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Leadership is a popular topic both in the business and education worlds. The main reason for this popularity is that effective leadership is a primary factor for the success of any organization. By implementing leadership at the middle school and high school grades, the belief is that this earlier intervention will ultimately help not only the students, but the local communities, small businesses and larger corporate citizens.

What constitutes an effective middle school or high school system wide leadership program that delivers a positive return on your investment? These 10 pointers may help you better answer that question.

1. All staff must be developed at leaders to ensure consistency of behaviors through modeling. From bus drivers to superintendents, these individuals become role models for many young people. If their behavior is not consistent with any curriculum, then the likelihood of sustained success is doubtful. Using a student leadership program that evolved from a proven adult leadership process is probably a better way to proceed.

2. The desired end results for this leadership program should be clearly articulated before adoption of any curriculum. Simple benchmarks could be improved grades, improved high school retention and less discipline referrals. All benchmarks need to be measurable because as the old adage goes “if you can measure it, you can’t manage it.” This is the beginning to determine a positive or negative return on your investment for the leadership program or any change initiative.

3. The curriculum should focus on the affective learning domain especially interpersonal skills. Additionally, the cognitive and psychomotor domains should include: communication, conflict resolution, goal setting and goal achievement, higher order thinking skills, team building and time management.

4. Alignment between the leadership curriculum and the other academic disciplines is also necessary to the success of such a program. There needs to be numerous opportunities to apply newly learned concepts outside of the leadership classroom.

5. A goal setting and goal achievement Action Plan is probably the most critical piece to the success of this program. This Action Plan for success should allow for all students to self-evaluate themselves and provide a mechanism to prioritize and organize current and future goals.

6. A mentoring or alumni program should follow the student leadership development program. At this juncture is when the youth can fully participate in community projects as well as mentor younger students.

7. Parents need to be informed and if possible included within this leadership program. With many parents lacking the necessary skills and tools to help their children, by proactively working with parents helps both the young people and the school.

8. Local small business owners to larger corporate citizens need to be also involved. These companies can help by participating as keynote speakers as well as work to fund scholarships to help offset the cost of the leadership program and employing the graduates.

9. The curriculum should be highly interactive, highly adaptable and flexible and modeled after the best corporate training and development programs. Also, this curriculum should be researched based and should reinforce sound educational research including emotional intelligence, cognitive retention, etc.

10. Any student leadership program should also include pre and post assessments both cognitive and attitudinal. Additionally, a mechanism should be included to track these students for longitudinal data collection. These assessments show both the short-term return on investments as well as the long-term investments.

Finally, this leadership program should be for the majority of your student body and not just the high performing students. The success of our country is due to the as much if not more so to the every day efforts of the average citizen.

If constructing a viable and sustainable student world-class leadership program is in your current or future plans, then these pointers should catapult you ahead of the class because you now know that you have created self-leaders who are capable of being the knowledge workers needed in the 21st century workforce.

Copyright 2005(c) Leanne Hoagland-Smith, M.S.

This article may be freely published. Permission to publish this article, electronically or in print, as long as the bylines are included, with a live link, and the article is not changed in any way (grammatical corrections accepted).

Leanne Hoagland-Smith, M.S. CEO of ADVANCED SYSTEMS located outside of Chicago, IL, is the Learning and Process Specialist. As one of the first nationally certified facilitators for America’s Rising Stars, a researched based student leadership program, Leanne speaks nationally on student leadership. Her 25 years of business & education experience allow Leanne’s clients to double their performance. Beginning with the belief systems, she brings a unique perspective to education, training and development that delivers a significant return on investment. Leanne infuses a 25 year old proven goal achievement action plan into her results focused solutions that work within a variety of industries including education, healthcare, manufacturing and professional services. Please contact Leanne at 219.759.5601 or visit http://www.processspecialist.com/youth.htm to read how you double your performance for unheard of results.

Tags: character education, education, Leadership, NCLB, schools, Student leadership, teen leadership programscharacter education, education, Leadership, NCLB, schools, Student leadership, teen leadership programs

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With the passage of the No Child Left Behind Law, each state is required to set their own performance benchmarks and through a series of tests assess the academic improvement of all students to ensure accountability for the billions of dollars being invested within the American public education system. One of the most repeated arguments is that this law or any accountability law mandates teachers to teach to the test and that teaching to the test is wrong.

From a performance improvement perspective, teaching to the test is 100% absolutely correct. One of the best examples is the thousands of citizens in every state study who study to pass the state’s driving test to earn a driver’s license. The state driver’s examination is to determine the applicant’s knowledge of the laws pertaining to operating a motorized vehicle. Each question on the test can be found within the appropriate state driver’s manual. High schools to commercial driving schools instruct their students based upon the information within the manual. If these instructors did not teach to the information within their state manuals, their students would not pass the state’s exam. These teachers must teach to the test.

The real problem arises when students who have not mastered previously taught concepts are forced to play “catch up” within a very short time frame. This is where, I believe, this fallacy of teaching to the test originated. This type of testing is really a symptom of a greater problem, lack of mastery.

During the last 5 years, I have surveyed over 500 teachers and 98% agreed that this is how learning works in the classroom:

• Read It
• Learn It
• Test It
• Forget It
• Proceed to Next Lesson
• Repeat Process

This process is all about the acquisition of knowledge and not truly about performance - the application of knowledge.

Performance comes in various stages from limited to mastery. Within the American public education, mastery, in all honesty, is not the desired end result for many teachers and students. If mastery was the desired end result, we would not have teachers who are not highly qualified, social promotion along with the many other programs that sacrifice mastery for issues of self-esteem, etc. nor would we continue to have an agrian school structure. Did you know that today’s students spend less time in the classroom than students of 50 years ago even though information is doubling every year?

If we truly want to improve public education, which is one of the best explanations why America rose to be a super power, then we must revamp the structure of public education to reflect a 21st Century performance driven society. In the meanwhile, public education must begin to develop the desire for young people especially middle school, high school students and even college students to become self-directed learners who demonstrate leadership skills by mastering key concepts necessary for their success. This solution would seem much more logical; align to the desired end results; avoid the blame game; eliminate wasted tax dollars and get to the performance results in real time.

Leanne Hoagland-Smith, President of ADVANCED SYSTEMS, works with large urban to private schools, certified staff, support staff, students and parents to improve performance in 30 to 180 days. Using proven tools, we can quickly and affordably identify the gaps in YOUR organization, provide you with an Action Plan that you can easily implement along with developmental programs from executive leadership to student leadership.

What would the value to you be if everyone within your school all rowed in the same direction with energy and enthusiasm?

ADVANCED SYSTEMS

Connecting Passion to Purpose to DOUBLE Performance in Real Time

Tags: accountability, assessments, No Child Left Behind, public education, Student leadership, testing, testsaccountability, assessments, No Child Left Behind, public education, Student leadership, testing, tests

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