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Designing learning experiences that mimic real-life contexts has always been a challenge for leadership educators. As a result, many educators in leadership courses rely on studies of leadership perspectives, selfassessment activities, and textbook case analysis. However, many educators also successfully design microlevel processes and interactions that offer students the opportunity to experience the dynamics of power and influence whereby they practice leadership. Others explore the daunting challenges of placing students in various organizations to practice leadership. This latter type of practicing leadership is often full of challenges because of the reluctance of organizations to allow practicing students in decision making processes. In this paper, I present a two-week teaching segment in which leader dilemmas are used as inputs for practicing leadership in micro-level processes. The segment is designed in such a way that it mimics real life group dynamics, problem solving, and decision dilemmas. The objective is to provide a context wherein students practice micro-influence making as they experience the complexity of group life and, at the same time, learn to reflect on their learning, emotion, and the potential capacity to lead and follow.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the process of involving students and staff on school action groups, and staff and student experiences of reviewing local data and initiating school-level changes, to address bullying and other aggression.

The authors draw on qualitative, process data collected at four purposively sampled pilot intervention schools in England via semi-structured interviews with school managers, action group members and facilitators (n=33), focus groups with students (n=16) and staff (n=4), and observations.

School staff used multiple methods to recruit a diverse range of students onto school action groups. Locally tailored data reports were an important catalyst for action groups to identify priorities and plan whole school change – both through the process of “validation” (whereby existing concerns were confirmed) and “discovery” (whereby new problems were identified). An unexpected benefit of providing schools with these data was that it triggered analyses of other data sources, including routine monitoring data. External facilitators were important in promoting student voice and ensuring the intervention retained integrity as a whole-school restorative approach.

It was feasible to involve young people using action groups, and there was evidence of school-level actions led by students, including in disadvantaged school contexts. Future Health Promoting Schools interventions could incorporate this approach to support locally appropriate, school-level change.

The micro-level processes that were observed, whereby action groups interrogated feedback reports and collected additional data, suggest the responsiveness of such youth-involvement interventions to local needs. Contrary to many public health interventions, implementation appeared to be facilitated rather than hindered by features of the secondary-school “market” whereby parents have some choice between schools.

Globally, urban planners and decision makers are pursuing place-based initiatives to develop and enhance urban infrastructure to optimise city performance, competitiveness and sustainability credentials. New discourses associated with big data, Building Information Modelling, SMART cities, green and biophilic thinking inform research, policy and practice agendas to varying extents. However, these discourses remain relatively isolated as much city planning is still pursued within traditional sectoral silos hindering integration. This research explores new conceptual ground at the Smart – Natural City interface within a safe interdisciplinary opportunity space. Using the city of Birmingham UK as a case study, a methodology was developed championing co-design, integration and social learning to develop a conceptual framework to navigate the challenges and opportunities at the Smart-Natural city interface. An innovation workshop and supplementary interviews drew upon the insights and experiences of 25 experts leading to the identification of five key spaces for the conceptualisation and delivery at the Smart-Natural city interface. At the core is the space for connectivity; surrounded by spaces for visioning, place-making, citizen-led participatorylearning and monitoring.The framework provides a starting point for improved discussions, understandings and negotiations to cover all components of this particular interface. Our results show the importance of using all spaces within shared narratives; moving towards ‘silver-green’ and living infrastructure and developing data in response to identified priorities. Whilst the need for vision has dominated traditional urban planning discourses we have identified the need for improved connectivity as a prerequisite. The use of all 5 characteristics collectively takes forward the literature on socio-ecological-technological relationships and heralds significant potential to inform and improve city governance frameworks, including the benefits of a transferable deliberative and co-design method that generates ownership with a real stake in the outcomes.

As a rule, common courts are hermetic organizations, separated from their stakeholders by procedures based on legal provisions. For these reasons, they are often perceived as unreliable and non-transparent, and as such, they do not inspire trust among stakeholders. The authors posit that the court’s community involvement may lead to the increased accountability and legitimacy of courts, which should in turn result in jurisprudence benefits. This paper discusses the concept of community involvement of courts, demonstrates how this idea may be implemented and explains its benefits for courts.

The results of an action research study undertaken between June 2013 and March 2018 at the Regional Court in Gdansk (Poland) are discussed.

The results highlight factors underlying the implementation of the idea of community involvement, as well as the areas in which courts take these actions, and explain how it influences their accountability and legitimacy. This research describes the interests of different stakeholders and proposes a range of actions that may be taken by courts while cooperating with stakeholders to achieve the aims of community involvement. It also proposes a set of steps that enable courts to implement the idea of community involvement.

This paper develops the idea of the community involvement of courts, which may be used as an operating rule for public institutions to increase their legitimacy and accountability and explain its introduction in the context of courts. It offers a universal framework for the community involvement of courts that can be used in the context of any court in both the continental and Anglo-Saxon systems.