Looking for Development in Leadership Development: Assessing Learning for Reflexivity Among Graduate Students

Abstract

Scholars have identified reflexivity, the ability to question what one might be taking for granted, as a critical meta-cognitive skill that management schools should cultivate amongst students. Reflexive learning though is a complex and idiosyncratic process. Little is known about how students experience this process, what they learn, or how a range of students representing different degrees of potential for reflexivity experience such a process differently. This article reports on a study using Kegan’s Constructive Developmental Theory to assess how masters students at a professional school studying leadership and representing different developmental stages experience the same teaching methods for cultivating reflexivity. This work illuminates how students at different stages of development experience the same teaching method for cultivating reflexivity quite differently. Results indicate that for students with limited potential for reflexivity, there is profound developmental growth. Other students who began the course with existing reflexive capacity did not initially demonstrate skills of reflexivity. However, this group of students learned to practice reflexivity without actually interrogating their own assumptions in a way that represents developmental growth. I share details of the study and conclude with implications for teaching reflexivity across a diverse range of experience.