Cultivating Student Leadership

The Harvard Education Letter recently ignited a "buzz" in education circles with a report on four longitudinal studies that tried to identify common childhood characteristics for people who became leaders as adults.

Cultivating student leadership has been a critical part of my classroom practice for the last eight years. I became a high school teacher after spending 19 years as a community organizer. One of the primary reasons I made the switch was that I had witnessed adults making dramatic positive changes in their lives because of the leadership skills they had learned in organizing. Wouldn't it be better, I thought, if people developed these abilities when they were younger?

Here are a few of the strategies that I employ to nurture student leadership:

Develop Power

"Leadership is the wise use of power. Power is the capacity to translate intention into reality and sustain it." -Warren Bennis, scholar, author, and pioneer in leadership studies

You really can't be a leader without having power, which most dictionaries define as "the ability to act."

One way to have power is by feeling a strong sense of self-efficacy—a strong belief that you can accomplish your goals. William Glasser calls this quality the "power within." Differentiation strategies, including the ones shared by Katie Hull-Sypnieski and me in this space last month, can help to build students’ self-efficacy.

Teaching students about learning strategies can also strengthen self-efficacy. This is different from teaching skills. Being able to turn on the car’s ignition is a skill, but if you'd lost your car keys, you’d need strategies. We can help our students gain the capacity to tackle unforeseen problems by emphasizing comprehension, not decoding; using inductive learning to ask students to identify patterns and not always explicitly telling the "rule" in advance; and helping them learn to categorize information instead of just listing data.

We can also introduce students to what community organizers call "relational power" when we use cooperative learning activities and invite as much participatory democracy in the classroom as possible. We can be more open to students’ ideas about how our classrooms look and where students are seated. We can even let students grade their own work—which can work surprisingly well. I have had students grade their own work during my entire teaching career: 90 percent of the time I have left the grade as is, 5 percent of the time I've raised it, and 5 percent of the time the student and I have jointly decided to lower it after a discussion.

Glasser suggests that 95 percent of classroom management issues occur as a result of students trying to fulfill a need for power. Power is not a finite pie. When we share power with our students, it doesn't mean that we “have less power” —but it can mean we’ve created more possibilities for learning and leadership.

Enhance Intrinsic Motivation

The studies described in The Harvard Education Letter identified intrinsic motivation as a key childhood characteristic among adults who became leaders. I've previously shared various actions teachers can take to improve students’ intrinsic motivation. For example, we can build relationships with students so we can learn their self-interests, hopes, and dreams, and be better prepared to more explicitly connect lessons to them. We can praise effort and specific actions more than intelligence. And we can encourage cooperative learning. (Read about additional strategies here.)

Explore the Stories of Leaders

A substantial amount of recent research has found that reading stories—fiction or non-fiction—can promote empathy and alter behavior. I have my students read short examples that demonstrate leadership and we use them as opportunities for literacy instruction and for exploration of leadership characteristics that connect to students’ own lives. For example, we have read stories ...

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