A lthough the Army faces increasing fiscal constraints, manpower reductions, and complex global missions, its enduring focus remains developing leaders. Historically, military personnel received the bulk of leadership development opportunities while hundreds of thousands of Army Civilian Corps (ACC) employees, who provided critical support to those in uniform, sat on the sidelines. In 2006, the Army initiated the Civilian Education System (CES) to transform leadership development opportunities for civilian employees. At the center of this transformative effort is the Army Management Staff College (AMSC), located at Fort Leavenworth,
Kansas. AMSC is responsible for designing, developing, and implementing Army civilian leadership development courses. Students attending courses at AMSC enter a learning environment that is unfamiliar, loosely structured, and student-centric. For many students, this learning environment contradicts their workplace, which is typically highly structured and rule bound.
Consequently, students initially describe themselves asdisoriented and uncertain as they try to make sense of their learning experience. Kegan (1994) described these emotions as “fear, the understandable terror” (p. 280) when faculty ask students to leave behind what they see as familiar and step into the unfamiliar; students are asked to “change the whole way they understand themselves, their world, and the relationship between the two” (p. 275).