The most durable knowledge students carry out of a political science course is not what they were told — it is what they had to figure out for themselves under conditions that required genuine thinking. Simulations create those conditions. They take the abstract structures of democratic governance — committee procedure, legislative negotiation, judicial deliberation, campaign strategy, media production — and make them concrete, immediate, and consequential in ways that lecture and discussion alone cannot replicate.
My commitment to simulation-based pedagogy is both personal and scholarly. As an undergraduate at Millikin University I participated in Model Illinois Government, a statewide simulation of the Illinois General Assembly that gave me my first embodied experience of how legislation actually moves — or fails to move — through a deliberative body. That experience was formative in a way that no class I took before or after it was. It did not just teach me about legislative process; it taught me that I could navigate it, that the skills required were learnable, and that democratic participation was something I was capable of rather than something I observed from outside.
That experience is directly responsible for the Virginia Government Simulation. When I arrived in Virginia I recognized the opportunity to offer students the same kind of transformative engagement with democratic process that Model Illinois Government had given me — at scale, across institutions, on the actual floor of the Virginia House of Delegates. The distance from an undergraduate simulation experience to a co-founded statewide program represents more than thirty years of deepening commitment to the pedagogical proposition that learning democracy requires practicing it.
The scholarship on simulation-based learning in political science is consistent: well-designed simulations improve content mastery, develop transferable civic skills, and produce higher levels of student engagement and retention than equivalent lecture-based instruction. That is not surprising. Simulations require students to do exactly what learning requires them to do — actively process information, make decisions under uncertainty, receive feedback on the consequences of those decisions, and revise their understanding accordingly.
What makes a simulation pedagogically effective rather than merely entertaining is design quality. A simulation that rewards strategic gaming rather than substantive understanding, or that collapses under the weight of its own procedural complexity, is not a high-impact practice — it is a distraction. Every simulation I use or have developed is built around a specific set of learning outcomes, assessed against those outcomes, and revised based on what the evidence shows about whether students are actually achieving them. The Closing the Loop Award I received at FHSU in 2015 recognized exactly that kind of evidence-based revision — not of a simulation specifically, but of the internship program, which operates on the same principle: design deliberately, assess honestly, improve accordingly.
The Virginia Government Simulation (2024–Present)
The largest and most institutionally consequential simulation I have been involved with is the Virginia Government Simulation, which I co-founded in 2024 and serve on as a member of the faculty executive committee. Students from institutions across the Commonwealth travel to Richmond each fall to conduct a full simulation of the Virginia General Assembly on the floor of the Virginia House of Delegates — drafting, debating, amending, and voting on legislation under authentic parliamentary rules in the actual chamber where Virginia's elected representatives do the same work.
The VGS represents simulation pedagogy operating at its most ambitious scale — cross-institutional, conducted in an authentic physical environment, grounded in real legislative procedure, and connected to a broader civic education mission that extends well beyond any individual course or institution. It is documented in a peer-reviewed article published in the Journal of Political Science Education in 2026, making it one of the few co-curricular simulation programs in the discipline with a formal scholarly record of its design rationale and outcomes.
The simulations I deploy within my own courses are organized by the substantive domain each addresses, and each is designed to make a specific set of political processes legible through experience rather than exposition.
American Government — Class Constitution
In my American Government courses, students draft a class constitution at the start of the semester that governs how they will participate in the course's shared governance. Assignments and grading policies are fixed — those are not negotiable — but within those constraints students have genuine agency in determining how discussion is conducted, how participation is recognized, and how the classroom community operates. The exercise accomplishes several things simultaneously: it introduces students to constitutional design as a practical rather than abstract challenge, it gives them their first experience with collective problem-solving under real stakes, and it establishes from the first week that this is a course in which student agency is expected and valued. The Class Constitution assignment is linked here for reference.
Political Communication — Newscast and Podcast
Students in Political Communication take on the full production roles — producer, host, reporter, editor — for two different types of political news programming: a television newscast and a podcast. Each format requires students to make research, editorial, and production decisions appropriate to the specific constraints and affordances of that medium — what gets covered, how it gets framed, how much time each element receives, and what the implicit editorial priorities are. The simulation makes the argument of the course — that medium shapes message in ways that have direct political consequences — experientially rather than didactically. Students who have produced their own newscast understand media framing in a way that students who have only read about it do not.
Congress — The Game of Politics
I use Donald Jankiewicz's Game of Politics simulation in Congress to give students direct experience with the strategic and procedural complexity of how legislation actually moves — or fails to move — through a partisan legislative environment. The game is designed around the reality that the legislative process contains multiple structural veto points specifically engineered to make policy change difficult, and that navigating them requires not just good ideas but strategic thinking about coalition-building, timing, procedure, and the management of competing interests. Students consistently report that the Game of Politics changes how they watch and interpret news coverage of Congress — they recognize the procedural moves they previously found opaque.
The Presidency — Presidential Mock Debate
Students in my Presidency course participate in a structured mock debate between fictional presidential candidates, working in teams to research their candidate's positions, develop debate strategy, prepare responses to anticipated attacks, and make the strongest possible case during the actual debate event. The simulation develops research and argumentation skills, but its deeper purpose is to make the structural logic of presidential campaigns — the trade-offs between base mobilization and persuasion, the role of debate performance in shaping media narrative — visible from the inside rather than the outside.
Public Policy and Leadership — Social Security Simulation
This simulation, developed collaboratively with Brent Goertzen and published in the Journal of Leadership Education, places students in the role of a Congressional committee or regulatory body reviewing alternative policy responses to the Social Security financing challenge. Students must research the policy landscape, deliberate across genuine disagreements, and produce a final recommendation through compromise — experiencing firsthand the gap between what policy analysis recommends and what the political process can produce. The published version of the simulation makes it available to instructors across institutions, extending the pedagogical investment beyond my own classroom.
Judiciary — In the Justices' Shoes
In courses covering judicial politics, I use a simulation published in PS: Political Science and Politics that places students in the role of Supreme Court justices from specific historical eras, requiring them to apply the interpretive frameworks of their assigned justice to contemporary or hypothetical cases. The exercise makes the doctrinal and philosophical differences among justices concrete — students who have had to rule as a Warren Court liberal and then as a Rehnquist Court conservative understand originalism and living constitutionalism as live interpretive commitments, not just academic labels.
Simulations and Administrative Leadership
Please know the relevance of this page is not just pedagogical — it is administrative. A leader who wants to move a faculty toward greater use of high-impact practices needs to understand what those practices look like from the inside: what makes them work, what makes them fail, what design elements are essential and what are optional, and what the evidence base for their effectiveness actually says. As a faculty member and leader who has designed simulations, published on simulation pedagogy, assessed their outcomes, and built the largest co-curricular simulation program in the Commonwealth of Virginia is not advocating for high-impact practices in the abstract. I know what simulations are asking faculty to do, have done it myself, and can support the work from a position of genuine expertise rather than administrative aspiration.