Help Students Discover Their Leadership Skills
By James Simons and Maureen Chapman
We once worked with a middle-school student named Sinha. With bangs brushed over her eyes and a small frame curled into the shape of a question mark, Sinha was a walking disappearing act.
She spoke rarely and quietly, like a librarian with laryngitis. And she wrote in text so tiny, teachers needed a magnifying glass to assess her homework. However, her work was thoughtful and skillful. Sinha’s teachers wished she would share her voice, inspiring peers to take academics as seriously as she did. In short, they wished she would be more of a leader.
Gabriel’s teachers, in contrast, wished he would be a little less of a leader. Whereas Sinha wanted to disappear, Gabriel had the proud posture of an exclamation point. With a loud voice and a quick wit, he was always leading peers. The problem was that he was leading them off course. Teachers frequently felt frustrated: if only Gabriel would leverage his charisma and social capital for good.
How would it look, sound, and feel for Sinha and Gabriel – heck, for all students – to identify as a leader, to be identified as a leader, and to demonstrate the social and emotional skills of a leader?
We wrote our book, Leaders of the Class: Units for Teaching Motivation, Perseverance, Communication, and Collaboration to Secondary Students, because we believe that every educator and every student has the potential to be a leader. Furthermore, when everyone realizes this potential, the classroom becomes a more positive, productive place – and each individual in it experiences increased wellbeing and achievement.
Combining research in pedagogy and leadership development, we present a set of foundational leadership conditions and practices followed by a sequential five-unit framework, complete with clear steps to teach and assess competencies students need to realize their leadership potential.
Leaders, we have learned, motivate, persevere, communicate, and collaborate. We are excited to share a few insights and tools to help you and every learner in your class feel and act like a leader.
Leaders Motivate
Steve Jobs once said, “A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” As the lead leader of the class, it is your job to show students motivating work, work that they may not even know yet they want to do.
Since goal setting is an integral leadership practice, you, the lead leader, must establish and communicate compelling class-wide learning objectives. But also, you must sell those objectives. (After all, some of Apple’s success stems from their creative marketing and advertising efforts.)
How can you market the meaningful work of your discipline to potential buyers? One way is to write and deliver to your students an impassioned speech about why your discipline matters to you, and why it should also matter to them.
Another way is to make room for students to connect to their own class-specific motivation by engaging alongside you in the leadership practice of goal setting. Schools often offer learners opportunities for big-picture goal setting: What do you want to accomplish this term or this year? What are your aspirations after graduation?
Though there is enormous value in such practices, they are not frequent and focused enough to become habits that impact student performance on an ongoing basis. Thus, we advocate for incorporating small-scale goal setting that is intrinsically linked to the work of one’s course: What is your goal for this ten-minute class discussion? What motivates you to achieve this goal?
Research tells us that motivation stems, in part, from our emotions. Put another way, emotion sets us in motion. At all times, how we feel – or how we want to feel – motivates how we act. There is, therefore, tremendous benefit in learning to understand and express our emotions.
With this in mind, we recommend incorporating emotion-centered reflections before, during, and after everyday academic experiences. Doing so helps students productively channel pleasant emotions and move through unpleasant ones in order to achieve their goals. What’s more, sharing regularly about emotions strengthens relationships, and the more connected we feel to the mentors and peers with whom we work, the more motivation we will experience when engaging in this work.
Below are a few prompts you can incorporate into any lesson plan to support students’ self-awareness, strengthen the student-teacher relationship, and gather data that will help you to support each learner. We recommend pairing these prompts with an emotional literacy tool, like the Mood Meter.
- Name an emotion that you felt today. What was happening? Why do you think you felt this way?
- What level of challenge did you experience today? What in the work felt engaging or disengaging?
- How much do you agree with the following statement: I felt motivated to work toward the class goals today? Explain your choice.
(Learn more about the Mood Meter here.)
Leaders Persevere
If the first step on the path to leadership is to set motivating goals, the second step is…to stumble. Inevitably, leaders encounter obstacles en route to their objectives. It is your job as the lead leader to ensure the going gets appropriately tough, and then, it is the job of the tough young leaders in your class to get going.
But how do leaders maintain momentum in the face of challenges? By experimenting with strategies. Along with setting academic goals that they are motivated to achieve, we want students to experiment with strategies that help them achieve these goals. We encourage teachers to co-construct with students a Perseverance Strategy Bank using a simple template like the one below. In the first row, you will see some strategies that a class co-constructed to help all students attend consistently to the important work of the course.
Leaders Communicate
Leaders Communicate You may notice a trend in the guidance so far: set a goal and share it, reflect on your motivation and share it, encounter a challenge and exchange ideas about effective strategies. It is little wonder that leadership training across industries centers so frequently on the skills of communication.
Exchanging performance feedback is one of the highest-impact communication practices. It also is one of the hardest communication practices. While students give and receive feedback constantly, they do not always do so skillfully.
Think of the kid who stuffs their essay into the bottom of their bag in an effort to avoid the thoughtful feedback you have provided. Or the student who laughs at a peer’s incorrect response, providing a type of feedback that threatens to ruin the recipient’s day.
While we educators may feel frustrated or discouraged when students’ communication skills fall short, the simple solution is to treat such communication skill gaps just as we would any other academic shortcoming: provide explicit instruction along with ongoing opportunities for practice, assessment, and feedback. (Yes, we should provide feedback…on feedback.)
As students practice feedback exchange in the academic setting, our Giving Feedback Tool provides a simple framework: a space to record the recipient’s goal, along with any observations, celebrations, or questions that arose for you, the feedback giver. You will notice that there is no category called “Criticisms” or “Weaknesses” or “Reasons the Student’s Work Stinks.” Communicators should aim for what we call “kinder candor.”
While input should be honest, it should be focused on an area about which the receiver has requested feedback. It also should eschew harsh criticism in favor of less evaluative observations, along with celebrations and questions. This approach fosters the psychological safety that learners need to reflect on and share about their strengths and areas for growth.
Sentence stems, like the examples in the chart, can further support students to build their capacity for exchanging feedback.
Leaders Collaborate
Leaders communicate to build skills and relationships. But also, leaders communicate to get important things done. For this reason, our framework culminates with a collaboration unit empowering young leaders of the class to become leaders of a team.
In every discipline and at every grade level, educators should endeavor to design long-term collaborative tasks that foster both independence and interdependence. What this means is that every individual has a specific job and that every individual relies on the contributions of the other individuals in order to do their job. Think of a baseball game: the pitcher and the catcher each holds a unique role, and they can’t do their job without the other. (Try catching a ball when no one is throwing it.)
To ensure that everyone on the team has an authentic leadership position – and yes, everyone should have a leadership position – we offer structures in our book to help students understand and meet expectations. One of our favorites is the following version of group roles:
Leadership development takes time
Developing leadership skills takes time. Adults and students alike benefit from ongoing opportunities to set motivating goals, persevere in the face of challenges, and appropriately and effectively communicate and collaborate. In the process, students like Sinha can build the courage to share their voice, students like Gabriel can learn to lead their peers down more productive paths, and educators like you can experience renewed motivation as the lead leader of the class.
Reference
Jobs, Steve. Business Week, May 12, 1998.
Maureen Chapman loves school. As the Co-Founder of Cor Creative Partners, Maureen supports leadership development and student engagement through speaking, coaching, workshops, and PLCs. Maureen writes about education for various outlets including Edutopia and Inside Higher Ed. She is the co-author of the Solution Tree book Leaders of the Class: Units for Teaching Motivation, Perseverance, Communication, and Collaboration in the Secondary Classroom.
Maureen taught for 15 years in elementary, middle, and high school classrooms and spent eight years in school leadership. As a Curriculum Director and the head of an Instructional Leadership team, she oversaw curriculum, resources, student data, instructional coaching, professional development, new teacher induction, and career education. Connect with Maureen on LinkedIn and learn more about her work at www.corcreativepartners.com.
James Simons loves school. As co-founder of Cor Creative Partners, James works to spread this love through educator professional development with a focus on student engagement as well as leadership development for adults and adolescents alike. When James is not in schools collaborating with fellow educators, he contributes to a community of thought leaders by speaking at conferences across the country, producing videos, and writing for various outlets including Solution Tree, Edutopia, and Inside Higher Ed.
James is the co-author of Leaders of the Class (Solution Tree, 2025). Prior to co-founding Cor Creative Partners, he served as a high school principal and dean of students, an instructional coach, and a middle and high school English teacher. Connect with James on LinkedIn and learn more about his work at www.corcreativepartners.com.
