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Improving the governance is one of the priorities of the reforms in the area of higher education in Russia. Radical reforms and massive democratisation of the sector in the last 25 years resulted in accumulation of many development issues: the quality of public services, the efficiency of public spending and the modes of interaction between state, society and institutions. Supervisory boards are the latest addition to the landscape of the university governance. The paper discusses the legal framework of the supervisory boards in Russia, analyses how it relates to the best world practices in the sector and how it reflects in the actual composition of the boards and affects the roles they accomplish at the universities. The paper concludes with the discussion of the areas of concern in the current boards’ practices and suggests how they can be improved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the crossroads of current innovation policies towards a European Research Area (ERA) and a European Higher Education Area (EHEA) lies an important province of higher learning and research: doctoral training and the further careers of PhD graduates. A considerable number of higher education systems across Europe shift their paradigms for doctoral training away from the traditional so-called Humboldtian model towards the so-called professional model. On this background, the paper discusses (1) the German pattern of a strong link of the PhD to the labor market outside academe that is based on a traditional academic-disciplinary mode of apprenticeship training, and (2) approaches that argue for a new mode of knowledge production replacing an academic-disciplinary model of research training by a hybrid model that crosses disciplinary and organizational borders. The paper argues that a diversity of organisational and structural forms as well as different validation criteria and procedures will probably determine the future face of research training. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Teacher team involvement is considered a key factor in achieving sustainable innovation in higher education. This requires engaging in team learning behaviors that should result in new knowledge and solutions. However, university teachers are not used to discussing their work practices with one another and tend to neglect any innovation in their tasks. Team leadership behavior is often considered essential for stimulating team learning behavior, but it is unclear how this transpires. Therefore, the present study explores university teacher team members' perceptions of team learning behavior, their assigned task, and leadership behaviors in their team. Interviews were conducted with 16 members of different teacher teams at a university of applied sciences. Findings included that the vast majority of the team learning behaviors only involved sharing ideas; engaging in constructive conflicts and co-constructions was not observed. Only a few teams combined all three team learning behaviors. In these teams, members observed that existing methods and solutions were no longer adequate, with leaders appearing to combine transformational and transactional behaviors, but operating from a distance without actively interfering in the process. Furthermore, these team members shared leadership behaviors while focusing on the team as a whole, instead of solving problems at individual level. This strongly indicates that task perception and specific vertical and shared team leadership behaviors play a role in stimulating teachers in seeking controversy and co-constructing new knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]