Faculty members in Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University have been reimagining the undergraduate and graduate teacher preparation programs to serve better PreK-12 students and improve the teaching profession. An important feature of the reimagined teacher preparation model included placing teacher candidates (TCs) on teams of educators with distributed expertise, which was intended to provide PreK-12 students more opportunities for deeper and personalized learning. Lead teachers who also served as mentors for TCs facilitated these teams. Within this reimagined approach to organizing the educator workforce and preparing future teachers, there was still a need to supervise appropriately TCs during their student teaching experience. Faculty supervisors conducted a minimum of six observations of each TC during each student teaching semester. These observations required a substantial amount of time being spent meeting with TCs at school sites, as well as a substantial amount of travel between placement locations. To address this problem of practice, an online, virtual supervision (VS) approach to providing coaching and feedback was implemented during the fall 2020 semester. The VS approach included an initial training for faculty supervisors, adoption of a video coaching platform, and a flexible protocol for completing four virtual walkthroughs and two virtual performance assessments for each TC during the student teaching semester. The purpose of this mixed methods action research study was to examine the effects of using VS to provide coaching and feedback to teacher candidates (TCs). Participants included three faculty supervisors who organized and facilitated coaching conversations with their assigned TCs who also participated in the study. Data for this mixed methods study included pre- and post-intervention faculty supervisor interviews, post-intervention TC interviews, and retrospective, pre-intervention and post-intervention surveys of TCs. Findings suggested faculty supervisors and TCs preferred the flexibility in scheduling coaching conversations and the ‘any-time-any-where’ availability of the faculty supervisor for support offered through the VS model. TCs also indicated they received quality feedback and coaching. The discussion focused on complementarity of the quantitative and qualitative data, connecting the findings to the research literature, limitations, implications for practice and research, personal lessons learned, and conclusions.

This study employed Participatory Action Research (PAR) which applied critical pedagogy, actor-network theory, and social network theory to create and implement an Application Framework for Critical Pedagogy (AFCP) with the goal of making critical pedagogy more broadly accessible to a wider range of faculty in higher education. Participants in the study included faculty, staff, and students from Watts College of Public Service and Community Solutions of Arizona State University, and data was collected in the form of surveys, interviews, written interactions, and video observations of multidisciplinary committee meetings to build the framework. The study concluded with a functional framework from which faculty and instructional designers alike can work to create better, more effective courses. Including participants of diverse backgrounds, varying power levels, and sometimes opposing perspectives in the study created a diversity of thought and experience which offered the opportunity to refine the purpose, expectations, and specific language of the tool. While the framework is not intended to be a definitive source of critical pedagogy application, this refinement allows the possibility that more faculty, instructional designers, and other higher education stakeholders may find utility in the revised framework as a tool for self-advocating and for professional pedagogical growth.

This dissertation aims to present an emerging theory of leadership for active learning organizations in higher education by clarifying factors leaders should integrate to facilitate adaptability. The emergent theory is grounded in multi-year mixed methods action research exploring the role of design, delivery, and leadership of a reflective action learning team model on innovation in a higher education setting. Four research methods were employed including document analysis, interviews, observations, and surveys. Data were analyzed using content analysis, process analysis, coding, frequency analysis, descriptive statistics, Cronbach’s alpha, and Wilcoxon signed-rank test. A grounded theory approach permeated all analyses. Research was guided by theories of experiential learning, action learning, and organizational learning, as well as change theory and design thinking. Results revealed that leaders of active learning organization can improve innovation by facilitating reflective action learning teams that are inclusive, empowering, and iterative. Additionally, teams that display more frequent and consistent welcoming, ideating, synthesizing, and mentor seeking behaviors have more innovative outcomes than teams displaying these behaviors less often and inconsistently. This research indicates that employees who participated in these teams gained the skills and knowledge needed to develop innovative proposals for the organization and increased individual innovative abilities at a statistically significant level. This study adds to the existing literature by offering a theory for leadership to promote effective team learning and innovation.