Kansas State University

Cale Morrow continues this series on teaching and learning practices for leadership development. In this essay, Cale explores how educators can look to both contemporary leadership perspectives and theatre performance techniques to develop students’ social and emotional skills.

At the age of 17, I was asked to run a summer theatre camp for kids—nothing fancy, just a program offered to the public by a local dinner theatre in my hometown. We went about the usual theatre camp troupes, like line memorization tricks, costuming 101, and learning stage directions. We put on a short one act play by a first-time writer and everyone went home happy enough. From a theatre perspective, it was a 5/10 experience.

However, there was something other than basic theatre education that I observed while running this camp. I noticed that the participants began to perform better socially in the small group situations that the camp had created. They made friends quicker, spoke up more often when I asked a question, and developed a sense of confidence akin to someone ready to take on the world and whatever it had to throw at them. This change in the camp participants was my first experience with the positive impact of theatre techniques on a person’s social and emotional development. Continue reading “All the world’s a stage, and all of us are just leaders trying to connect upon it: Approaching contemporary leadership from a theatre performance perspective” →

In this series, authors will share examples of teaching and learning practices for leadership development. In this essay, author Ania Payne describes how applying a leadership as practice lens to work in the classroom can help students learn how to be more successful at group projects and community engagement.

When the students in my Technical Writing class start the final project of the semester, they usually bemoan “the dreaded group project,” complaining that it’s impossible to have a group without “social loafers.” They assure me that as much as I might try to enforce an equal distribution of the workload, inevitably 1-2 people end up bearing most of the load of this 3-4 person group project.

Students often start group projects by identifying their competencies: one student might be more artistic and confident with design software; another student might identify as a “strong writer,” and another might decide that they are a skilled project manager or team leader. However, not all students see themselves filing these narrow roles, which leads to those students starting the project with lower confidence, unsure about how they fit into the group dynamics and less willing to speak their voices or take on significant roles. Students are often taught that identifying competencies is the best way to approach group projects; however, competency thinking does not transpose context, such as from one class to another, therefore it tends to represent individuals acting independently and “performing in isolation to others and context” rather than “being cognizant and compensatory with where one is stronger and weaker” (Carroll et al., 2008, p. 365). Continue reading “Leaderful learning through group projects” →