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By: Mike Johanek – Distinguished Senior Fellow, NCREST
Teachers College, Columbia University
The pilot that we initiated last week in Chile—the first of its kind—is part of a groundbreaking national initiative called LIDERA, an exciting collaboration with a unique binational organization, ChileMass.
At its core, the LIDERA Initiative aims to capture the professional learning that takes place across experienced school principals and ensure that the system does not lose it.
Professions do not advance if we are constantly reinventing practice rather than building on what has already been learned. A school principal, over 20 years, develops a deep and nuanced understanding of how to manage communities, support teachers, navigate supporters and non-supporters, and lead through curriculum reform and other complex challenges. Yet much of that learning remains uncaptured.
This learning broadly falls into two categories.
The first is practical knowledge—tips, tools, and resources. This includes which programs work and which do not, what content resonates with different audiences, and how to adapt curriculum to local contexts. These are tangible insights that can be shared and exchanged. Just observe a group of school principals together, typically swapping tips and resources eagerly. One part of the LIDERA Initiative focuses on leveraging social network analysis and advances in AI to match leaders with peers and to the relevant resources generated by their peers. The goal is simple: principals should not have to start from zero when others have already navigated similar challenges. Instead, they can access proven insights and, where relevant, connect directly with peers who have addressed those issues.
The second category—often overlooked and far more difficult to capture—is situated judgment.
Situated judgment is the capacity of leaders to read their context, interpret signals, and make decisions in real time. Leaders continuously pick up cues, generate and test hypotheses, act, gather evidence, reflect, and move forward to the next decision. This cycle happens hundreds of times a day. It is central to leadership effectiveness—and it is precisely where simulations have a unique ability to support development. We were fortunate to team up with SchoolSims in the design and implementation of these sims.
Our work in Chile brings these two areas together. In addition to connecting leaders with shared knowledge and resources, we are directly supporting, enhancing, and measuring the situated judgment of school principals.
This is a complex effort, and we are fortunate to be working with multiple strong partners in addition to ChileMass, including three national leadership centers, four universities and four different funders. In the pilot last week, we collaborated closely with a national non-profit, Impulso Docente, an organization originally focused on elevating the work of outstanding teachers and strengthening educational communities. In recent years, their work has expanded to include school leadership. They are also the organization behind Premio LED, a national award recognizing 30 outstanding school principals each year.
Impulso Docente also leads an academy that brings together selected cohorts of school leaders from across the country. This year, three cohorts of approximately 20 leaders each will participate, further strengthening a growing national leadership community.
Last Friday marked an important milestone: the first pilot of a simulation originally developed in Chile in partnership with SchoolSims. This simulation, initially part of a research effort funded by the national funder FONDECYT, was refined using input from current Chilean principals and enhanced with measurement considerations to better capture insights into situated judgment.
The simulation experience collected information on key leader characteristics, including empathy, tolerance for ambiguity, and self-efficacy. It also engaged participants in both individual and group debriefs to better understand how they interpreted the situation, what stood out, and how they reasoned through their decisions.
The goal is to gain a deeper understanding of how leaders make decisions in the moment—and to use that understanding to strengthen and develop that capability over time.
This type of work is emerging in other professions as well, including medicine, policing, and business, allowing for meaningful cross-professional learning and collaboration.
In this initial session, 19 principals from across Chile participated in the simulation, completed survey instruments, and engaged in structured group discussion to reflect on their thinking.
This is the beginning of a longitudinal effort. Participants will engage in additional simulations throughout the program, which runs through November. A follow-up simulation at the end of the program will allow us to observe how their decision-making evolves over time. Additional simulations will be administered after the program concludes, and again six months later, to better understand how learning sustains and transfers back into practice.
Across all three cohorts, this work will generate what we believe to be the first dataset of its kind—simulation-informed data that captures and tracks the development of situated judgment over time.
It is an important step forward, and one we are proud to be developing in collaboration with SchoolSims.
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