Rate My Professor Wade Leuwerke

Wade C. Leuwerke, Ph.D., serves as Professor of Education in Drake University's School of Education, joining the faculty in 2004 and advancing to full professor status. He earned his B.A. from Gustavus Adolphus College and both his M.A. and Ph.D. from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. Referred to as Professor of Counselor Education within the Counseling program, he previously held the position of associate professor and chair of the Leadership & Counseling department. Leuwerke instructs graduate-level courses including Methods of Counseling, Ethics for Counselors, College and Career Readiness, School Counseling Internship, Mental Health Counseling Internship, and Human Growth and Development. His teaching incorporates active learning strategies such as pre-class readings for discussions and projects, ethical dilemma simulations, lifespan development tracking, and supervised counseling skill practice with peer debriefing.

Leuwerke's scholarship centers on noncognitive factors influencing student success in educational settings, career development dynamics—including technology's role in career counseling, computer-assisted tools, outcome assessments, and online counseling ethics—and the roles, responsibilities, and perceptions of professional school counselors, with emphasis on college and career readiness. He created the Student Strengths Inventory, a noncognitive measure predicting college academic success and retention, adopted by dozens of institutions in the United States and Canada. Notable publications encompass peer-reviewed articles such as "Predicting Occupational Considerations: A Comparison of Self-Efficacy Beliefs, Outcome Expectations, and Person-Environment Congruence" (with P.A. Gore Jr., Journal of Career Assessment, 2000), "A Psychometric Study of the College Self-Efficacy Inventory" (with P.A. Gore Jr. and S.E. Turley, Journal of College Student Retention, 2005), "Informing Principals: The Impact of Different Types of Information on Principals’ Perceptions of Professional School Counselors" (with J. Walker and Q. Shi, Professional School Counseling, 2009), and "Predicting Engineering Major Status from Mathematics Achievement and Interest Congruence" (with S. Robbins, R. Sawyer, and M. Hovland, Journal of Career Assessment, 2004). He co-authored the textbook Connections: Empowering College and Career Success (with P. Gore and A.J. Metz, Macmillan Learning, 2015). Professionally, he has collaborated with federal agencies on executive and career coaching, career development firms evaluating assessment tools, and higher education institutions addressing retention and program effectiveness. Leuwerke is a member of the Iowa Behavioral Sciences Licensure Board.