How do you teach leadership in high school?
August 25th, 2008
I was recently asked by a high school teacher about ideas for teaching leadership to teenagers (She heard about Making things happen, and is considering applying some of its content). They start in middle-school and the students are hand picked to continue throughout highschool:
The Middle School Leadership students are in seventh and eighth grade (12-14 years old). Every year they are hand picked or re-picked. If they demonstrate “leadership skills” they may apply to the High School Leadership class. These are the students who will primarily benefit from your perspectives on project management and leadership.
In an effort to stave off senioritis I would also like to incorporate some of the project management and leadership lessons in my twelfth grade honors and regular curriculum this year. Any suggestions?
I have my own ideas, but I’m hoping some of you will offer thoughts or experience. Anyone know of other programs like this? Or have experience running leadership programs for high school age students? Please leave a comment. Cheers.
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Sir Ken Robinson gave a talk at TED about creativity in education (or the stifling of it as the case may be). I have always been passionate about teaching and have taught both in corporate America as well as at the Junior College level. After listening to Sir Robinson, it came to mind that I would love to have students pick an issue facing the world (Malaria, fresh water shortages, energy shortages, etc). And have students come up with a solution. Plan the project from start to finish. It can’t just be something where one side essentially donates the solution. No, it must be a solution that can be viable from a business sense. The instructor’s responsibility would be to guide them thru the considerations that they would have to make in having a truly viable solution. I believe we may be surprised at the ideas and solutions that come out of that class.
One of the big aspects of the Boy Scouts program is leadership development. They have a week long training program that is called National Youth Leadership Training. Both of my sons, now 18 and 22 years old, have attended it and gave it high marks as far as the leadership skills they received from the course.
For more information, here is the link to an entry in Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Youth_Leadership_Training
@snarky comment: Wouldn’t it be better to offer leadership and project management classes to the students who do not display “leadership skills?”
Project Management is a skill which is separate from leadership. Things like management of scope and expectations at the low end, to EVM and cost accounting at the high end.
Being good at one is not the same thing as being good at the other, and those who get the two confused are usually doomed to failure.
Either can be fun to chuckle at though - watching a leader confidently lead his team off a cliff he doesn’t know about, or watching a manager measure predict how bad his failure will be and not being able to convince his team to change things.
I think I would try and teach them a slightly different class - project survival skills. Stress:
- Promising things is dangerous.
- How to regnegotiate when things go wrong.
- How to present requests for change.
- Calculating risk and reward.
- How to work out who to keep informed.
But then this line of work turns you cynical fast :)
@Sam
But then, who would the followers be? A society full of leaders isn’t going anywhere ;)
On Topic:
I don’t think leadership can be taught, per se. But it is possible to give an individual the opportunity to develop it. A baptism by fire, perhaps, would work well.
A series of projects, rotating groups members and leaders. Then each leader is evaluated by the group members. After a sufficient number of projects, you’ll have comments (anonymous, preferably) that rate the leadership skills of each individual. Assign individuals who are lacking specific assignments that induce them to develop skills they need to improve on.
How does that sound?
There are different kinds of leadership. There’s technical leadership (pick a random Nobel prize winner in science), charismatic leadership (Gen’l Patton), positional leadership (General George Meade, the failure who preceded Ulysses S. Grant), functional leadership (every member of a group is a team lead in a complex project with 10 people, 20 teams, and one or two people on each team). I think there were two more, I’m reaching back to a class at the Naval Academy from 12 or 13 years ago.
What they all have in common is responsibility and accountability. Those Nobel prize winners: they did what they did on a budget. Generals are responsible for their soldiers, and accountable for the actions of their soldiers. You don’t get a group of 10 people to work on a complex task unless there was a need they wanted to help fill (choose any non-profit).
You need to find ways to create a sense of responsiblity, a goal-directed environment, and the goal has to involve something the students value. That’s one of the great things about competition, which I hear is wildly out of fashion in education these days, but creating a goal-directed environment is a great way to motivate people to clearly identify a leader and followers with responsibilities. It may seem trivial, but I think that Trump show did a damn good job of that. The potential for a downside other than the reverse of the upside is also helpful.
Niels: Trump’s show was a travesty in that it rewarded cutthroat behavior for no purpose other than to create drama to serve the needs of a reality TV show. There was so much posturing and trying to look like a leader, rather than actual leadership, that I couldn’t watch it as anything other than a game show.
But specific to children, which kind of leadership do you think a teenager can learn at 13 or 14? And how, in the context of school could it be taught? That’s the question I’m asking here.
Niels makes a good point. Singling individual students out in any way, even a good way, is frowned upon. All you’re doing is risking lawsuits from the ones who *weren’t* singled out.
Why yes, I am feeling cynical today.
The West is already far to full of “leadership”. Everyone without talent wants to be a “leader” (since it’s the easiest thing to fake in the absence of skill). Just think of the countless hollow souls that are “leaders” of companies. Do we really want more such people and do you (the reader) really want such uninspiring people to tell you what to do?
We should be teaching our kids to think and to make things happen. These things are the antithesis of leadership (since you’re not waiting for one “leader”’s blessing). These require individualism and freedom of thought.
Let’s make leadership disrespectable and replace it with cooperation & creativity.
Love the opinions guys, I really do - but I’m hoping for some practical advice for this teacher.
So double bonus points for references, links or stories related to teaching high school kids about leadership. Thx.
Fraternities do a lot of leadership work, and they’re not *too* much different in age. I’d contact some national fraternal organization and ask them for ideas. When I was in college, we did a “ropes course”, which was a ton of fun, and apparently are popular for teaching leadership.
Shamiq: “But then, who would the followers be? A society full of leaders isn’t going anywhere ;)”
The same people. It’s a poor leader who can’t also follow, and nobody is a leader at everything.
Niels: “You need to find ways to create a sense of responsiblity, a goal-directed environment, and the goal has to involve something the students value. That’s one of the great things about competition”
Competition may be one way to do it, but it’s certainly not the only way. I wouldn’t even say it’s the most valuable way, since cooperative win/win ventures seem to far outnumber win/lose competitive ventures in real life. I find it hard to follow a leader whose primary methods are competitive in nature.
When in college I was in AFROTC, an officer training program for the Air Force. The primary purpose of this course was to teach leadership and I thought they did a good job of it. A similar program called JROTC exists for the high school level.
In a nutshell, the program works like this: first year students are followers and taught basic military *stuff*, second year students are mentors to the first year students… third and fourth year students are organized into a formal structure with a reporting hierarchy and individual job assignments. Students are in charge of other students providing the most demanding group you can ask to lead, your own peers.
I know this sounds well and good for a 4 year program. What about something more short term?
Juniors take a leadership development course. At my university there is a large festival that takes place every February with 30 days of work and preparation leading up to it. During this time the students of the leadership development class are put in charge of all the students in AFROTC to prepare for and participate in this event. Everyone has a sizable piece to lead with one lucky student conducting all of them. Participation is voluntary for people not taking the class meaning a lot of leadership by example is necessary. This 30 day experience was one of the most transforming for me while I was in the AFROTC program.
I’ve since left the AF but found the lessons I learned as a cadet stick with me. Whatever your thoughts are on the military, what they do here is something worth looking into.
I think we have so much “required” stuff for High Schoolers. They need more choices, I really like “Michael Minella” points on the first comment about trying to get them passionate about something. I like the whole concept of getting them to buy in.
I give talks to highschool students and have been successful in reaching them. I wrote a book on leadership and the subject of this book really is appealing to the students because many have not experienced great role models for personal leadership.
One chapter titled, “Remember, Everyone Matters really strikes home with the students as well as one titled, “Be Careful What You Say and Do.” One young 11th grader came up to me after my talk with them and said,” Thank you for coming today. Until today I did not know I could be a leader.”
This is why we need to find relevant messages that inspire these young students to believe in themselves and understand “how” they can reach levels higher than they currently think are possible…Lee Cockerell
Hey there :)
I run a leadership program for that age group here in Australia, (and overseas in Singapore and Hong Kong).
Happy to share some of my program ideas and activities if it helps…
.. or give you a copy of my Year 7 Co-ordinator’s Teambuilding Guide for developing leadership and community at school.
send me an email to taki (at) allstarslive (dot com, and I’ll help in any way I can.
To your success,
Taki Moore
Allstars | Leadership for kids
Interesting topic.
1. Most, if not all, of the leadership theory will be wasted on the students, because might not tend to have antecedent experience in leading and following, or b/c the theory itself may be vapid.
2. I think the main insight of problem-based learning may apply here: form or allow the students to self-select into small groups, and give them problems they are challenging enough to be just out of reach. Provide some small incentives, and stand back. Observe.
3. Meet periodically to discuss your observations, and link what you saw to theory, where it applies. This creates more vivid and memorable impressions.
4. Allow some chaos and frustration to be produced, and resist the urge to step in, up to the point of derailment.
5. There may be a natural opportunity for HS-age students to design and implement modest programs, activities for younger schoolchildren. This yields some value, and may be intrinsically motivating.
6. I don’t really have references for this, but it is a sort of amalgam of service learning, problem-based learning, and some innovative practices I’ve seen in engineering education and military junior officer development.
HTH,
James
Perhaps it is premature to focus on group leadership while a kid is in school. A child’s energy is nearly all expended on growing up, and feeling OK with peers, and so precious little energy remains for group tasks. Thus college age groups for, say, saving the black footed ferret are always more effective that a comparable high school endeavor.
“Accepting responsibility” was something I associated with nerds, not with popular students (with Buffy, not Cordelia)…. I recall an eight a.m. class in first year college where the folding desks were not light but bizarrely heavy. Noisy to unfold. Our small class number was constant, but every class the number of chairs unfolded chairs varied. And, it being morning, you could be sure that some students would be late. I could have counted heads and unfolded any needed chairs to avoid noisy class disruption but I never did. Memory is dim but I believe I was afraid to look uncool and responsible. Oh, and if my first-year peers gave a party? It was not cool to plan, not even, say, for counting ashtrays needed.
If leadership for a group first requires group commitment to a task, and if kids, judging by their group behavior, are task/commitment phobic, (they have a million ways of running away from the task) then perhaps the solution is to develop not so much leadership in terms of projects and followers, but in self management. As Ben Franklin noted, Caesar did not deserve a triumph as much as a person who conquered himself. Call it pre-leadership training.
During my NCO training we made a list of all the qualities of a good soldier. Then a list of what a good NCO did. The latter list was not much longer than the first. Meaning: To be a good leader you must first be a good follower.
At the student level this means the basics: cleaning up any mess, keeping your word, being punctual, neat and clear in writing and speaking, polite… without excuses. Perhaps students could support each other in this.
At my university toastmaster club the actual speeches were less than a quarter of the meeting time. The rest was people being accountable for little speaking roles that helped the meeting to run. They had to- without excuses- show up on time, be clear, be prepared… maybe that is what this teacher could facilitate her students doing.
Scott, I am the chair of the Education Committee at a private Christian pcollege prpe school in Ohio and we’re instituting a program now. Our best vetted resource has been Blanchard’s Situational Leadership for Teens as content, but we’re blessed with a lot of talented parents who will also bring in fundamentals like mission statement writing (might want to look at Laurie Beth Jones’ Path4Teens as a start), goal setting, communications and presentation skills, collaboration, influence, and negotiation skills. The objective and final deliverable for seniors could be anything from a true Senior Research seminar (put together along the lines of one response here: build a solution to a world problem, sophomore year through senior year, in a team setting) to a Senior Capstone presentation. It can be done and can be very powerful! By the way - a leader leads from wherever she sits - it’s not a hierarchical title - so you can never have too many truly effective leaders!! :-) Good luck!