The Leadership Educator Podcast

In this episode, Dan and Lauren are joined by Dr. Todd Deal, Senior Faculty and Director of the Higher Education Practice at the Center for Creative Leadership and a longtime facilitator with the ILA Leadership Education Academy, where he and Dan first met. Todd traces a career he calls serendipitous: 28 years as a tenured chemistry professor, a five-year stint as associate dean, and then a vice president's request that he build a leadership program for high-ability students despite having, by his own account, no obvious qualification for the job — a program that grew to fold in service learning and community engagement, occupied him for a decade, and won five national awards. Most of the conversation sits with the pivot from teaching to facilitating, including the early CCL colleague who told Todd his challenge wasn't passion for the material but his expert mindset. He describes how discovery learning and guided inquiry moved intact from chemistry into leadership theory, how deliberately forming teams across the four CliftonStrengths leadership domains cut his conflict mediation to two cases in the remaining years of a service-learning course, and why senior higher-ed leaders often handle ambiguity worse than undergraduates do — inventing rules and rubrics nobody ever stated, a pattern the 30 circles exercise exposes in about three minutes. He closes on framing academic and student affairs as a polarity to manage rather than a problem to solve, on CCL colleagues using AI to build experiential activities where none existed, and on 15 years as the public address voice of Georgia Southern football.

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In this episode, Dan and Lauren are joined by Dr. Trisha Teig, leadership educator at the Archer Center for Student Leadership Development at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Dr. Joshua Taylor, director of the Hargis Leadership Institute at Oklahoma State University, co-editors of New Directions for Student Leadership Issue #189, Leadership Learning Through Study Abroad: Considerations, Best Practices, and Innovative Ideas. This marks the 21st episode in the TLE–NDSL partnership series. Both editors came to the work through practice: Teig built programs in Costa Rica, Ireland, and Northern Ireland through the Pioneer Leadership Program at the University of Denver, while Taylor has led roughly a dozen short-term programs across six continents, most recently a 47-student program in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand.

The conversation returns repeatedly to access. Both editors are direct that study abroad cannot remain, as Teig puts it, for the rich and elite only, and the issue treats structural choices — third-party providers versus faculty-led courses, cost, program design — as the levers that determine who participates. Teig discusses applying Heifetz's adaptive leadership framework to sort anticipatable risk from the genuinely unforeseeable, while Taylor describes nightly campfire reflection as the structural backbone of a faculty- and staff-led program in rural Zimbabwe. Both land on the same point about emergent curriculum: the learning that matters often has to be facilitated in the moment. And both are emphatic that leading study abroad is immersive, always-on professional work — Taylor has now been in hospitals with students on six different continents — while still urging educators who haven't led one to find or create the opportunity.

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In this episode, Dan and Lauren welcome back Dr. Nyasha M. GuramatunhuCooper, founder of Girton Road Leadership Learning & Consulting. Nyasha's path into the discipline ran through a doctoral program at Gonzaga where she found room to ask bigger questions. One of those questions came from a student at Kennesaw State early in her career, who asked why they should be learning about leadership in African countries. In that conversation, her home region of Southern Africa had been positioned as a consumer of leadership knowledge rather than a producer of it, and unsettling that assumption has been a throughline in her teaching and writing ever since.

Resources and works mentioned in this episode include:

In this episode, Dan and Lauren are joined by the three co-editors of the newest New Directions for Student Leadership issue: Dr. Kerry Priest, Professor and Director of Leadership Studies at the Staley School of Leadership at Kansas State University; returning guest Dr. Jason Headrick, Associate Professor of Leadership and Community Development at Texas Tech University; and Dr. Haley Traini, Associate Professor of Leadership Education at Oregon State University. Together they co-edited NDSL #188: Leadership Learning for Systems Thinking and Practice — the 20th episode in the TLE–NDSL partnership series.

Kerry, Jason, and Haley trace the issue's origins from a 2023 keynote by Mary Uhl-Bien in Copenhagen to a call for submissions deliberately open to stories, case studies, and reflections. They walk through the three questions that structure the issue — how we develop systems capacities, how we teach them, and how we evaluate systems-level change — along with tools like Human Systems Dynamics and its "what, so what, now what" adaptive-action cycle. The conversation is full of classroom-ready metaphors, from tracing how ice gets made to why an iPhone is merely complicated while mayonnaise is truly complex. As Kerry reminds us, in systems work the goal isn't winning or losing — it's staying in the game.

Resources and works mentioned in this episode include:

In this episode, Dan and Lauren are joined by Dr. Laura Greenhaw, Assistant Professor of Agricultural Leadership in the Department of Agricultural Education and Communication at the University of Florida. Laura's path to the leadership classroom ran through a ranching family in rural New Mexico, years teaching high school agriculture, and a Ph.D. at Texas Tech — where she first watched a fellow doctoral student weave film clips into teaching and never looked back.

The conversation explores how Laura has turned film into a deliberate, evidence-based tool for teaching team leadership and group development. Students arrive already knowing what leadership and teamwork feel like, she argues, but they rarely share the same mental model of the words — and film creates a shared experience the whole class can debrief together. Laura walks through the research arc she has built with collaborator Matthew Gold: applying Tuckman and Jensen's stages of small-group development to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, examining how Hogwarts house identity shapes team decision-making, and comparing inductive and deductive sequencing with The Imitation Game. Along the way, she and the hosts trade the practical craft of film-based teaching — student choice, "REEL" analysis papers, showing full-length films as students' viewing habits change — and talk candidly about navigating sensitive content with intention. Dan connects it all to his own long-running "Leadership in Film" assignment and the Collegiate Leadership Competition's curated clip library.

Resources and works mentioned in this episode include:

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In this episode, Dan and Lauren are joined by Dr. Kathy Guthrie, Professor of Higher Education and Leadership at Florida State University, and Dr. Gayle Spencer, Senior Director of the Illinois Leadership Center at the University of Illinois. Together, Guthrie and Spencer co-edited New Directions for Student Leadership Issue #187: General Principles for Advancing Leadership Programs (Fall 2025) alongside the late Rian Satterwhite. This conversation honors both the issue and Rian's foundational contributions to the work.

Kathy and Gayle share how the issue came together and how it works: each of the five core areas of the ILA General Principles — context, conceptual framework, content, learning, and metrics/outcomes/assessment — gets one chapter that deepens the knowledge base and one that shows real application. Listen for why the general principles are a living document worth revisiting early and often, especially as the contexts leadership educators teach and lead in keep shifting. This marks the 19th episode in the TLE–NDSL partnership series; find all NDSL episodes in The Leadership Educator Podcast archive

Resources and works mentioned in this episode include:

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In this episode, Dan and Lauren are joined by Dr. Cris Wildermuth, Professor of Leadership and Program Director for the Master of Science in Leadership and Innovation and the B.S. in Organizational Leadership at Barry University. Cris is also a member of the ILA Leadership Education Academy facilitation team and brings more than two decades of experience as a leadership educator, researcher, and consultant.

The conversation explores how generative AI and technology-enhanced tools are changing what is possible in the leadership classroom — not by replacing good pedagogy, but by dramatically expanding the range of experiences educators can design and deliver. Cris shares how she uses vibe coding tools like Lovable and AI voice platforms like ElevenLabs to build immersive branched scenarios, simulations, and themed course experiences that would have been impractical or impossible before. She walks through concrete examples: an ethics course built around Game of Thrones, an online simulation using John Rawls' theory of justice played out through a dukes-knights-and-peasants game, and an alien-invasion metaphor for leading change. Dan and Lauren reflect alongside her on what it means for educators to be willing to fail, to stay curious, and to use AI as a lever for the kind of creative teaching that has always been at the heart of good leadership education.

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In this episode, Dan and Lauren are joined by Dr. Jason Headrick, Associate Professor of Leadership and Community Development at Texas Tech University. Jason's work sits at the intersection of leadership education, rural community development, and inclusive leadership practices. He also serves as director of the Civic Leadership Academy at Texas Tech's Davis College of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources — a yearlong program that helps students develop civic leadership principles.

The conversation explores how leadership educators can move students from the classroom into genuine community engagement — and why that shift matters. Jason shares how his own roots as a first-generation college student from Kentucky, deeply involved in 4-H, shaped his understanding of leadership as something lived in community. He discusses community-engaged learning as a pedagogical approach that centers community partners in the learning process, and walks through concrete examples from his Civic Leadership course, including an interdisciplinary asset-mapping project spanning multiple departments and multiple semesters. Dan and Lauren reflect alongside Jason on their own teaching experiences with civic engagement, stakeholder analysis, and helping students see their capacity to lead and make change — now, not later.

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In this episode of The Leadership Educator Podcast, Lauren and Dan talk with Dr. Kat Callahan and Dr. Sean Connable about New Directions for Student Leadership Issue 185, Pop Culture’s Contributions to Leadership Development. The conversation explores how leadership educators can use pop culture as more than an attention-getter and instead treat it as a serious tool for examining storytelling, cultural values, identity, and leadership development. Listeners will hear examples from podcasts, sports, comic books, television, and other cultural spaces, along with practical ideas for helping students critically examine the stories that shape how society defines leadership.

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In this episode, Dan and Lauren are back for Season 12 of The Leadership Educator Podcast. Before diving into the season, they catch listeners up on where they have been since May 2025 — what they have been working on, what they have published, and what is ahead. This season focuses on specific instructional strategies leadership educators use to facilitate learning across curricular and co-curricular spaces. Guests will discuss strategies such as reflection, community-engaged learning, teaching with film and media, team building, AI, and more.

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