Conference Track: Leading Through Change and Uncertainty
Leading at the Edge: Fatigue and Burnout in Higher Education
Calvin Nobles
Vice President and Dean, School of Cybersecurity and Information Technology, University of Maryland Global Campus
Higher education leaders face sustained cognitive, emotional, and operational demands that can degrade judgment, recovery, and organizational effectiveness. This session examines fatigue and burnout among executives and administrators through a human factors lens and introduces the Executive Demand-Authority-Recovery Framework. Participants will learn to distinguish fatigue from burnout, understand how workload, decision authority, and recovery interact to create risk, and explore practical strategies to redesign leadership work before strain becomes chronic.
Regulate Before You React: Leading Higher Education Through Change and Uncertainty
Rubina Chadha
Professor, College of Arts and Letters, CalState LA, UCLAx, CSArts, Inner Design®
Higher education leaders are navigating enrollment shifts, budget pressure, rapid technological change, and widespread fatigue. Under sustained pressure, even experienced leaders can become reactive, communicate with less clarity, and unintentionally increase uncertainty. This session introduces the Inner Design® R³ Method: Regulate, Realign, Rewire, a practical framework for leading change from greater clarity and choice. Participants will learn to recognize how stress-driven patterns affect decisions and trust, practice a two-minute regulation reset before high-stakes interactions, and apply an R³ Change Leadership Map to one current institutional challenge.
Innovation Is Bigger Than the Boldest Person in the Room
Kevin Doe Crowsyn
Adjunct Professor, University of Florida
Higher education leaders face rapid changes in technology, enrollment, resources, workforce expectations, and student needs. Yet meaningful change requires more than the person with the boldest idea. This session introduces the Currents and Crosswinds of Innovation, a framework for understanding the different strengths people bring to change and the forces that can derail progress. Participants will identify their own Innovation Current, examine how different approaches complement one another, and apply the framework to a higher education change challenge.
The 90-Day Myth: Onboarding Yourself Through Leadership Uncertainty
Melissa McElhill
Director of Web and Digital Strategy, Oberlin College and Conservatory
Most leaders enter higher education with a job description but little guidance for navigating the complexities of institutional leadership. Sponsors depart, priorities shift, and ambitious 90-day plans collide with the realities of longstanding institutional structures. Drawing on her first-year leading web and digital strategy at a liberal arts college, where the vice president who championed her five-year roadmap departed just nine months into her tenure, the presenter shares a candid, practical playbook for navigating leadership transitions and building sustainable momentum. Participants will learn how to identify institutional decision-making dynamics and cultivate allies beyond their immediate teams, transform recurring challenges into sustainable systems and shared resources, and reframe short-term plans into a three-year vision without sacrificing ambition.
Leading Through Uncertainty: Building Adaptive Capacity in Higher Education
Victoria Brodie
Department Chair, Communication Arts,
Mary Ann Pearson
Professor of Communication and Leadership, California Baptist University
Higher education leaders increasingly operate in environments characterized by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA). Navigating these conditions requires more than traditional change-management skills; it requires adaptive capacity grounded in emotional intelligence, psychological safety, and relational leadership. This session presents an integrated framework for leading through uncertainty while strengthening trust, engagement, and organizational resilience. Participants will examine how emotionally intelligent leadership behaviors influence responses to change, explore psychological safety as a foundation for adaptability, and identify practical strategies for creating cultures capable of learning and responding to disruption.
From Quality Framework to Quality Practice: Building Capacity That Sticks
Kathe Pelletier
Founder, Confluence Network,
Brenda Boyd
Founder, Practice Learning
Adopting quality standards is relatively straightforward. Making quality an integral part of how an institution operates is much harder. Even strong initiatives can stall when quality depends on individual expertise, early adopters, or temporary structures rather than becoming embedded in institutional practice. In this session, participants will examine five conditions that help turn quality frameworks into sustainable practice: ownership and coordination; faculty participation and professional learning; feedback and improvement cycles; governance and decision-making authority; and resources, recognition, and continuity. Participants will learn to identify implementation gaps that put quality initiatives at risk, distinguish between adopting standards and developing institutional capacity, and determine practical steps to strengthen quality implementation at their institutions.
Leading Through Change: Using Group Dynamics to Strengthen Higher Education Teams
Melanie Jones
Sr. Director, Student Success Programs, Kent State University
Organizational change affects more than reporting structures, responsibilities, and processes; it can fundamentally shift how teams function. During restructuring, leadership transitions, staffing changes, and shifting institutional priorities, leaders may encounter resistance, uncertainty, disengagement, or conflict without fully recognizing the group dynamics driving these responses. This session draws on research in psychological safety, group cohesion, and social identity to help higher education leaders better understand how organizational change affects team dynamics.
Conference Track: Faculty Engagement and Development
From Theory to Impact: Transforming Classroom Instruction into Institutional Success
Melissa Schettler
Consultant
Student engagement and learning outcomes can suffer when faculty lack practical training in effectively applying instructional theory. With student success at the heart of higher education, institutions must prioritize strong classroom instruction as a foundation for meaningful learning. This session explores why traditional teaching approaches may fall short and identifies essential instructional principles institutions can adopt to strengthen student engagement and achievement. Participants will discover how targeted faculty development can transform classroom practices, improve learning outcomes, and elevate the overall student experience.
What First-Generation College Students Wished Professors Knew
Ellen Flynn
Education Faculty, University of Bridgeport
What do first-generation college students wish their professors understood about the challenges they face in achieving academic success? Drawing on a qualitative study of 60 first-generation students, this session explores how an empathetic, student-centered approach to teaching and learning can strengthen belonging, engagement, and academic success. Through students’ lived experiences, participants will discover how rethinking traditional teaching practices and allowing students to help shape their learning environments can create meaningful change. Participants will leave with practical strategies for fostering welcoming, inclusive classrooms, strengthening students’ sense of belonging, and embedding intentional, student-centered practices into the academic experience.
Leading AI-Responsive Assignment Design with the ARAD Framework
Tim Mousel
Professor of Kinesiology, Lone Star College — CyFair
As artificial intelligence reshapes higher education, how can leaders help faculty design assignments that remain meaningful, equitable, and academically rigorous? This session introduces the five-step ARAD framework, a practical approach to evaluating and redesigning assignments in an AI-driven learning environment. Participants will explore AI-resistant, AI-inclusive, and AI-required approaches to assignment design and consider how these strategies can be applied across disciplines. Through hands-on activities and collaborative discussion, participants will leave with a draft assignment revision and actionable strategies for supporting faculty development and strengthening assessment practices across their institutions.
The Real Lever to Pedagogical Wellness: Course Design Strategies for Both Sides of the Room
Sharanya Kanwar
Instructional/Learning Designer, Syracuse University
Wellness initiatives in higher education often assume that easing demands on students improves outcomes for everyone. In practice, that ease often gets absorbed by faculty instead through tracking extensions, re-explaining grades, and staying constantly available. This session reframes course design, rather than faculty availability, as the real lever for wellness, one that reduces demands on students and faculty alike. Participants will learn to identify where courses quietly shift burdens onto faculty and explore five concrete, theory-backed strategies for scheduling, grading, communication norms, and more that remove those burdens by design, not willpower. Attendees will leave with ready-to-use templates and a free diagnostic tool to help put these strategies into practice.
Conference Track: Student Success and Institutional Outcomes
Supporting First-Generation International Researchers in Graduate School
Gideon Irogbele
Researcher in Materials Science and Engineering, Clemson University
First-generation international graduate students often enter research-intensive programs with strong academic preparation but limited familiarity with the unwritten expectations of graduate education. Drawing on lived experience and research on advising, belonging, and doctoral socialization, this session explores common barriers related to advisor communication, research expectations, help-seeking, laboratory integration, and professional development. Through case analysis and action planning, participants will learn to identify barriers to student success, strengthen advising and onboarding practices, and assess student engagement, belonging, and academic progress.
Online Degree Completion Students: What’s Next?
Clotilde Dudley-Smith
Director and Professor Health Sciences, Quinnipiac University
Adult learners returning to college bring significant professional experience, competing responsibilities, and unique barriers to degree completion. This session explores how higher education leaders can design and strengthen online degree-completion programs that meet the needs of nontraditional students while advancing institutional enrollment and completion goals. Drawing on practical experience developing and leading an online health sciences degree-completion program, this session examines strategies for accessible program design, flexible pathways, proactive advising, targeted communication, and student-centered support.
Beyond the Deficit: Leadership Practices Supporting Black Male Doctoral Degree Attainment
Sonya Okoli
Assistant Professor of Higher Ed Administration and Program Director, Clark Atlanta University
Black male doctoral degree attainment has implications for career advancement, leadership representation, social mobility, and intergenerational opportunity. Yet conversations about Black men in graduate education often focus on barriers and deficits rather than the institutional conditions that support their success. This discussion shifts the focus from what Black male doctoral students lack to what higher education leaders can do. Using an asset-based approach, participants will examine practitioner-informed strategies for strengthening mentorship, financial support, research development, belonging, and institutional climate. Participants will leave with a framework for recognizing institutional barriers to doctoral completion, actionable strategies for supporting persistence and attainment, and approaches for creating environments where Black male doctoral scholars are valued, supported, and positioned to thrive.
Relationship-Centered Academic Advising: Practical Strategies for Neurodivergent Student Persistence
Barbara Muñoz
Learning Specialist/Academic Advisor and Instructor of Learning Essentials and Self Discovery, Beacon College
Academic accommodations alone may not address the challenges neurodivergent students experience in college. Drawing from a mixed-methods study of students, parents, faculty, and administrators, this session examines how academic advising relationships can support student persistence and independence. Participants will learn a three-step approach focused on relationship-centered check-ins, executive functioning support, and self-advocacy. Using a brief case study, participants will apply the three steps to a realistic advising situation and consider how they can use them within their own roles.
Find It, Fix It: Removing Disability Access Barriers by Design
Karin Boxer
Disability Inclusion Consultant, Karin Boxer LLC
Individual accommodations are necessary, but they cannot reach every student. Many barriers to access are embedded in everyday institutional practices, from attendance and assessment policies to registration procedures, procurement, and budgeting processes. Academic leaders have the power to change them. This session introduces ABLE, a four-step method for identifying and removing these barriers. Drawing on student oral histories, participants will practice applying ABLE to policies and practices within their own units. Participants will learn to recognize the abilities that institutional practices assume, identify and redesign the rules and workflows that create barriers, and lead ABLE reviews that build access into everyday practices rather than requiring students to request it.
Conference Track: AI, Technology, and the Future of Leadership
Closing the Higher Education AI Gap: A Five-Part Leadership Framework
Grace Alexis
Chancellor, Generations College
Higher education doesn’t have an AI problem; it has a pace problem. While 88% of students use AI, only 15% see it integrated into their courses. Drawing on national trends and Generations College’s launch of Chicago’s first associate degree in Business + AI, this session introduces a five-part leadership framework to bridge this gap. Participants will explore how to shift AI from an IT initiative to an organizational culture priority and adapt curricula at the speed of industry. Participants will learn to accelerate academic updates from years to months, leverage AI tools to automate routine content delivery and free faculty for meaningful mentorship, and apply a transferable framework to foster student entrepreneurship and workforce readiness.
Human Intelligence, Amplified: Building the AI-Ready Institution
Eric Goodman
Human-Centered AI & Business Transformation Strategist; Former Business School Dean and Chief Academic Officer, Higher Ed Change
AI adoption in higher education is accelerating, but adding more tools does not create an AI-ready institution. Leaders need a way to listen across the institution, identify the right priorities, build appropriate AI literacy, and decide where AI should automate work, amplify people, or remain outside the decision. This session introduces a human-centered framework: Listen – Prioritize – Prepare – Apply – Learn. Participants will explore how institutional listening, stakeholder-specific AI literacy, organizational context, specialized AI capabilities, and human judgment can work as one system.
The Work Behind AI Governance: A Decision Framework
Denisse Rodriguez
Founder, In Service AI
Most AI governance conversations in higher education start with tools—what’s allowed, what’s banned, or what requires sign-off. This session starts with the work itself: which institutional decisions should never be fully handed to an AI tool, and which can safely be delegated once the distinctions are clear. Using a live example (financial aid triage, admissions scoring, or one provided by participants), attendees will sort a real decision into three categories: what AI can safely handle, where a human must remain accountable, and where the answer is genuinely unclear. Participants will then apply a concrete test to the uncertain decisions: Is it reversible? Is it verifiable? What’s the cost of being wrong? Attendees will leave with a repeatable framework for evaluating AI-related decisions, practical strategies for establishing governance guardrails, and actionable recommendations to bring back to institutional policy committees.
Lessons from Building an AI Ecosystem Together: One Institution’s Strategy
Delaney Foster
AI Educator
Shannon Harmon
Assistant Director of Innovation in Scholarly Teaching
Stephanie King
Interim Executive Director & Professor
Cathy Curtis
Sr. Program Manager, AI Training & Adoption, Mississippi State University
Most AI governance conversations in higher education start with tools—what’s allowed, what’s banned, or what requires sign-off. This session starts with the work itself: which institutional decisions should never be fully handed to an AI tool, and which can safely be delegated once the distinctions are clear. Using a live example (financial aid triage, admissions scoring, or one provided by participants), attendees will sort a real decision into three categories: what AI can safely handle, where a human must remain accountable, and where the answer is genuinely unclear. Participants will then apply a concrete test to the uncertain decisions: Is it reversible? Is it verifiable? What’s the cost of being wrong? Attendees will leave with a repeatable framework for evaluating AI-related decisions, practical strategies for establishing governance guardrails, and actionable recommendations to bring back to institutional policy committees.
Conference Track: Building Culture, Trust, and Belonging
Tiny Scripts, Big Leadership: Micro-Scripts for Managers Leading Through Pressure, Conflict, and Change
K. Todd Houston
Professor of Speech-Language Pathology, University of Akron
Managers shape culture in small, high-pressure moments: the tense meeting, the overloaded inbox, the unclear decision, the difficult feedback conversation, and the conflict everyone is avoiding. This session introduces micro-scripts—short, values-aligned phrases that help leaders respond with clarity, empathy, accountability, and steadiness under pressure. Participants will learn the SOS Model: Sense It, Own It, Shift It, Live It, a practical framework for noticing pressure cues, interrupting reactive habits, and choosing language that strengthens trust and moves work forward. Participants will leave with practical scripts for feedback, conflict, workload boundaries, change communication, and emotionally charged conversations—and a simple plan for rehearsing them in real leadership moments.
The Interpretation Gap: Why Good Leadership Communication Still Breaks Trust
Carol Gardiner
Adjunct Professor, Indiana Wesleyan University
Communicating accurate information with good intentions is sometimes not enough to gain trust. Why? What leaders intend to say and what faculty and staff believe they heard can be very different. These interpretations can affect morale, workplace relationships, and responses to change. This session explores how the Interpretation Gap and faulty assumptions about decisions, messages, and motives affect emotions, behaviors, and trust in higher education. Participants will learn to identify communication patterns that unknowingly breed mistrust, utilize the Event → Interpretation → Emotion → Response formula during challenging interactions, and employ practical techniques to minimize misinterpretation, enhance communication, and build trust through change and conflict.
Voices Under Pressure: Leading Through Conflict and Difficult Conversations
Tisha Tyler
Communications, Adjunct Faculty, College of Southern Maryland
Higher education leaders are often judged by what they say during conflict, but the quality of their response is shaped by what happens before they speak. Under pressure, assumptions, incomplete information, power dynamics, and competing priorities can turn difficult conversations into deeper organizational conflict. Voice Under Pressure introduces the A³ Strategic Response Framework—Analyze, Assess, Apply—a practical approach for slowing the rush to response and communicating with greater intention. Through a realistic higher education scenario, participants will practice distinguishing facts from interpretations, assessing stakeholder and relational dynamics, and selecting communication strategies appropriate to the moment.
From Performance to Presence: Leading for Belonging and Student Success
LaDonna Croffe
Academic Specialist, Michigan State University
Higher education leaders are often called to guide others when answers are incomplete and the path forward is uncertain. Sustaining clarity, trust, and connection in these moments requires more than having the right answers; it requires intentional presence. This session introduces Anchor, Reframe, Respond, an evidence-informed framework for moving beyond the pressure to perform toward more thoughtful, intentional leadership. Through a realistic leadership scenario, participants will apply the framework and practice managing urgency, examining assumptions, and choosing values-aligned responses. Participants will leave with practical strategies for remaining grounded under pressure, reflection questions that support thoughtful decision-making, and a repeatable process for strengthening trust, fostering belonging, and prioritizing student success.
The ROI of Humor in Higher Education Leadership
Cary Lopez
Designer-in-Residence, University Design Institute
Anca Castillo
Designer-in-Residence, Arizona State University
Higher education leaders are navigating relentless change, constrained resources, burnout, and pressure to sustain both people and performance. This session reframes positive, purposeful humor as a leadership practice (not entertainment) that can strengthen trust, connection, adaptability, and recovery during difficult moments. Participants will explore the difference between constructive humor and humor that excludes or harms, examine how appropriate humor contributes to effective leadership, team cohesion, and resilience, and practice simple, inclusive techniques for strengthening workplace relationships and fostering healthier, more supportive team cultures.
The Emotional Immaturity Tax: What It’s Costing Your Campus
Angel Henry
President, Amulet Consortium
Higher education leaders are navigating budget pressure, enrollment shifts, and exhausted teams. Under that strain, emotionally immature behavior quietly spreads: difficult conversations get avoided, accountability gets deflected, and conflict goes unresolved. Institutions pay for it in turnover, stalled initiatives, and eroded trust, but it never shows up in the budget. This session introduces the Emotional Immaturity Tax, a practical framework for naming these hidden costs and reducing them, starting with your own leadership.
Conference Track: New and Emerging Leaders
Feedback, Coaching, or Both? Choosing the Right Leadership Conversation
Stephanie Calley
Manager, Engagement & Belonging, California State University Fullerton
Effective leadership requires more than knowing how to give feedback or coach—it requires knowing which approach the moment calls for. This session introduces a practical framework for diagnosing whether an employee needs clarity, discovery, or both. Through higher education scenarios and guided practice, participants will learn to distinguish feedback from coaching, choose when to use feedback, coaching, or both, and use practical language that builds clarity, reflection, ownership, and growth. Participants will leave with a simple decision tool they can immediately apply to everyday leadership conversations.
Leadership Without the Title
Morgan Jones
Executive Assistant to the Head of School, The Lexington School
Leadership doesn’t begin when the title arrives; it begins when you decide to create value, build trust, and take ownership. This session challenges participants to rethink what leadership looks like from every seat in the room. Through practical strategies, reflection, and real-world examples, participants will explore how to build influence without formal authority, communicate with confidence, navigate relationships, and turn initiative into impact. This session is designed for emerging leaders, young professionals, and anyone ready to stop waiting for permission to lead.
Leading From Lived Experience: A Reflection Alternative for New Academic Leaders
Samrat Ghosh
Founder and CEO, Three Moments Leadership
Most faculty-to-administrator transitions happen without structured reflection on what actually shapes how a person leads. This session introduces an alternative to traditional personality assessments: a three-word, three-moments reflection exercise. New and transitioning leaders identify three words that describe how they lead, then reflect on the specific experiences behind each word, creating a personal, evidence-based leadership pattern rather than an assigned personality type. Participants will complete the exercise during the session and explore how their experiences influence their leadership approaches. They will leave with a better understanding of why static personality labels may not lead to meaningful behavior change, a practical, low-cost reflection tool that requires no assessment license, and a repeatable exercise they can immediately use with new department chairs, associate deans, or program directors.