The Imperative of Education

Abstract

Teaching midgrade leaders at the Command and General Staff Officers Course (CGSOC) located in Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas, comes with many unique challenges. At CGSOC, students arrive having led soldiers in combat and having served in leadership positions in the United States Army for at least 10 years. When they walk into the classroom and see an instructor with a dress shirt and tie—not in a uniform—their immediate thought is, “What can this civilian teach me? I have fought in foreign lands and had to watch people die and lead soldiers through intensely difficult circumstances.” Through most of their careers, their approach to learning in Professional Military Education (PME) has been through training. CGSOC is the first time they experience learning from mostly an educational pedagogy as opposed to training. We focus on teaching how to think instead of what to think. At CGSOC we use an Experiential Learning Model (ELM), based on Kolb's Experiential Learning Theory. The ELM takes Kolb's experiential learning cycle and superimposes five steps on the preferred learning styles described by Kolb. We promote student‐to‐student dialogue, drawing out the experience resident in the classroom, and add leadership theory to reinforce the learning.

Who Teaches Leadership? A Comparative Analysis of Faculty and Student Affairs Leadership Educators and Implications for Leadership Learning

“…(p. xiv -xv) Leadership educators may also include a wide range of practitioners, including community educators, peer leaders, coaches and consultants, student affairs professionals, and leadership training officers (" About ALE," n.d.). Correspondingly, leadership education activities both transcend professional contexts from the military (Thomas & Gentzler, 2013) to healthcare education (Hess, 2013) and higher education (Jenkins, 2013b) as well as disciplinary contexts from the social sciences (Perruci, 2013) to STEM (Kotnour, Koekstra, Reilly, Knight, & Selter, 2013) and agricultural education (Velez, Moore, Bruce, & Stephens, 2013) to curricular and co-curricular partnerships (Buschlen & Guthrie, 2013;Jenkins & Harvey, 2013;). The vast array of disciplinary backgrounds may or may not have adequately prepared individuals with direct content and pedagogical knowledge essential to leadership education and development (Owen, 2012).…”