Johanek: “The need to accelerate the development of sound professional judgment in education leadership is urgent”

Schools can’t succeed without strong leadership.

But new principals, superintendents, and other administrators say they often enter their jobs feeling unprepared for high profile, high stakes judgment calls.

Writing in SmartBrief, Mike Johanek, the director of Penn GSE’s Mid-Career Doctoral Program in Educational Leadership, and Ken Spero, who teaches in the program, say this silent crisis of leadership in education should prompt a reexamination of how school leaders are trained.

“The need to accelerate the development of sound professional judgment in education leadership is urgent,” Johanek and Spero write.

“Utilizing methods of experiential learning can help build good judgment in emotionally charged situations of complexity and uncertainty. Computer-based simulations are one such method, enabling participants to experience a variety of lifelike professional experiences and decisions in a compressed time period. We advocate for the use of simulations of various types, drawing from across multiple professional traditions, all of which provide risk-free environments that approximate actual practice.”

You can read the full SmartBrief piece here.