The Virtual Practicum initiative in CASTLE was launched at UCEA Headquarters in 2019, by CASTLE co-director Sara Dexter, with Davis Clement, Danny Moraguez, and Margaret Thornton.

What are virtual practicums?

We define virtual practicums as the technologies and learning opportunities faculty design and embed in their courses to create hypothetical, but realistic, rehearsal opportunities that capture learner performance data that is then used by faculty to provide feedback, elicit learner reflection and knowledge application, inform future practice, and assess developing competences. Essential to any virtual practicum is the requirement that learners engage in cycles of experiential learning—experience-reflect-think-act—through reflection and debriefing. Virtual practicums provide interactive, context-rich simulated learning experiences that allow students to rehearse their leadership decision-making without the possibility of causing harm to students or other stakeholders.

There is a rich history of using virtual practicums in UCEA that includes use of simulations in educational leadership since the 1950s.

Why virtual practicums?

Today’s schools require a different type of leader. The role of school leader has evolved over time, expanding to include instructional leader, curriculum and assessment expert, budget analyst, facility manager, special program administrator, change agent, and community builder. With this change comes an entirely new set of demands. To serve the needs of all students, leaders must have the capacity to effectively impact teaching and learning while also leading for an organization’s continuous improvement, equity of educational opportunities, and empowerment of families and communities. The interactive learning and pedagogical tools making up a virtual practicum offer the possibility of producing relevant, dynamic, and innovative learning experiences that prepare educational leaders for today’s schools.

As leaders with limited leadership competences pose a threat to students, faculty, and staff, leadership education needs a pedagogical option that is more responsive and authentic than static text-based case studies but less risky than field-based practice for those affected by a leader’s decisions. Virtual practicums reside between traditional classroom-based pedagogies and the field-based experiences—the missing middle in preparation pedagogy—and offer opportunities to learn and develop more complex competences through innovative, interactive modes of instruction to foster the subject-object transfer and internal capacity building necessary for effective leadership. They have also been shown to make rich, formative assessment possible by making learners’ thinking visible and using novel analytic approaches to identify patterns of inferred values, knowledge, and skills, and assess competence development progress. In a virtual practicum, learners can access digital resources at will, and independently and repeatedly practice with them, removing current preparation program constraints of limited time spent on important topics and/or competences. These facts argue for a role for simulation-based rehearsal to develop effective leadership, with the added benefit of providing a scalable high-fidelity experience, if the right tools, content, and processes for practice with formative feedback can be brought together.

Conceptual schema building through virtual practicums in realistic contexts can be as effective as field experience schema building, raising the long-term need to investigate if the affordance of a student trying out ideas in a safe digital environment makes virtual practice even more effective than field-based practicums as those are currently configured in educational leadership. A social justice-oriented practicum, for example, would provide a valid way to train, rehearse, observe, and assess pre-service leaders’ social justice leadership competences, which would ensure programs are not sending leaders into schools to serve multi-marginalized, historically underserved children without an accurate measure of their readiness to lead in those contexts.

Application of virtual practicums in educational leadership preparation programs also advance our knowledge base by allowing us to consider the following questions. Some completed research is noted, and further research is needed.

• What structural and design criteria need to be in place in order for interactive learning tools to effectively develop desired leadership attitudes, values, knowledge, and skills for action in pre-service school leaders?
  • Dexter, S., Moraguez, D. & Clement, D. (2022), Pedagogical Gaps in the Bridge from Classroom to Field for Pre-Service Principal Competency Development, Journal of Educational Administration. [advance online publication]
• To what extent can a suite of interactive learning tools for development of specific leadership competences be effectively deployed across a variety of educational leadership preparation programs?
  • 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
• To what extent do interactive learning tools develop leaders’ desired attitudes, values, knowledge, and skills for action?
• What changes in policies, standards, and practices can be developed by national educational leadership bodies to assist in a transformative shift in leadership education, and the role of interactive learning tools in its development.

Additional Resources

Creating Virtual Practicums

Learn how you can create virtual practicums to help improve and expand skills related to your area of expertise.