You can buy the best leadership curriculum in the world, implement it in every single classroom in your building and watch it die by October. Not because the curriculum was weak, but because a curriculum by itself is just a document waiting to be brought to life by a trained teacher.
A good school that has invested in the development of student leadership knows the secret to success is that teacher training for leadership curriculum implementation is done first, before a child is ever exposed to a lesson. Schools that do this piece wrong or wait to do it are left with binders on the shelf and an initiative quietly buried by spring.
Teacher Confidence Is the Engine of Student Engagement
How many times have you been in the room with a leader who shows confidence? You were engaged, right? And the last time you were in a room with someone who was clearly lacking in confidence, you were probably bored, maybe even pulled out your phone and pretended to be working on something important. Students are the same (if not more honest) with their teachers.
If a teacher is confident in the curriculum and he or she knows why it’s so important to students, that confidence is baked into the way you teach. That teacher’s questions get more pointed, his or her tone becomes more engaging. They start to lead more than they teach. That is the difference between rows of passive learners and circles of courageous, values-driven leaders.
The same is true for curriculum implementation in schools. The teacher’s confidence and buy-in predict student outcomes more reliably than curriculum content. If the conversation goes wrong, a confident teacher can improvise and an unprepared teacher may shut it down to stay safe. Students feel the energy of the room and are either invested or disengaged for the rest of the year.
A teacher who has not been trained to practice the curriculum will default to what they know.
In Practice, Peer-Led Discussion Is a Different Skill From Teaching
This is the secret in the process that many schools don’t seem to understand: it is not the same skill set to teach a lesson as it is to facilitate a peer-led discussion.
Instruction is about providing information. Facilitation is about getting out of the way as students argue and advocate, challenge and support each other’s views, while you withhold the answer. It takes a kind of mental fortitude to deny students the answer because you want them to think for themselves, when you have spent years in the classroom as the expert.
Teachers need to be trained to facilitate peer-led discussion in a different way than they would be trained to teach a lesson. Without that preparation they’ll fall back on habits that have been hardwired into them for years. They will lecture students, fill the silences students should have and correct “wrong” answers instead of letting the group work through them. The result is an indistinguishable leadership lesson that looks no different than any other lesson because the teacher didn’t know how to teach it any other way.
That is why John Maxwell has long taught that leadership is influence, not position. The teacher’s authority in this work is not so much about how much power they have in the classroom as how well they model self-leadership and trust students to lead themselves first.
What Will Happen If Teachers Aren’t Prepared?
You can skip teacher training and you can predict what will happen. Teachers will follow the guide closely in week one, confused at times but probably doing what they are told to do. Teachers in week three will be less enthusiastic, students will see that the lesson isn’t worth their time, and they will view the advisory period as a free period. Teachers in week six will probably move away from the leadership lesson entirely in favor of something they’re more comfortable with because they don’t have anyone who’s trained them to do this work.
One middle school administrator who has been involved in leadership development has seen this in person. Her faculty had been excited about a leadership program and after three months she found only two of the 12 teachers were using the curriculum consistently. The other ten had not rejected the philosophy but they had never had coaching to feel confident in running it.
That’s in contrast to schools that have invested in teacher training for leadership curriculum implementation. Their teachers come to the room with a philosophy, not just a lesson plan. They have already practiced facilitating real discussion and not just watching a video on facilitation. They know exactly what to do when a student says something totally unexpected because they have practiced it in a training room, not in front of 30 students.
The curriculum is the map; the teacher is the one who has to know the terrain.
Preparation Is the Multiplication Point
Growing Leaders is here because everything rises and falls on leadership, and in a school building that starts with adults, not students. iLead Elementary, iLead Middle School and iLead High School were designed to transform students from the inside out, but that only happens when the adults in the building are prepared to lead it first. That is the multiplication mindset in action: leaders who train leaders, starting with your teachers.
A better school culture and deeper engagement in school don’t come from a better workbook. They come from teachers who are prepared to facilitate, not instruct, and know how to lead a discussion because they have done it before. They come from teachers who can demonstrate self-leadership so students can as well.
If you’re going to launch or re-launch a student leadership program in your school, you owe it to your teachers to first prepare them. And if you want to prepare your staff before day one, look to growingleaders.com to see how Growing Leaders can help schools with teacher training for leadership curriculum success.
