Simulations Help School Leaders Hone People Skills

By Sarah D. Sparks

Ed Week

Syracuse, N.Y.

Jody F. Manning has been a superintendent in New York state for more than 20 years, but his experience didn’t make his conversation with the woman across the table any easier.

Terry Jones had made three increasingly urgent phone calls asking to meet about her daughter, whose grades had been dropping precipitously. Ms. Jones talked about her daughter’s bruises and clothes found ripped, bullying the girl has mentioned in passing but wouldn’t talk about directly—and said she suspects the girl has been cutting herself. When Mr. Manning talked about the high school’s anti-bullying policy and suggested ways to find the bullies and stop them, Ms. Jones became increasingly upset and adamant that the school not involve her daughter in any way in the punishment.

And then she dropped a potential legal bombshell: Ms. Jones is a lesbian, raising her daughter with another woman, and she fears her daughter’s bullying may be a hate crime.

This is the sort of meeting, wedged among dozens of other daily fires, that could easily blow up in a school administrator’s face. It won’t, in this case, as Mr. Manning was among nine other school leaders meeting with “Terry Jones” as part of a simulation training program for school leaders at Syracuse University.

The research project here, between Benjamin H. Dotger, an assistant professor of teaching and leadership at Syracuse, and the State University of New York’s Upstate Clinical Skills Center, takes a page from the traditional “standardized patients” used to simulate disease symptoms for medical students. The project is creating a series of parent, teacher, student, and community-member roles to help principals and teachers learn how to cope with tricky conversations.

Supported by a three-year grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences, the project has developed 15 principal and 13 teacher simulations, and is rolling out a school leadership training curriculum based on them this fall.

Initial research on the live simulations found participants improved significantly in their awareness of and responsiveness to different races and cultures, and slightly improved their moral and ethical judgment after going through the simulations as gauged on standardized assessments.

A Leadership 'Scrimmage'

Mr. Manning, the superintendent of the 1,500-student Solvay Union Free School District in New York, has taken part in 13 such simulations. He calls the experience a “scrimmage” for school leadership.

School Leader Simulation

Using medical actors to play the role of parents, Syracuse University's simulation training program helps principals and teachers learn how to cope with tricky conversations.

Social interaction “is something we aren’t trained on,” he said. “[Preservice programs] take care of the pedagogy, take care of classroom management, but they never teach how to deal with parents.”

“When I started as an assistant principal, everything I learned was on the job, and there are times where, reflecting on them, there are things I would have done differently,” he added, “and I’ve seen first-year [staff members] just fall apart and almost lose their career over a bad parent conference, where they just can’t deal with it.”

At a time of increasing principal turnover and high-stakes school accountability, more school leadership programs are evolving beyond traditional role-playing lessons to more-dynamic simulations.

“Often in higher education they talk about principal preparation, while folks in school districts talk about principal readiness, and there is a real gap between preparation and readiness,” said Richard A. Flanary, the senior director for leadership programs and services for the National Association of Secondary School Principals, in Reston, Va.

“For many principals, their clinical experience”—the administrator-candidates’ practice in a school—“was the most valuable of their program, but often those were done in episodic, piecemeal experiences,” Mr. Flanary said. “We’re beginning to see more and more programs using simulations so that they don’t leave those kinds of experiences with parents and teachers and board members until the end of the program.”

'Standardized' Experience

Much of the recent research on professional-development simulations has focused on computer simulations, such as the University of Central Florida’s TeachME project, in which preservice teachers instruct a classroom full of virtual students projected onto a screen. Little emphasis, though, has been given to live simulations for school leaders, who must interact regularly with not only with students, but also with parents, teachers, school board members, and community officials.

To help school leaders develop diplomatic skills and hone their judgment, Mr. Dotger, the lead researcher for the Syracuse program, looked to the live-action simulations already used in nearly all medical schools to train would-be doctors to interview patients and diagnose symptoms.

“The entrepreneurial part of me recognizes the value” of using virtual avatars instead of trained actors, Mr. Dotger said. “At the end of the day, though, I am preparing teachers and school leaders for what is still a career that requires dealing with people. I’m not convinced that sitting in front of a computer screen dealing with an angry parent is going to produce the same visceral experience as dealing with an angry parent in person.”

Mr. Dotger and his team interviewed 52 principals about regular issues in their daily practice, including their most difficult conversations with students, parents, and teachers and examples of situations they thought they had resolved well or poorly. The researchers then analyzed the interviews for common problems and themes, particularly those which the school leaders thought a new principal might not have dealt with during training, and developed characters that could be used to illustrate the issues.

For example, “one of the things principals repeatedly told us was, you have to be patient,” Mr. Dotger said. “If you are too quick to give a student a lunch detention and get him out of your office so you can get to other stuff, you may miss the chance to really help that kid.”

That issue inspired the character “Shannon Casey,” who lands in the principal’s office of a large urban school after threatening to beat up two students on the bus.

The actors who play Shannon Casey are ...

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Coverage of leadership, expanded learning time, and arts learning is supported in part by a grant from The Wallace Foundation, at www.wallacefoundation.org.