Promote undergraduate students’ distributed leadership through project-based learning experiences

The possibility for students to take part in meaningful and challenging activities is recognized as one of the
strategic dimensions for qualify university formative processes and for promote students’ development of
leadership skills (Baeten et al., 2010; Moretti & Giuliani, 2016; Sternberg, 2016). Those who work in the
educational field have been interested in active teaching methods for a long time (Nigris et al., 2007; Kane,
2007; Hunt & Chalmers, 2021), and the advantages that they highlight are connected to the possibility for
students to increase their level of engagement and sense of responsibility and to develop skills in an open
and flexible learning context (Kahu, 2013; Domenici, 2017; Hodges, 2020). Linked to other instructional
tools that encourage peers’ collaborations, active methodologies can promote the development of
communication and relational skills too (Bartkus, 2001; Asoodeh et al., 2012).
Project-based learning is one of the active teaching strategies that has proven to be very effective due
to its ability to promote the development of skills on a personal and relational dimension (Pellerey, 2005;
Bell, 2010; Guo et al., 2020). By involving students in the management of small group projects, projectbased
learning should propose tasks that are motivating and close to real life. The skills on which it is
possible to work through an instructional design that enhances project-based learning are consistent
with the construct of students’ distributed leadership investigated in the literature (Leithwood et al., 2004;
Komives et al., 2011; Giuliani, 2019), and in the paper will be deepen a practical experience developed
in this regard.
The paper explores a laboratory developed in the Department of Education of Roma Tre University
(Italy). The laboratory involved 56 students and asked them to work on a project in small groups. At the
end of the formative process, each group was asked to produce an artifact to present to the teacher and
other peer groups the results of the study conducted.
The groups had organizational autonomy to develop the project and had to: identify and study different
sources; design an educational module aimed at promoting the pleasure of reading in childhood
services; produce teaching materials and data collection tools; report in a final multimedia presentation
what they done and detected.
The main findings that emerged confirm the effectiveness of problem-based learning in promoting an
active approach of students during their formative processes. Students’ leadership skills relating to the
personal and social dimension, at the end of the laboratory, reached good levels in almost the cases
and the feedback that the students themselves returned on the activities developed was very positive.