What’s the most effective way to learn? Learning by doing. But how do you learn by doing when you can’t “do” until you learn? Since we also believe that Experience is the Best Teacher™, our simulations essentially accelerate time and manufacture experience.
We expect administrators to learn on the job, but responding to conflicts in a virtual world helps them learn without real-world consequences. American schools are facing a crisis in the lack of professional learning for school leaders.
There is a silent crisis undermining school improvement efforts. As in any major organizational change effort, leadership is a key ingredient to success. However, in educational leadership, the abilities to communicate, coordinate, and make decisions are not enough to address the “painful” trade-offs regularly faced by leaders in education. Their challenge is not just about making good decisions, which is daunting enough. They must also manage highly-public and often emotionally-charged issues among a diverse student and adult population. The state of our leadership pipeline, though, and our efforts to support their work, call for a dramatic shift in approach.
Preparing new school leaders and further developing those who’ve already found roles in administration is a broad task. There’s no single tool or approach that covers everything. The responsibilities of school leaders are varied and the decisions they make affect different constituencies with sometimes competing interests. As a result, it’s impossible to train new and aspiring leaders how to respond to every specific challenge they may face in the course of their careers.