The professional skills of yesterday and today will not be adequate in the future, yet professional schools are preoccupied with the old to the exclusion of emerging competencies.-Chris Argyris and Donald Schön (1974) T his quote, although decades old, continues to describe the status of professional programs, including planning. While planning espouses the ability to change with the times, much of its substance and emphasis remain in a traditional mode of academic learning. This article demonstrates the application of a pedagogical approach receiving renewed attention in the planning curriculum-community service learning. The discussion begins with a four-part framework, based on an interdisciplinary literature, that describes the essential characteristics of service learning for a graduate course experience. Next we present an example of this framework: a studio course, taught annually in the Graduate Program in City and Regional Planning at the University of Memphis. ᭤ Literature ReviewCommunity service learning as a pedagogical strategy has been the subject of renewed interest in the educational literature of a range of academic disciplines. This teaching strategy takes students into the community with the goal of complementing and implementing student learning (Kinsley 1994). Service learning is particularly appropriate for applied disciplines, such as planning, because effective professional practice involves more than a conceptual understanding of the knowledge and skills; it also requires an operational understanding. This additional requirement involves developing competence. As Kirschner et al. (1997, 151) explain, competence is "the whole of knowledge and skills which people have at their disposal and which they can use efficiently and effectively to reach certain goals in a wide variety of contexts or situations." Accordingly, experiences in service learning that mirror professional situations allow students to apply classroom theories and thereby develop competence in a AbstractThis article explains the importance of including service learning opportunities in the planning curriculum. Based on an interdisciplinary literature, the authors develop a four-part framework for service learning: an emphasis on the different ways of understanding; the value of human experience as a source of learning; the requirement for reflective thinking to transform experience into learning; and an ethical foundation that stresses citizenship to community, profession, and a larger public interest. This framework is then applied through a studio course that is taught annually in the Graduate Program in City and Regional Planning at the University of Memphis.

Although much has been written about the need for effective nonprofit leadership and management, less attention has been paid to the unique career paths taken by professionals who occupy the highest nonprofit staff positions. This study investigated who is serving in the role of executive leader of nonprofit organizations and the variables that may affect reaching the CEO position. Data for this research included a random sample of LinkedIn profiles of local and regional leaders from 12 national nonprofit organizations. K-modes cluster analysis and multiple regression modeling revealed clues for understanding the career trajectories of current top leaders and resulted in the development of a new typology for nonprofit executive career paths. Significant factors affecting the path to the CEO role included gender, education, age, mission-focused career, and sector-specific experience. These findings inform nonprofit professional career decision making and guide boards in the executive selection process.

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