The Leadership Educator Podcast

In this episode, Dan and Lauren are joined by Dr. Todd Deal, Senior Faculty and Director of the Higher Education Practice at the Center for Creative Leadership and a longtime facilitator with the ILA Leadership Education Academy, where he and Dan first met. Todd traces a career he calls serendipitous: 28 years as a tenured chemistry professor, a five-year stint as associate dean, and then a vice president's request that he build a leadership program for high-ability students despite having, by his own account, no obvious qualification for the job — a program that grew to fold in service learning and community engagement, occupied him for a decade, and won five national awards. Most of the conversation sits with the pivot from teaching to facilitating, including the early CCL colleague who told Todd his challenge wasn't passion for the material but his expert mindset. He describes how discovery learning and guided inquiry moved intact from chemistry into leadership theory, how deliberately forming teams across the four CliftonStrengths leadership domains cut his conflict mediation to two cases in the remaining years of a service-learning course, and why senior higher-ed leaders often handle ambiguity worse than undergraduates do — inventing rules and rubrics nobody ever stated, a pattern the 30 circles exercise exposes in about three minutes. He closes on framing academic and student affairs as a polarity to manage rather than a problem to solve, on CCL colleagues using AI to build experiential activities where none existed, and on 15 years as the public address voice of Georgia Southern football.

Resources and works mentioned in this episode:

Todd Deal — CCL faculty bio — background on his higher education practice and the chemistry-to-leadership transition

Frost, L. D., & Deal, S. T. General, Organic, and Biological Chemistry (4th ed.). Pearson. — the allied-health textbook Todd co-authored

CliftonStrengths (Gallup) — the assessment Todd used to build student teams across the four leadership-strengths domains

Bonwell, C. C., & Eison, J. A. (1991). Active Learning: Creating Excitement in the Classroom. ASHE-ERIC Higher Education Report No. 1. — referenced by Dan on the origins of active learning pedagogy

Are You Facing a Problem or a Polarity? (CCL) — CCL's treatment of polarity thinking, the frame Todd applies to academic affairs and student affairs, originally developed by Barry Johnson

Build Your Creative Confidence: 30 Circles Exercise (IDEO) — the creativity activity Todd uses with students and executive audiences, originally from Stanford's Bob McKim

Leadership Educators Institute (LEI), Dec. 14–16, 2026, University of Louisville — the biennial conference Dan recommends

Journal of Leadership Education — a source Todd credits for classroom activities he adapted for university and CCL audiences

ILA Leadership Education Academy — where Todd and Dan met and began collaborating

In this episode, Dan and Lauren are joined by Dr. Trisha Teig, leadership educator at the Archer Center for Student Leadership Development at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Dr. Joshua Taylor, director of the Hargis Leadership Institute at Oklahoma State University, co-editors of New Directions for Student Leadership Issue #189, Leadership Learning Through Study Abroad: Considerations, Best Practices, and Innovative Ideas. This marks the 21st episode in the TLE–NDSL partnership series. Both editors came to the work through practice: Teig built programs in Costa Rica, Ireland, and Northern Ireland through the Pioneer Leadership Program at the University of Denver, while Taylor has led roughly a dozen short-term programs across six continents, most recently a 47-student program in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand.

The conversation returns repeatedly to access. Both editors are direct that study abroad cannot remain, as Teig puts it, for the rich and elite only, and the issue treats structural choices — third-party providers versus faculty-led courses, cost, program design — as the levers that determine who participates. Teig discusses applying Heifetz's adaptive leadership framework to sort anticipatable risk from the genuinely unforeseeable, while Taylor describes nightly campfire reflection as the structural backbone of a faculty- and staff-led program in rural Zimbabwe. Both land on the same point about emergent curriculum: the learning that matters often has to be facilitated in the moment. And both are emphatic that leading study abroad is immersive, always-on professional work — Taylor has now been in hospitals with students on six different continents — while still urging educators who haven't led one to find or create the opportunity.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

New Directions for Student Leadership, Issue #189: Leadership Learning Through Study Abroad — the issue at the center of this conversation, co-edited by Teig and Taylor

Volpe White, J. M., Guthrie, K. L., & Torres, M. (2019). Thinking to Transform: Reflection in Leadership Learning. Information Age Publishing — the reflection scholarship Taylor connects to his program's nightly debriefs

Hoffa, W. W. (2007). A History of U.S. Study Abroad: Beginnings to 1965. Forum on Education Abroad — a foundational source for Teig's historical research in the issue

Heifetz, R. A., & Linsky, M. — the adaptive leadership framework Teig uses to categorize program risk

Archer Center for Student Leadership Development, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute — Teig's center

Hargis Leadership Institute, Oklahoma State University — Taylor's institute

Service Learning in a Pandemic with Dr. Tara Coste — Coste's prior TLE appearance; she contributes to Issue #189 and collaborates with Dan on his Cape Town program

In this episode, Dan and Lauren welcome back Dr. Nyasha M. GuramatunhuCooper, founder of Girton Road Leadership Learning & Consulting. Nyasha's path into the discipline ran through a doctoral program at Gonzaga where she found room to ask bigger questions. One of those questions came from a student at Kennesaw State early in her career, who asked why they should be learning about leadership in African countries. In that conversation, her home region of Southern Africa had been positioned as a consumer of leadership knowledge rather than a producer of it, and unsettling that assumption has been a throughline in her teaching and writing ever since.

Resources and works mentioned in this episode include:

Girton Road Leadership Learning & Consulting — Nyasha's consulting practice

The Accidental Facilitator — Nyasha's workshop on foundational facilitation skills, co-created with a business partner

Holding Space — Heidi Brooks' facilitator-development retreat through the Interpersonal and Group Dynamics program at Yale School of Management

ILA Leadership Education Academy — Nyasha attended the inaugural LEA in 2015 and has since served on the facilitator team

Gladwell, M. (2008). Outliers: The Story of Success. Little, Brown and Company — the popularization of the "10,000 hours" concept drawing on Ericsson's research

Heifetz, R. A. (1994). Leadership Without Easy Answers. Harvard University Press

In this episode, Dan and Lauren are joined by the three co-editors of the newest New Directions for Student Leadership issue: Dr. Kerry Priest, Professor and Director of Leadership Studies at the Staley School of Leadership at Kansas State University; returning guest Dr. Jason Headrick, Associate Professor of Leadership and Community Development at Texas Tech University; and Dr. Haley Traini, Associate Professor of Leadership Education at Oregon State University. Together they co-edited NDSL #188: Leadership Learning for Systems Thinking and Practice — the 20th episode in the TLE–NDSL partnership series.

Kerry, Jason, and Haley trace the issue's origins from a 2023 keynote by Mary Uhl-Bien in Copenhagen to a call for submissions deliberately open to stories, case studies, and reflections. They walk through the three questions that structure the issue — how we develop systems capacities, how we teach them, and how we evaluate systems-level change — along with tools like Human Systems Dynamics and its "what, so what, now what" adaptive-action cycle. The conversation is full of classroom-ready metaphors, from tracing how ice gets made to why an iPhone is merely complicated while mayonnaise is truly complex. As Kerry reminds us, in systems work the goal isn't winning or losing — it's staying in the game.

 

Resources and works mentioned in this episode include:

New Directions for Student Leadership, Issue #188: Leadership Learning for Systems Thinking and Practice

Human Systems Dynamics Global, co-founded by Glenda Eoyang and Royce Holladay

21st International Studying Leadership Conference, Copenhagen Business School, December 2023

Complexity Leadership: Insights on Adaptability from Professor Mary Uhl-Bien

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

In this episode, Dan and Lauren are joined by Dr. Laura Greenhaw, Assistant Professor of Agricultural Leadership in the Department of Agricultural Education and Communication at the University of Florida. Laura's path to the leadership classroom ran through a ranching family in rural New Mexico, years teaching high school agriculture, and a Ph.D. at Texas Tech — where she first watched a fellow doctoral student weave film clips into teaching and never looked back.

The conversation explores how Laura has turned film into a deliberate, evidence-based tool for teaching team leadership and group development. Students arrive already knowing what leadership and teamwork feel like, she argues, but they rarely share the same mental model of the words — and film creates a shared experience the whole class can debrief together. Laura walks through the research arc she has built with collaborator Matthew Gold: applying Tuckman and Jensen's stages of small-group development to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, examining how Hogwarts house identity shapes team decision-making, and comparing inductive and deductive sequencing with The Imitation Game. Along the way, she and the hosts trade the practical craft of film-based teaching — student choice, "REEL" analysis papers, showing full-length films as students' viewing habits change — and talk candidly about navigating sensitive content with intention. Dan connects it all to his own long-running "Leadership in Film" assignment and the Collegiate Leadership Competition's curated clip library.

Resources and works mentioned in this episode include:

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Gold, M., & Greenhaw, L. L. (2024). Harry Potter and the Leadership Educator: Using Film to Teach Team Leadership. Journal of Leadership Education, 23(2), 121–127.

Dyment, M. A., Gold, M., & Greenhaw, L. (2026). The Science of Sorting: Analyzing Team Decision-Making in an Agricultural Communication and Leadership Course Using Hogwarts Houses. Journal of Agricultural Education, 67(1), Article 18.

Gold, M., Greenhaw, L. L., & Bunch, J. C. (2025). Decrypting Enigma: Utilizing 'The Imitation Game' to Analyze the Impact of Abstraction Order on Team Development Comprehension. Journal of Leadership Education, advance online publication.

UF/IFAS Leading Teams series — Greenhaw's Extension publication series on the stages of group development

Tuckman, B. W., & Jensen, M. C. (1977). Stages of Small-Group Development Revisited. Group & Organization Management, 2(4), 419–427.

Wimmer, G., Meyers, C., Porter, H., & Shaw, M. (2012). Learning Vicariously: Students' Reflections of the Leadership Lessons Portrayed in The Office. Journal of Leadership Education, 11(2), 52–71.

Collegiate Leadership Competition — Dan's curated film-clip library

Dr. Gaea Hock — Professor of Agricultural Education, Kansas State University

Matthew Gold — Ph.D. student, The Ohio State University