Student Leadership Program is expected to create future Knowledge Workers and deliver positive ROI

Leadership is a popular theme in both business and education world. The main reason for this popularity is that effective leadership is a primary factor for the success of any organization. With the implementation of leadership at the middle school and high school classes, the belief is that this earlier intervention will ultimately help not only students, but local communities, small businesses and large corporate citizens.

What constitutes an effective school or high school system wide leadership program that guarantees a positive return on investment? 10 These pointers can help you better answer this question.

1. All staff should be developed to ensure consistency across behaviors through modeling. From bus drivers to superintendents, these people become role models for many young people. If their behavior is not compatible with any program, so the likelihood of lasting success is doubtful. Using a student leadership program that has evolved from a process of proven adult leadership is probably a better way to proceed.

2. The desired end results for this leadership program must be clearly articulated in advance of any curriculum. Simple benchmarks could be improved quality, improved retention of high school and less discipline references. All benchmarks must be measurable because, as the old saying "if you can measure it, you can not manage." This is the beginning of determining a positive or negative return on your investment in the leadership program or of any change initiative.

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

4. The alignment between the leadership curriculum and other academic disciplines is also necessary for the success of this program. We need many opportunities to apply newly learned concepts outside of class leadership.

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

6. A mentoring program or alumni must follow the guidance of the student development program. Now is when young people can participate fully in community projects, and mentor to young students.

7. Parents must be informed and, where possible, included in this leadership program. With many parents who do not have the skills and tools necessary to help their children, working closely with parents, helps both the young and the school.

8. Local owners of small businesses to large corporate citizens must be involved. These companies can help by participating as speakers as well as work to fund scholarships to help offset the cost of the leadership program and the employment of graduates.

9. The curriculum must be highly interactive, highly adaptable and flexible and modeled after the best corporate training and development programs. In addition, this program should be studied and must become the basis of sound educational research in emotional intelligence, cognitive retention, etc.

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

Finally, the leadership program should be for the most part of the student body and not only the students high performance. The success of our country is due to the much-if not more than the efforts of every day of the average citizen.

If the construction of a viable and sustainable world-class student leadership program is in your plans or future, then these pointers should catapult in front of the class, because now we know that you have created self-leaders who are able to be workers necessary knowledge of the workforce of the 21 st century. Leanne Hoagland-Smith, M.S.

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