Enhancing Leadership Skill Development By Creating Practice/Feedback Opportunities in the Classroom

Abstract

Efforts to enhance students' management action and leadership skills are generally based on behavior modeling and experiential learning models. The classroom practicum approach to developing leadership skills described in this article enhances student learning by integrating a greater emphasis on the transfer phase of the learning process than is typical with either approach. By engaging students in opportunities for extended practice and informed feedback, this approach seeks to better achieve the conditions known to result in improved learning. Just as important, the classroom practicum approach seeks to achieve these conditions through a course design that is practicable even in classes with larger enrollments.