Networked Leadership and Collaborative Planning in Adult Education: A Two-Layer Conceptual Framework

Abstract

Adult education operates under complex demands—heterogeneous learner trajectories, community-anchored priorities, and chronic resource constraints—that call for transforming leadership planning into a collaborative, traceable, and evaluable practice. This conceptual/practice article proposes a two-layer framework to professionalize networked leadership co-planning. The theoretical–practical layer standardizes language and artifacts (advance agenda, minutes with owners/deadlines, RACI matrix, action log, after-action reviews, stakeholder protocol, and risk log). The practical–transformational layer institutionalizes weekly co-planning and short feedback cycles. We formalize a theory of change and logic model that render the approach evaluable via lightweight KPIs: planning quality (0–4), meeting effectiveness (0–1), action completion (%), stakeholder engagement (0–100), and implementation fidelity (%). We offer design principles for resource-constrained contexts, an operational guide, and testable propositions for future research. Our contribution is an actionable, transferable framework that integrates distributed/networked leadership, collaborative planning, and evaluability without heavy data infrastructures, paving the way for subsequent empirical testing.