Promoting student success: The importance of shared leadership and collaboration

Abstract

Collaborative, shared leadership among administrators, students, faculty, and staff is a key component to creating campus environments that foster student success. Collaborative work groups can be powerful vehicles for launching and institutionalizing student-friendly policies and practices and for developing complementary programs such as first-year initiatives, fresh approaches to general education curricular offerings, service- learning, and student leadership development programs among others. Such initiatives almost always result in richer learning opportunities for students when done collaboratively than when an individual unit develops them. But collaborative approaches to leadership and program development do not come naturally within higher education institutions that reward individualistic endeavors over collaboration. The guiding principles offered here for promoting shared leadership and collaboration are based on an in-depth examination of 20 diverse four-year colleges and universities that have higher-than-predicted graduation rates and, as demonstrated through the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), effective policies and practices for engaging their students.