Central to this course is acquiring skills as leadership competencies and learning current and historical leadership styles and strategies. Through reading, discussion, and brief inventories, students recognize and analyze leadership theories and their practical application and assess personal leadership characteristics and behaviors to lead to students’ growth as leaders. Students also evaluate and discuss leadership case studies that promote critical thinking and creative problem-solving skills.  In addition, this course assists in preparing students for Ed. D.: Leadership Program success through their acquisition of academic writing and presentation skills and by introducing scholarship as an approach to learning and as an academic product with practical applications. Students are introduced to American Psychological Association (APA) style, a program requirement for written assignments. They learn how to conduct database research; to critique empirical articles, books, and other pertinent material; and to construct an academic literature review. Students also analyze a case study to identify and articulate the underlying leadership problem(s).

Upon completion of this course, students will be able to:

• Identify leadership theories and their philosophical origins.
• Articulate the advantages and drawbacks of each theory from the viewpoints of all organizational constituents, including leaders and followers.
• Analyze how leadership as a practice and as a discipline has evolved, especially in the Western world, recognize leaders’ governance styles, as manifested by their decision making and behavior, and analyze the effects of these styles on all constituents related to the leaders’ organizations.
• Demonstrate the ability to think critically about traits essential to ethical, responsible, and successful leadership in the age of accelerations.
• Assess and refresh personal leadership style as an ongoing practice.
• Embed new ways of teaching and learning within an organization and develop strategies that mitigate and/or remove barriers to learning.
• Demonstrate critical thinking, reading, and creative problem-solving skills.
• Produce academic writing formatted in American Psychological Association (APA) style.
• Understand elements of basic research and conduct database research.
• Distinguish scholarly from popular research in order to comprehend and critique empirical research.
• Conduct literature reviews.