With leadership education expanding at an unprecedented rate, there is an acute need for an evidence-based leadership pedagogy that can bridge the gap between leadership theory and student practice both in the classroom and beyond its boundaries. This paper will give an overview of the Intentional Emergence Model as a way to teach leadership to emerging adults that specifically addresses this gap between theory and practice. It will discuss the model, research and evaluation data associated with the model, training requirements for instructors and teaching assistants, and the implications for leadership education as a result of the research on, and application of, the model.

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.