Agriculture Workforce Training for Collaborative Leadership (AWT4CL)

by Curt Friedel -- You may have heard something that we have a leadership gap, with several books and articles more recently being written about this phenomenon. What is the leadership gap? In the simplest way, it can be described as the perception of current leaders being inadequate for the challenges of the future. The leadership gap is supported by research. Consider the following: §   Rosenthal, in the National Study in Confidence in Leadership (2012) – Discovered that 69% agree America is in a leadership crisis. §   Bailey 2017 – Fount that 13% of employees said their boss was dangerously incompetent. §   RandstatUSA (2018) – Indicates that 60% of employees left their jobs or are considering leaving because they don’t like their supervisor. A few key points are indicated in these citations. The leadership gap is global, it is across industries and beyond politics and started before the Covid-19 international pandemic. This is a small selection of research o...

  by Celeste Carmichael -- Gamification is a known program design approach used to provide motivation for students and participants to complete tasks - offering visual, virtual, and sometimes tangible rewards and validation of learning. In recent years, and particularly with the broader adoption of e-learning and hybrid work in higher education, experimentation and documentation of gamification as a part of classroom pedagogy has grown .  Beyond content transfer, can this same strategy be used to connect relevant past experiences for students to current classroom learning? Some faculty from the Virginia Community College System involved in the Agriculture Workforce Training for Collaborative Leadership (AWT4CL) are applying these approaches to help students to bridge informal and formal learning experiences, connecting the dots on experiences that can translate to valuable workforce attributes. The AWT4CL cohort members have noted that digital badges used in this way can he...