Enhancing Identity Development at Senior Service Colleges
Abstract
Identity development is touted as an important leader development need, but it often gets short shrift in professional military education (PME) environments, including the Senior Service Colleges (SSC). The inculcation of professional values, resiliency, and critical and reflective thought are essential to properly operationalizing the skills and knowledge learned in an SSC, but they are highly subjective, difficult to measure, and therefore difficult to develop educational activities around. New policies for officer and civilian professional education include provisions for developing leaders, such as the recent inclusion of six Desired Leader Attributes (DLAs) in the Joint officer PME continuum, but it remains unclear how to operationalize those goals. This Letort Paper presents a way ahead using role identities and Bloom’s affective domain to identify developmental objectives to parallel the development of skills and knowledge in SSC programs and shows how this approach can be generalized across PME.