Flipped Classrooms and Research-Informed Leadership Education
By Nathan Eva
Nathan Eva, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Management at the Monash Business School, Australia. Nathan was awarded the 2016 and 2013 Dean's Award for Teaching Excellence and nominated for Monash University’s 2017 and 2016 Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Teaching Excellence for his local and international leadership development units. Nathan’s research focuses on servant, ethical, and entrepreneurial leadership and has appeared in international outlets such as The Leadership Quarterly and Journal of Business Ethics.
G’day, my name is Nathan Eva and I hail from the Monash Business School in Melbourne, Australia where I am an Assistant Professor in Leadership. I encourage you to come join me at the ILA’s Leadership Education Academy (LEA) in Denver in August for a truly unique leadership education experience.
My Experience as a Former LEA Participant
Two years ago, when I was looking to turbo-change my leadership education knowledge and practice, I serendipitously received an email about LEA and was instantly intrigued by a leadership-only education program. I immediately reached out to co-creator Dan Jenkins for more information about what I was going to get over LEA’s three-and-a-half days. He promised me a detailed, highly-interactive curriculum designed for leadership educators by leadership educators. From the moment I arrived, I was surrounded by people who were speaking my language. I had been to many higher education workshops before, but this was the first that spoke to the challenges and the opportunities that I was facing — specifically leadership education challenges. This is what makes LEA truly unique. The pedagogies, activities, and assignments proposed are all specific for teaching leadership. You will not find this anywhere else in the world.
I love LEA’s small group settings where participants are grouped by similar interests and have access to a facilitator specializing in that focus area. This allows for the opportunity to build a community of practice sharing best-practices and problem-solving through shared challenges. The facilitators are dynamic, each offering a diverse skillset, but all specializing in leadership education. As a participant, the program allowed me time to work with different facilitators that assisted me in developing and refining my own leadership curriculum. I have since taken this knowledge back to my own classroom to enhance how each of my activities, topics, and assignments better transitions and scaffolds from one to the next. In addition, I am still in constant contact with members of my group continuously networking and sharing experiences, hardships, and suggestions to help make each of our leadership programs increasingly exceptional.
My Transition to an LEA Facilitator
When Corey and Dan began recruiting for 2019 LEA facilitators, I thought about what unique insights and experiences I had that differentiate make me from other leadership educators. Further, I reflected on how I, as a facilitator, might make a significant contribution to the upcoming leadership educator participants joining LEA in 2019. I have a broad leadership education background, having developed and delivered multiple leadership programs for industry, public service, university students, and post graduate students. In addition to my research interests, two passions that stand out are my international leadership immersion program and my “flipped” classroom.
International Leadership Immersion. Each year, I take 24 students to Florence, Italy to engage in a two-week leadership development course, without distraction or competing demands, within a supportive environment. I am given a rare opportunity as a leadership educator to bring together students from across 10 faculties — from medicine to entrepreneurship to drama. This program gives students exposure to leaders operating in vastly different areas to their own and challenges their personal leadership paradigms. Students learn the theory and then are able to apply it straight away on the streets of Florence, learning in the footsteps of some of the greatest leaders of the past. I have run this program for three years now, and have since coached others in developing international leadership programs that have long-lasting impact on their students.
The Flipped Classroom. I have also designed and delivered a flipped classroom, where the material is learned online via a series of videos and pre-class activities before class even begins. The students then enter the classroom equipped with the knowledge to engage in more active, social, and interactive activities. From this, I have written a how-to guide and mentored colleagues on using the flipped mode of delivery in more than 10 other courses. The flipped classroom is based on the assumption that students are active and independent participants in their own learning. It puts the student at the center of the learning process.
Research Interests. All my courses are informed by my own research on leadership and leadership development. My research focuses on changing the conversation of how people lead within organizations by demonstrating that inclusive approaches to leadership have more profound and lasting effects on followers and organizational in-role and extra-role behaviors than traditional heroic leadership approaches. The romantic notion of leaders as heroes, where leaders are lauded for being ego-centric, has caused more damage than good, fueling multiple corporate scandals. My research challenges the idea of ego-centric leadership and argues that we need to rethink how we lead and what leadership behaviors we should reward. If we, as leadership educators, continue to produce ego-centric leaders, we will continue to experience crisis in the confidence of our political and business leaders.
My research addresses this leadership problem in three different ways. The first is through researching servant leadership, which is a leadership approach that focuses on the holistic development of followers (professional and personal). My research has advanced the leadership field to establish servant leadership as a legitimate leadership approach for organizations that want the performance benefits of transformational leadership without the expense of the well-being of their employees. The second is through researching how we are developing leaders who do not engage in ego-centric leadership. Specifically, my research has built theories to explain how we are developing women and young people, and how we are developing teams of leaders, rather than one heroic individual. Finally, I have tried to shift the conversation from performance-driven leadership to follower-driven leadership more broadly, by examining alternate leadership approaches. This has included collective, ethical, and empowering forms of leadership — all of which have been examined in different countries and across ethnicities and genders. This research can be found in a number of journals across multiple disciplines including The Leadership Quarterly (leadership), Journal of Business Ethics (ethics), Journal of Vocational Behavior (careers), Human Resource Management (HRM), and International Small Business Journal (small business).
I Invite You to Attend LEA 2019
At LEA, you can expect me to be a voice of evidence-based strategies and theories. I will constantly be sharing about the latest research into leadership and leader development, and how we can use this to inform our own course and program designs. I am a proponent of feedback mechanisms and effective evaluations to ensure our participants aren’t just getting a sugary hit from our programs, but rather that they are getting a long-term solution to improve their leadership health. I am looking forward to sharing my insights on leadership development with you and learning from your experiences.
At every conference I now go to, I am always asked by leadership scholars about the best ways to educate people on leadership. My response is always the same. There is an academy called the Leadership Education Academy — it will change the way you think about leadership education and equip you with the knowledge to be able to shape the next generation of leaders. So, I will give you the same advice. Come along to LEA as it will turbo-change your leadership education knowledge. See you in August!
Nathan Eva