Although many schools have clubs, assemblies and electives dedicated to leadership development, these programs can only be for a small part of the student population. Although these programs can be very impactful to the students who participate, a values-driven advisement program has the potential to change the entire school culture.
When schools are in the process of starting a leadership program, we need to make the case for why the advisory period is the perfect place to start.
Reach Is Important, but Impact Within Reach Is More Important
Leadership clubs are very powerful in those who attend.
A values-driven advisement program has the power to affect the whole school community.
Leadership programs in schools typically only reach a small proportion of students. To have a lasting impact on school culture, a leadership program needs to include all students: students who are ready to lead, those who don’t care about leadership, the athletes and those who haven’t discovered their leadership superpower. Leadership development will touch every student and programs which only involve self-identified leaders will fail to change a school culture. Everything rises and falls on leadership, and a program that only reaches self-selected students will never build the culture a whole school needs.
That is why a leadership program needs to go beyond clubs or electives and be a collective experience for all students to have, and this is where the advisory period comes to shine.
Consistency Builds Capacity
A one-time leadership lesson could be inspiring, but after a few weeks, even the most passionate students will forget what they’ve learned. One lesson isn’t enough to change a student’s life trajectory, but lessons spaced out over the course of the year can have a big impact.
Each week, students add to their leadership knowledge, and implement these new values in life. Students who have little interaction in the past are now talking the same leadership language and giving each other advice by spring. They’re not just learning leadership, they’re living it, one week at a time, in the same room, speaking the same language.
Now imagine this lesson being taught to all students in every section of the school. This peer-led, consistent programming creates pockets of culture all over the school, pockets that will eventually unite under one common leadership language. No club can do this because it doesn’t have access to every student, every single week. This is how you develop a culture of character and leadership and is what makes the advisory period so uniquely suited for this kind of development.
Start Small to Scale Up
Growing Leaders has watched this play out at scale. In Kigali, Rwanda, one principal built a values-based culture across nearly 3,000 students in five years, and it all started with one school. In Argentina, the same values-driven, peer-led approach has now trained more than 200,000 leaders. iLead is now used in more than 170 countries around the world, proof that this same model, applied consistently, outperforms a single high-profile program every time. This is the power of a values-driven, peer-led advisement program.
Why iLead Fits Perfectly Into This Model
iLead was based on this model. It is not a curriculum for assemblies or club meetings. It was designed to maximize the time given to advisement periods. Lessons are peer-led roundtables that don’t need a professional leader, and it was designed to be developmental, unfolding over the year.
This means that every teacher only needs to learn basic concepts to teach the same lesson in the same week in the same school all the time.
Homeroom teachers, coaches, and counselors can all teach the same lesson on the same day, so all students have the same leadership experience. That kind of consistency builds a school-wide leadership language that no program can provide because of its limited scope. On the other hand, programs that need a specialized leader to teach typically don’t scale well because they have limited capacity. With iLead, the same lesson is available to all students in all advisement sections. If schools have a curriculum that is aligned across the year for grade-level teaching, students will get relevant leadership materials from kindergarten to high school.
Make Your Case for a School-Wide Leadership Program
Administrators looking into starting a leadership program should understand the need of getting everyone on board. No school will have the time or money to create a new class and write a new budget line, but what schools do have is the time and resources to create an important leadership program in their current advisement period.
This period was designed to be a place to turn passive learners into active participants of their education.
And so schools can create a home base for leadership development that’s worth investing in by turning rows of passive learners into circles of courageous, values-driven leaders.
When you present this idea to your administration you’ll come with this proposal: begin small and start with one grade level at a time, one semester at a time and one curriculum that will be taught to all the students in every advisement section for that grade level. See how this small pilot program affects attendance, referrals and the language students speak when they discuss conflict and responsibility. This pilot could be easily funded and easily scaled, and if it works well in one semester, imagine how it can scale across your whole school? Every successful leadership program starts with one grade level, one semester and a uniform curriculum.
School Leaders Ready to Establish the Advisory Period as the Home Base of a School-Wide Leadership Program?
See growingleaders.com for how iLead can provide leadership development at every advisement period in your school, for each grade level, and for every student.
