Learning by Leading

Student-Driven Conference Planning as Pedagogy for Leadership Development

Abstract

Leadership development is integral to the social work profession and competencies, yet classroom teaching of leadership skills remains elusive. The purpose of this article is to describe a promising approach to developing student leadership skills through a 1-credit seminar using project-based learning and student-faculty collaboration. In two consecutive years, students and faculty collaborated to design and lead a student-driven social work health policy and practice conference attended by over 220 learners. Student planners co-led all aspects of the project including selecting themes, inviting speakers, marketing, leading workshops, moderating panels, emceeing, and evaluation. A novel, fast-paced “360 Roundtable” event engaged over 30 students in leading multi-faceted mini-workshops. The planning team evaluated the impact of their efforts by collecting post-conference feedback in which attendees self-reported high satisfaction. Conference planning and implementation served as a pedagogical context for students to demonstrate learning by leading. They successfully solicited the expertise of policymakers, recruited peers, collaboratively handled conference logistics, and led confidently in public venues. Overall, this collaborative, pedagogical approach to conference planning illustrates how engaging students as leaders and co-designers in their own education can produce impactful real-world outcomes and build student leadership capacity. We describe each stage of project implementation and discuss its rationale to enable other educators to adapt and modify this promising leadership teaching strategy for their own contexts.