Every leadership program makes grand promises about transformation. Walk into any education conference and you’ll hear them: students will gain confidence, become more resilient, develop 21st century thinking skills… Meanwhile you’ve watched a promising program fizz and wither and die by spring, leaving only a few worksheets in its wake.
Classroom hours are precious, and they are your most limited resource. Before you invest any of your students’ time in a leadership program for high school students, you should hold it to the same standard as any academic curriculum. This framework will allow you to assess any leadership program for high school students from inside your own school or from the outside so that you don’t waste the most valuable resource of all, the time of your students.
5 Criteria to Help You Evaluate Programs to Cultivate School Culture
Leadership programs that don’t lead to actual behavior change should not exist as a stand-alone event. Advisor periods, CTE blocks and after school hours are limited resources. A program that only produces posters and empty pledges, without the number of actual leaders in the student body being increased, is never going to work to better the students and will just waste the resources. These five criteria will help you determine the validity of any program, so you can apply that same standard to your own programming as well.
- Is It Peer Led?
Adult-led leadership content has a ceiling on how deeply it actually lands. Students will benefit from peer-led leadership practice. In peer-led programming, students learn to lead and teach each other. This is a different way to learn leadership than simply being taught by an adult leader. When reviewing a program, ask yourself if the programming allows the students to lead one another or if only an adult leader is present. An adult leader-based program will not produce the multiplication mindset of trained student leaders who train their peers.
- Is Character the Foundation?
Leadership programs are so much about communication skills, goal setting, public speaking, etc. These are all good tools for leaders, but without character underneath them, they never really become leadership at all. A values-based curriculum addresses who this student is becoming, not just what they can perform. The programming should focus on character first and foremost, with skill sets built on top of it. Skill sets without a basic character will make good actors, but not necessarily good leaders.
- Is It Embedded or Bolted On?
A one-day assembly or even one elective class, while helpful, will not change anything about school culture. Programs that change school cultures are embedded in the existing school systems. When you have over four hundred students graduating per year, a leadership program that touches only thirty of them is not going to change your school culture. Ask yourself if the program is being designed to be part of the structure of your school, or if it has to be created separately. If your program must be done in isolation, you cannot touch your entire student body and therefore your school culture is never going to change.
- Does It Create Behavior Change?
Does this program develop servant leaders or does it just produce satisfied students? Good leadership programs will not only develop better leaders, but they will also create observable change in the culture. Students will start to self-govern, hold each other accountable and solve problems without adult intervention. If the program has no data to support claims of a changed school culture, then ask yourself why that is. Are they taking a survey that measures student satisfaction, or are they measuring actual change? A real leadership program should be able to point to a behavior change within your student body, and if the program has been used elsewhere, ask for their data.
Growing Leaders can point to specific behavior change in schools and communities around the nation and around the world, from more than 200,000 leaders trained in Argentina to a transformed 3,000-student school system in Rwanda, where the head principal began using iLead five years earlier.
- Is It Sustainable Beyond One Champion Teacher?
Will this leadership program still work when the only adult advocate drops out, is promoted or quits? A good leadership program has no single leader you need to use to influence the lives of your students. Good programs are designed so that any advisor, coach or counselor can use them with fidelity and effectiveness. This is why research-based programming matters. The best programs are meant to be used by any advisor, creating champions who can use the program with their peers in the future, in an ongoing cycle.
Use the Framework
When you are considering investing your limited time, your students’ time, in a leadership program for high school students, use this framework to evaluate that program. Programs that meet these criteria may not be the flashiest, but they will have the greatest impact on servant leaders and school culture.
iLead High School was designed with these standards in mind. It is peer led, values based, and designed to be embedded in your existing school structure and to create actual behavior change which lasts far beyond the graduation of any single set of students. It is designed to produce a multiplication mindset that goes far beyond the teacher who introduces it. This is the kind of program that turns rows of passive students into circles of courageous, values-driven leaders.
Use this framework to understand why iLead High School from Growing Leaders makes such an outstanding investment for your school. Visit growingleaders.com to learn more.
