the beginning of learning how to walk
They are both walking, running, jumping, skipping, falling and in the case of Serena…sleep walking….
I didn’t teach them, they didn’t learn from a book, didn't watch an instructional movie…they learned by doing….learned in stages and each stage built on each other…first they sit, crawl, stand, cruise and walk
Before we leave the theory then…..When one makes meaning of an experience leads to learning happens…
In the context of a student leader then….Experiences of a student leader
Other than jumping spontaneously, unprompted, regularly what are common student leader experiences?
Planning event
Chairing a meeting
Navigating a conflict
Helping others
Managing Time
What kinds of skills do these lead to…
Communication
Time Mgt
Working with others
Conflict resolution
Problem solving
And each time they have the experience they get better and better an betters at each skill
This notion of skill development in leadership experiences isn’t a novel one. I suspect that like at York, many campuses have career development sessions that help students identify their skills and accomplishments from a range of experience and articulate them in resumes, cover letters and co-curricular transcripts. What was new for us, is incorporating this kind of activity or process into leadership education.
Student leaders aren’t that great at articulating their skills and accomplishments and don’t necessarily see the transferable skills they have developed.
2 part developed by student leadership and career development practitioners and delivered to 100 peer leaders during PLT 2014. They were both 90 mins long…
The Leader Within: Preparing for the experience
The Leader Within: Making meaning from the experience
The sessions were designed to facilitate deep reflection and personal meaning of experiences through a number of reflective activities.
