A 2026 UCEA Mini-Grant was awarded to CASTLE, with Sara Dexter as PI, for

Digital Case Environments within a Virtual Practicum Approach to Equity Leadership: A Design-Based Research Study 

Driving Questions

• TOOL: What do educational leadership faculty need from digital case environments to support learners’ practice of equity-centered leadership judgment, and how should ETIPS be redesigned to meet those needs while generating usable evidence of learning for coaching and program assessment?
• PEDAGOGY: How can digital case environments, used as virtual practicum in leadership preparation, make equity-relevant noticing, interpretation, and decision-making visible—so instructors can coach situated judgment (through debrief, reflection, and feedback) rather than only evaluate final responses?

Purpose

The purpose of this project is to conduct a one-year design-based research (DBR) study that strengthens and extends the impact of ETIPS as a “digital case environment” within a “virtual practicum” approach for equity-centered leadership preparation. This award funds the research-enabling stabilization and instrumentation required to conduct DBR and disseminate artifacts across UCEA. ETIPS currently has sustained uptake through word-of-mouth (approximately 500 distinct users per year), yet its legacy infrastructure is approaching a failure point; without modernization, the platform will become unreliable and inaccessible to the field. This mini-grant will support a DBR cycle that begins with systematic user discovery with current and former ETIPS-using faculty, followed by targeted redesign decisions and stabilization work that preserves ETIPS’ core instructional value while improving usability and strengthening the evidence it can generate for learning, coaching, and program assessment.

This DBR work intentionally addresses two linked aims. TOOL: First, it will identify what educational leadership faculty need from digital case environments to support learners’ practice of equity-centered leadership judgment, and translate those needs into design requirements for ETIPS—particularly around instructor workflows, student experience, and the generation of usable evidence of learning (e.g., trace indicators and artifacts that support coaching and, where relevant, program accountability). PEDAGOGY: Second, it will examine how faculty can implement digital case environments within virtual practica to make equity-relevant noticing, interpretation, and decision-making visible—so instructors can coach situated judgment through structured debrief, reflection, and feedback rather than only evaluate final responses to scenario-rich dilemmas.

The expected outcomes are (a) a stable, usable ETIPS platform that remains available to the UCEA community and supports expanded adoption, and (b) a field-building contribution: a research-grounded articulation of digital case environments within virtual practicum for equity leadership learning, including practical implementation routines and evidence strategies that can be shared with leadership preparation faculty. This work builds directly on the PI’s long-standing development and study of ETIPS and her recent success advancing simulation pedagogy in the field (e.g., shepherding the adoption of “branching simulations” as a new Journal of Cases in Educational Leadership genre and conducting training for prospective authors). This work directly aligns with the mission of the Center for Advanced Study of Technology in Leadership Education (CASTLE) and its Virtual Practicum initiative, and contributes to UCEA’s vision to transform schools and create positive outcomes for students through leadership preparation. 

Background and Rationale

Educational leadership preparation programs (ELPPs) increasingly emphasize leadership for equity as a professional imperative, and over the last two decades many programs have improved in response to critiques, updated standards, and stronger evidence about how aspiring leaders learn (Campanotta et al., 2018; Cheney & Davis, 2011; Crow & Whiteman, 2016; Darling-Hammond et al., 2022; Davis & Darling-Hammond, 2012; McCarthy, 2015; Orr & Orphanos, 2011). Yet the field still struggles to produce a critical mass of leaders who can consistently translate equity commitments into practice at scale, as persistent achievement, opportunity, and access gaps remain features of schooling (Alemán, 2009; Black & Murtadha, 2007; Dantley, 2005; Gooden, 2005; Khalifa, 2013; Theoharis, 2007; Young, 2015). One reason is that preparation can over-rely on declarative learning—what leaders should value and what they should do—while expecting internships and early career experience to develop the practical judgment required to enact equity under real constraints (Moraguez et al., 2025). This leaves a persistent gap: candidates may be able to articulate equity principles, but have limited opportunities to rehearse how to notice inequities in context, interpret competing evidence, anticipate consequences for different student groups, and decide on defensible actions in complex, socially charged dilemmas.

This project addresses that gap by stabilizing and studying ETIPS as a practice-based learning tool designed to “make thinking visible.” Over 25 years, ETIPS has been used by educational leadership faculty through word-of-mouth adoption, suggesting durable instructional value and a readiness in the field for tools that move beyond discussion of leadership to practicing leadership and the situated judgement it requires. The current moment is pivotal: without stabilizing and operationalizing the refactored platform for research and dissemination the platform risks becoming unreliable and inaccessible; with stabilization and design-based research, the field gains a reliable tool and a clearer, research-grounded pedagogy for developing the situated judgment necessary  for equity-centered leadership. The time is ripe to investigate how AI can further the value of both this tool and pedagogy using it. 

Key Concepts

Digital Case Environment:  A digital case environment (Dexter et al., 2020; Dexter et al., 2022) is not a traditional narrative case posted as a PDF. It is a context-rich, menu-driven problem space that simulates how leaders encounter information in real schools: incomplete, distributed across sources, and requiring discernment. Instead of reading a linear storyline, learners choose what information to access (e.g., attendance trends, disciplinary records, staffing patterns, family communications, budget documents, teacher concerns). The environment is “case-like” because it is anchored in realistic dilemmas; it is an “environment” because it functions as an information landscape that learners must navigate and structure. This design intentionally shifts the learning task from absorbing a story to exercising judgment about what to attend to, what counts as evidence, and what is missing. As a digital case environment ETIPS contains nine hypothetical yet realistic schools portrayed through their website and intranet. Schools vary by level (elementary, middle, high), achievement (high, medium, and low) and setting (urban, rural, and suburban). With the ten case topics, 90 possible combinations are possible, and their use has been proven to improve leadership decision making (Tucker & Dexter, 2011). They are free for use, with hosting costs supported by PI Dexter over the last ten years.

Virtual Practicum: Virtual practicum (Dexter et al., 2020; Dexter et al., 2022) names a middle space in leadership preparation between classroom learning and fieldwork. Unlike internships, it is designed to be safe-to-fail, repeatable, and instructionally scorable. Unlike classroom discussion alone, it requires learners to act within a scenario and generate performance evidence. Within virtual practicum, digital case environments anchor the experiential learning cycle that faculty extend through facilitation and debriefing to reflection, transfer to theory, and future actions and plans (Kolb & Kolb, 2017). They become structured practice opportunities that can be intentionally sequenced, coached, and revisited, allowing leaders to develop judgment over time rather than hoping it emerges indirectly from experience. Virtual practicum also enables access and equity in preparation itself: candidates in online programs or uneven internship placements can still engage in rigorous, comparable practice of leadership thinking. In 2019, as Sara Dexter joined CASTLE as a co-Director, Dexter and  colleagues launched  the CASTLE’s Virtual Practicum initiative (see https://schooltechleadership.org/vp/). Through this initiative CASTLE is building field capacity for the using digital case environments, branching scenarios, and clinical simulations as anchors within a virtual practicum.

Perceiving–Interpreting–Deciding (PID) and the development of situated judgment:  The practical challenge of equity leadership is not only deciding what to do; it begins earlier, with how leaders perceive and interpret a situation. ETIPS is designed around the premise that situated judgment can be understood as a learnable assembly of cognitive work:

• Perceiving: What does the leader notice and treat as salient? What patterns do they see, and what do they overlook—particularly regarding student groups historically marginalized in schools?
• Interpreting: How does the leader make sense of what they noticed? What explanations do they generate, what assumptions drive their reasoning, and how do they weigh evidence versus stereotypes or “common sense” narratives?
• Deciding: What action does the leader choose, and how do they justify it in light of constraints, equity implications, and likely consequences?

Digital case environments make this PID process (Goodwin, 1994; Blömeke, et al., 2015) more visible than traditional cases because learner navigation and evidence selection can be captured as trace data (what they opened, when, and in what sequence), and paired with written rationales or structured responses. In other words, ETIPS allows instructors to see not just the final answer, but the information pathway and reasoning moves that produced it. That visibility is especially important for equity leadership because the core breakdown is often upstream: a leader may “decide” poorly because they failed to notice a critical inequity pattern, or interpreted it through a deficit lens, or relied on incomplete evidence. When those breakdowns are visible, they can be coached directly.

The field-level gap this project addresses:  In educational leadership scholarship there are strong commitments to leadership for equity (e.g., Khalifa et al., 2016), but leadership preparation has, and uses, fewer tools that operationalize equity-centered judgment as something that can be practiced, examined, and improved (Dexter et al., 2022; Moraguez et al., 2025). This mini-grant responds to that gap by supporting a design-based research cycle that both (a) preserves a tool with demonstrated instructional value and (b) advances the field’s capacity to develop equity leadership more deliberately. By clarifying digital case environments and virtual practicum as pedagogical constructs—and by linking them to the PID development of situated judgment (Dexter, in press)—this project aims to contribute a practical, researchable approach that leadership preparation faculty can adopt, study, and disseminate across the UCEA community.

Activity and Outcomes

Design-Based Research Cycle 1 

Design-Based Research Cycle 2 

Design-Based Research Cycle 3

Final Deliverables

1. Stabilized ETIPS.info platform with a vetted subset of equity-relevant modules imported and ready for pilot; documented content ingestion pipeline to expand the library with input from the field.
2. Innovative and Experiential Learning Session (i.e., “how to use”) session submitted to 2027 Annual UCEA Convention, and proposed to LTEL as webinars.
3. Proposal to JCEL Editorial Board to add the “digital case environment” genre to the taxonomy of cases (i.e., currently traditional linear text and newly added branching sims).
4. May 1 2027 detailed report To Program Center Associate Director Jayson Richardson, including a DBR technical memo with design principles and evidence strategy.

Contact

Please contact Dr. Sara Dexter, Co-Director of CASTLE, at [email protected] if you have any questions about this line of research, proposal (including deliverables). 

References Cited

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Dexter , S. (in press) Developing Educational Leaders’ Judgment: Some Assembly Required, in Johanek, M. (ed). The Five-Second Dilemma – Situated Judgment Across the Professions. Oxford University Press.

Dexter, S., *Moraquez, D. & Clement, D. (2022), Pedagogical Gaps in the Bridge from Classroom to Field for Pre-Service Principal Competency Development, Journal of Educational Administration, 60 (5), 473-492. https://doi.org/10.1108/JEA-07-2021-0141

Dexter, S., Clement, D., *Moraguez, D., & Watson, G. S. (2020). (Inter)Active Learning Tools and Pedagogical Strategies in Educational Leadership Preparation. Journal of Research on Leadership Education, 15 (3), 173-191. https://doi.org/10.1177/1942775120936299

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Kolb, A., & Kolb, D. (2017). Experiential Learning Theory as a Guide for Experiential Educators in Higher Education. Experiential Learning & Teaching in Higher Education, 1(1), 7–44.

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Moraguez, D., Dexter, S., & Clement, D. (2025). Assessing Equity and Social Justice Competency Development in Educational Leadership Preparation Programs. Journal of School Leadership, 35(4), 213-239. https://doi.org/10.1177/10526846251343561 

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Theoharis, G. (2007). Social justice educational leaders and resistance: Toward a theory of social justice leadership. Educational Administration Quarterly, 43(2), 221–258. DOI: 10.1177/0013161X06293717

Tucker, P. D. & Dexter, S. (2011). ETIPS Leadership Cases: An Innovative Tool for Developing Administrative Decision Making. Journal of Research on Leadership Education, 6 (5) 250-271. https://doi.org/10.1177/194277511100600510

Young, M. D. (2015). Effective leadership preparation: We know what it looks like and what it can do. Journal of Research on Leadership Education, 10(1), 3–10. DOI: 10.1177/1942775115569419

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