Gamifying Leadership: A Systematic Review of Game-Based Strategies in School Leadership Development

Gamification is viewed as a promising solution for employing game design elements in school leader professional learning and skill acquisition, and this systematic review summarizes research that has employed game-based and gamification approaches in K-12 school leadership development from 2020 to 2024. A total of 159 studies were identified in the ERIC, Google Scholar, and IDESR databases. After removing duplicates and excluding studies based on relevance and methodological quality, fourteen studies were included. The review was reported according to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyzes extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR) 2020. Qualitative content analysis and thematic synthesis were used to identify trends, constructs, and implementation outcomes. Leadership training courses involving gamification often used some kind of simulations, serious games or gamified elements to train leadership skills such as decision-making, cooperation or system thinking. Almost all studies affected training participants and engaged them. Those studies also caused them to have self-efficacy and to reflect in learning in a positive way. Researchers need to study more longitudinally and also within different educational contexts to corroborate these early findings. However, this review suggests that gamification may innovate how schools build leadership capacity. More rigorous research using standardized measurements should be conducted to confirm the results and determine the impact of long-term implementation. This research adds to a growing body of literature in online professional learning and has implications for education policy makers and leadership development organizations.

Gamification; School leadership development; Professional learning; K-12 education; Serious games; Self-efficacy; Systematic review

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