Leadership Practices in Scaling Efforts in Community Colleges

Abstract

Leadership in community colleges, and postsecondary institutions more broadly, plays a central role in the sustainability and scaling of promising innovations within institutions. Understanding what leaders do to support the sustainability and scaling of these innovations is crucial for helping leaders develop practices that enable them to support these efforts. Using practice theory as a guiding frame, this study sought to unveil central practices that shape efforts to scale a promising, evidence-based mathematics course within two two-year colleges. We found that executive and mid-level leaders engaged in the intertwined practices of tracking and leveraging, where they attended to institutional culture, practices, and policies, and drew on these institutional features to both constrain and enable efforts to scale. Our study highlights the power of examining practices in the day-to-day work of leaders to illuminate what leaders do to scale or inhibit innovations in their institutions.