The Syllabus and the Scar Tissue: What Leadership Preparation Programs Leave Out and Why It Matters – Faculty Focus | Higher Ed Teaching & Learning
As an educational leadership professor, I hear inspiring messages from colleagues all the time, and I understand the impulse to lead with the highlight reel. Wins matter, from measurable improvement and real growth to culture building, trust restored, and students graduating. Aspiring leaders need those stories because this work is hard, and hope is fuel.
But there is another curriculum I teach too, one that rarely makes it into the syllabus. The scar tissue. The heartaches, compromises, sacrifices, and difficult conversations. The emotions leaders absorb that were never theirs to begin with. The weight of decisions that do not fit neatly into a framework, a rubric, or a discussion board post. Much of school leadership has less to do with what you can recite and more to do with what you can carry. The principalship can be lonely, not because you lack people around you, but because you are often the one holding everyone else steady.
The Scar Tissue Curriculum
Leadership can be developed. But some of what leaders most need to learn is not content. It is how to move through grief, sustain relationships under strain, stay human in hard moments, and hold steady when no one is clapping. We should share the wins, and we should also teach what failure feels like, what heartache costs, and what leadership asks of you when the work bruises before it builds.
There is a concept in psychology called positive disintegration, the idea that inner tension and discomfort can be part of growth rather than something to avoid. In leadership preparation, this shows up when candidates realize their old playbook is no longer enough and must sit with uncertainty long enough to develop better judgment. The goal is not to leave them shaken. It is to design learning that reshapes how they think, decide, and carry responsibility.
Because aspiring leaders deserve more than encouragement. They deserve preparation. They deserve clarity about what the role demands. They deserve reality.
What Is Not in the Handbook (and How We Can Teach It)
These are not just leadership realities. They are design problems for leadership preparation programs.
Hard Decisions That Strain Trust
Leaders will have to deliver news that hurts and make choices that disrupt people’s lives, even when they follow process carefully.
What to Teach Future Leaders to Practice:
Speaking plainly without jargon, naming constraints and trade-offs honestly, holding space for reactions without defensiveness, and following up after decisions rather than disappearing.
Loss, Departure, and Relational Cost
Leadership includes investing in people and watching them leave, sometimes for growth and sometimes because the system could not hold them.
What to Teach Future Leaders to Practice:
Treating departures as part of development rather than personal rejection or betrayal, designing mentorship structures that outlast any one leader, and practicing how to honor people well on the way out.
Accountability That Changes Relationships
Not every situation ends with coaching, and not every relationship remains the same after accountability.
What to Teach Future Leaders to Practice:
Giving feedback early, separating kindness from avoidance, documenting clearly while maintaining dignity, and telling the truth without humiliating.
The Emotional Accumulation of Leadership
Leadership absorbs fear, anger, anxiety, and exhaustion, often from rooms leaders only pass through.
What to Teach Future Leaders to Practice:
Distinguishing empathy from ownership, building routines for processing that do not rely on subordinates, using mentors and peers for honest debriefing, and treating recovery as professional responsibility.
Steadiness in Uncertainty
Leaders are expected to be steady even when they do not yet have clarity.
What to Teach Future Leaders to Practice:
Rehearsing hard conversations, preparing protocols before crises occur, building small thinking circles for pressure-filled decisions, and practicing focus on the next right action.
Conclusion: Teaching What the Syllabus Cannot Hold
In my courses, realistic preparation means more than knowing frameworks. It means practicing the moments that test judgment, relationships, and emotional steadiness, especially when the situation is messy and the answers are incomplete.
That is why I use simulations, case studies, role plays, mock interviews, and other practice-based routines that place candidates inside realistic scenarios before the stakes are real. I bring in practitioners to speak honestly about misjudgments and repair, and I rehearse the conversations candidates will want to avoid because leadership is communication under pressure and practice is protection.
I will keep teaching the victories, but I will also teach the scar tissue. Because leadership is not only what you build. It is what you carry, and the goal is realistic preparation for both.
Dr. Andy Szeto is a New York City based educational leader, writer, and professor whose work focuses on instructional leadership, district systems, multilingual learner advocacy, and responsible, practical uses of AI in education. His writing turns complex leadership challenges into usable tools, decision prompts, and implementation oriented frameworks for school and district leaders.
Andy’s work has been published across a range of education outlets, including ASCD, Tech & Learning, eSchoolNews, District Administration, NAESP Communicator, Teaching Social Studies, the Journal for Leadership and Instruction, Faculty Focus, and Getting Smart. He regularly publishes on Lead Forward, his blog on The Worthy Educator website.
Andy is the author of Leading Before the Title: Growing Leadership Multiple Tracks (The Worthy Educator Press, 2025). He also has an upcoming chapter focused on college and career guidance for multilingual learners titled “AI-Powered Postsecondary Guidance for Multilingual Learners.” His next book will focus on his journey as an English learner and is due in late 2026.
To subscribe to his newsletter, please visit his Linkedin page or visit drandyszeto.com.