I spent a day last month marking essays that were part of the assessment for a postgraduate module I have been teaching about engineering leadership. I use Boyatzis’s theory of self-directed learning to talk about how students can develop their leadership competences. Then, we ask the students to reflect on the leadership and ethical issues associated with one or two incidents they had experienced or observed vicariously. Most of the time we teach engineering students to make rational technical decisions based on data; so, they find it difficult to reflect on their feelings and emotions when faced with ethical and leadership dilemmas. We show them Gibbs’s cycle for reflective thinking and encourage them to use it to structure their thoughts and as a framework for their essay.  There are obvious and natural similarities between the theories of Boyatzis and Gibbs.  Of course, some students use them and some don’t. However, so far, this is an assignment for which they cannot use an essay mill or a large language model, because we ask them to write about their personal experiences and feelings; and LLMs do not understand anything, let alone feelings.

Goleman D, Boyatzis R & McKee A, The new leaders: transforming the art of leadership into the science of results, London: Sphere, 2002, p.139.

I have written previously on teaching leadership, see for example ‘Inspirational Leadership‘ on March 22nd 2017, ‘Leadership is like shepherding‘ on May 10th 2017, ‘Clueless on leadership style’ on June 14th 2017.