Sanger team members Michelle Austin and Suzy Skrtic recently represented the University of Michigan at the Leadership Education Academy hosted by the International Leadership Association (ILA). The 7th annual conference, held at the University of Maryland in College Park, was an immersive training program designed by leadership educators for leadership educators. Participation was capped at 80 individuals, whose experience spanned student affairs leadership education, university administrators, corporate trainers, leadership coaches, and K-12 educators.
Here are a few top takeaways from Austin and Skrtic:
- Self-Leadership as Educators: We invested time in thinking about why we teach leadership, who we are as educators, and what we want to impart on our students. Similar to what we teach at Sanger, starting with ourselves as leaders was empowering and helped shape the learning we took in at the conference.
- Learning Design: We worked through a model of learning based on adult development that broke down the types of learning into six domains, authored by Seemiller and Rosch (2019). A key idea here was that before learners can take in the content, they need to care about what you’re teaching them, be open to changing their mind, and have the confidence to believe they can learn.
- Pedagogy: At Sanger, we try to teach leadership ways that prioritize experiential learning. The conference presented an entire afternoon focusing on learning activities and methods of teaching that could further engage our students. In particular, we had fun attending a session on improv and case-in-point.
- Assessment: Measuring behavior change from leadership development programs can be difficult, but it’s necessary. Other educators were also assessing behavior change with pre/post self-reported evaluations. An alternative way of collecting data using retroactive post-workshop questions was presented that has us thinking!
“Spending the week as a learner was really refreshing and rewarding for me,” Austin shared. “The facilitators demonstrated many leadership development activities and pedagogies to the group. In one activity, I had to act like a leader who only focused on task-based feedback for my team to build a Jenga tower. In another activity, I participated in improv and then learned how the debrief for the activity could surface insights about empathy.”
Austin and Skrtic look forward to bringing all of their insights back to the Sanger Leadership Center and integrating some of them into future programming.
