A Strategy for Trustee Professional Development:
Using After-Action Reviews to Strengthen Board Performance

Traditional training approaches, retreats, workshops, and conferences, while valuable, are episodic and sometimes disconnected from the real work of governance. Yet the complexity of higher education governance has never been greater. Boards are navigating financial pressures, enrollment volatility, political scrutiny, technological change, and heightened public expectations around accountability and equity. In this environment, trustee effectiveness depends less on what trustees know in the abstract and more on how they reason together, exercise judgment, and learn from experience.