Using Deliberate Practice to Build an Instructor Development Program

Abstract

Learning to teach leadership in adaptive ways, such as using the classroom as a living leadership laboratory, requires a great deal of unlearning as well as deliberate, guided practice. However, developing instructors who are experts in this form of education is a challenging and underexplored area of leadership education. In the current essay, the authors explore how six of Ericsson and Pool's requirements for deliberate practice have been applied to a large undergraduate leadership minor in the Midwest to support leadership instructors using the Intentional Emergence (IE) model as a way to shift the classroom from traditional educational strategies to a leadership laboratory. The authors then discuss considerations for educators in translating this work to their own contexts.