Effectiveness of a Leadership Development Program that Incorporates Social and Emotional Intelligence for Aspiring School Leaders

Focus on social and emotional intelligence competencies to improve effective leadership has become commonplace in the corporate arena and is now considered by many a prerequisite to successful job performance and outcomes (Antonakis, Ashkanasy, & Dasborough, 2009; Grant, Curtayne, & Burton, 2009; Spence & Grant, 2007; Kampa-Kokesch & Anderson, 2001; McGovern, Lindemann, Vergara, Murphy, Barker, & Warrenfeltz, 2001). Only recently has a similar trend become recognized and more accepted in the field of education (Patti, Senge, Madrazo, & Stern, 2015; Patti, Holzer, Brackett, & Stern, 2014). Few studies exist that study the role that educational leaders’ social and emotional competencies in play in their job performance and effectiveness; none exist that explore such development with aspiring school leaders. This quasi-experimental pilot study evaluated the effectiveness of a post-graduate development program for aspiring school leaders that incorporates social and emotional intelligence based on the Goleman-Boyatzis model (Goleman, Boyatsis, & McKee, 2001) and inspired by the original concept of emotional intelligence (Salovey & Mayer, 1990). The interrelated social and emotional competencies explored in this study form four core clusters that include: 1) self-awareness, 2) self-management, 3) relationship management, and 4) social awareness (Brackett, Rivers, & Salovey, 2011; Goleman, 1996; Salovey & Mayer, 1990; Zins & Elias, 2007). This study’s sample consisted of 32 aspiring leaders who participated in a post-graduate educational leadership program at a university in New York. The study evaluated whether or not there were any effects of focused social and emotional intelligence content and skills on aspiring leaders’ emotional intelligence (EI) and other related characteristics such as assertiveness, empathy, mental health, personality, and openness to experience. Post-tests on the various characteristics after one semester found no statistical significance in the tested variables. However, after two years, when the social and emotional intelligence competencies were post-tested (ESCI-U), there were significant findings in the student candidates’ self-reported competencies directly related to leadership. Paired t-test comparisons of the means of Observer raters’ scores did not find statistically significant differences in the competencies assessed. This article discusses these findings as well as the strengths and challenges of implementing social and emotional intelligence development within an aspiring school leaders program; finally, it provides recommendations for further program development and studies

The workday of hospital surgeons: what they do, what makes them satisfied, and the role of core tasks and administrative tasks; a diary study.

BACKGROUND Many surgeons report passion for their work, but not all tasks are likely to be satisfying. Little is known about how hospital surgeons spend their days, how they like specific tasks, and the role of core tasks (i.e. surgery-related tasks) versus tasks that may keep them from core tasks (e.g., administrative work). This study aimed at a more detailed picture of hospital surgeons' daily work - how much time they spend with different tasks, how they like them, and associations with satisfaction. METHODS Hospital surgeons (N = 105) responded to a general survey, and 81 of these provided up to five daily questionnaires concerning daily activities and their attractiveness, as well as their job satisfaction. The data were analyzed using t-tests, analysis of variance, as well as analysis of covariance and repeated measures analysis of variance for comparing means across tasks. RESULTS Among 14 tasks, surgery-related tasks took 21.2%, patient-related tasks 21.7% of the surgeons' time; 10.4% entailed meetings and communicating about patients, and 18.6% documentation and administration. The remaining time was spent with teaching, research, leadership and management, and not task-related activities (e.g. walking between rooms). Surgery was rated as most (4.25; SD = .66), administration as least attractive (2.63; SD = .78). A higher percentage of administration predicted lower perceived legitimacy; perceived legitimacy of administrative work predicted job satisfaction (r = .47). Residents were least satisfied; there were few gender differences. CONCLUSIONS Surgeons seem to thrive on their core tasks, most notably surgery. By contrast, administrative duties are likely perceived as keeping them from their core medical tasks. Increasing the percentage of medical tasks proper, notably surgery, and reducing administrative duties may contribute to hospital surgeons' job satisfaction

ENHANCING THE PROSPECT FOR DELIBERATIVE DEMOCRACY: THE AMERICASPEAKS MODEL

Engaging citizens in the deliberative process is essential to overcoming participatory apathy, cynicism toward government, and the apparent disconnect between citizens and decision-makers. AmericaSpeaks developed an electronic town meeting (ETM) designed to reconnect citizens and government. Ideally, the ETM affords citizens a means by which they can impact the policy-making discourse. This paper examines the extent to which AmericaSpeaks’ ETM enhances the prospect for deliberative democracy. Thirty minute structured interviews were conducted with twenty participants from Citizen Summit III, an ETM held in the District of Columbia in November 2003. The interview data suggest that AmericaSpeaks’ ETM, to some measure, enhances the prospect for deliberative democracy insofar as it cultivates a broadly inclusive and autonomous dialogue

Combining Content Analytics and Activity Tracking to Identify User Interests and Enable Knowledge Discovery

Finding relevant content is one of the core activities of users interacting with a content repository, be it knowledge workers using an organizational knowledge management system at a workplace or self-regulated learners collaborating in a learning environment. Due to the number of content items stored in such repositories potentially reaching millions or more, and quickly increasing, for the user it can be challenging to find relevant content by browsing or relying on the available search engine. In this paper, we propose to address the problem by providing content and people recommendations based on user interests, enabling relevant knowledge discovery. To build a user interests profile automatically, we propose an approach combining content analytics and activity tracking. We have implemented the recommender system in Graasp, a knowledge management system employed in educational and humanitarian domains. The conducted preliminary evaluation demonstrated an ability of the approach to identify interests relevant to the user and to recommend relevant content

Agile, Versatile, and Comprehensive Social Media Platform for Creating, Sharing, Exploiting, and Archiving Personal Learning Spaces, Artifacts, and Traces

Nowadays, students bring their full ecosystem of social media platforms and their own devices to school, while teachers benefit from and contribute to local or global repositories of educational resources. As a consequence, educational institutions have to better align their digital infrastructures and support schemes with these personal ecosystems and social practices. They also have to offer resources at a level of granularity aligned with targeted activities rather than full-fledged courses to ease personalization. Institutions finally have to ensure control of learning traces and persistence of learning outcome. To meet these needs, this paper presents Graasp.eu, a social media platform supporting digital education from primary and secondary school to higher education. Participatory design, fitness for active learning, and adoption are discussed as wel

Contextual Learning Analytics Apps to Create Awareness in Blended Inquiry Learning

Blended inquiry learning, where students for example use online labs to perform experiments, is considered a promising approach to increase the skills and interest of students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics domains. For teachers to provide adequate guidance to their students, it is critical that they are aware of the progress and difficulties encountered by each student. This can be accomplished through visual learning analytics, namely by tracking student interaction, data analysis and adequate visualisations. To address this awareness issue, we present in this paper a set of contextual learning analytics apps which provide the teacher with learning-specific information. This paper presents a requirement analysis from a summer school with 32 teachers, the design and implementation of three contextual learning analytics apps, the main outcomes from a case study as well as an outlook on future research avenues

Kartierung und Beschreibung der Open-Access-Dienste in Deutschland

Die Allianz der Wissenschaftsorganisationen treibt seit 2008 im Rahmen der Schwerpunktinitiative „Digitale Information“ die Modernisierung der wissenschaftlichen Informationsversorgung voran. Die Arbeitsgruppe „Wissenschaftliches Publikationssystem“ befasst sich dabei mit der Ausschöpfung des Potentials digitalen Publizierens, vor allem durch die Unterstützung der Transformation des wissenschaftlichen Publikationswesens in Richtung Open Access und die Stärkung einer nachhaltigen und wissenschaftsfreundlichen Organisation des Publikationswesens. In diesem Rahmen hat die Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) die Technopolis Deutschland GmbH mit der Durchführung einer Studie zur Kartierung und Beschreibung von Open-Access-Diensten und -Infrastrukturen beauftragt. Die Ergebnisse bieten einen Überblick über den Status Quo der für OA-Publikationen unerlässlichen Infrastrukturen und erlauben es, Handlungsoptionen für die Ausräumung von strukturellen Hindernissen der Transformation des Publikationssystems abzuleiten und diese perspektivisch zu formulieren. Die Studie umfasste im ersten Schritt die Identifikation verschiedener Dienste und Infrastrukturen. Im zweiten Schritt folgte die Erhebung von Detailinformationen wie Reichweite, Nachfrage, Finanzierung und Nachhaltigkeit sowie Forschenden- und Expert*innen-Perspektiven auf das öffentliche OA-System

Loss of autophagy protein ATG5 impairs cardiac capacity in mice and humans through diminishing mitochondrial abundance and disrupting Ca2+Ca^{\text{2+}} cycling

Aims Autophagy protects against the development of cardiac hypertrophy and failure. While aberrant Ca2+ handling promotes myocardial remodelling and contributes to contractile dysfunction, the role of autophagy in maintaining Ca2+ homeostasis remains elusive. Here, we examined whether Atg5 deficiency-mediated autophagy promotes early changes in subcellular Ca2+ handling in ventricular cardiomyocytes, and whether those alterations associate with compromised cardiac reserve capacity, which commonly precedes the onset of heart failure. Methods and results RT–qPCR and immunoblotting demonstrated reduced Atg5 gene and protein expression and decreased abundancy of autophagy markers in hypertrophied and failing human hearts. The function of ATG5 was examined using cardiomyocyte-specific Atg5-knockout mice (Atg5−/−). Before manifesting cardiac dysfunction, Atg5−/− mice showed compromised cardiac reserve in response to β-adrenergic stimulation. Consequently, effort intolerance and maximal oxygen consumption were reduced during treadmill-based exercise tolerance testing. Mechanistically, cellular imaging revealed that Atg5 deprivation did not alter spatial and functional organization of intracellular Ca2+ stores or affect Ca2+ cycling in response to slow pacing or upon acute isoprenaline administration. However, high-frequency stimulation exposed stunted amplitude of Ca2+ transients, augmented nucleoplasmic Ca2+ load, and increased CaMKII activity, especially in the nuclear region of hypertrophied Atg5−/− cardiomyocytes. These changes in Ca2+ cycling were recapitulated in hypertrophied human cardiomyocytes. Finally, ultrastructural analysis revealed accumulation of mitochondria with reduced volume and size distribution, meanwhile functional measurements showed impaired redox balance in Atg5−/− cardiomyocytes, implying energetic unsustainability due to overcompensation of single mitochondria, particularly under increased workload. Conclusion Loss of cardiac Atg5-dependent autophagy reduces mitochondrial abundance and causes subtle alterations in subcellular Ca2+ cycling upon increased workload in mice. Autophagy-related impairment of Ca2+ handling is progressively worsened by β-adrenergic signalling in ventricular cardiomyocytes, thereby leading to energetic exhaustion and compromised cardiac reserve