Philosophy of Student Leadership
- Students must be allowed to practice leadership.
- Students must be given the technical, personal, and relational support to succeed in their leadership.
- Students must be guided towards sustainable self-directed ethical practices.
Core beliefs:
- Leadership is a teachable and practicable skill related to, but separate from the skills learned to be a good individual band student.
- All students can learn to be leaders.
- Leadership is life-enriching and has great value beyond band.
1. Practicing Leadership
An analogy I like to use with other teachers is teaching leadership via lecture is like trying to teach someone to swim via lecture. The only way to truly learn leadership is to jump in the water and do it. But what is “jumping in the water?”
An opportunity to practice leadership requires two things:
- Meaningful Projects
- Student Autonomy
Meaningful Projects:
The projects that you give to students must have value beyond exercise. This is the same philosophy as teaching music through performance. Projects with no urgency or value (ex: planning a band bonding event that won’t happen) is like having band rehearsal with no concert.
Opportunities to practice leadership in meaningful ways is as essential to leadership as having concerts is to musicianship.
Be intentional with which students take on which projects. While a certain amount of “stretch” is certainly necessary for growth, I would encourage you to start junior leaders on managerial projects and create teams for relational and blended projects.
Student Autonomy:
2. Student Supports
Just as you wouldn’t hand out recorders to your fourth graders before going over recorder rules, you don’t give out leadership projects without going over your non-negotiables. And just how you wouldn’t just abandon those 4th graders after they learn how to hold the instrument to focus on other things, your student leadership team needs the same attention throughout their projects. And just as you reflect with your students after concerts, you must reflect with your student leaders on their projects - especially when projects fail. As such, student leadership supports come in three parts: before, during, and after.Before - Planning:
Before a student runs off to go work on their project, you must lay out the ground rules. For me, the ground rules are:- Stay within school rules.
- Stay safe. (with people and equipment)
- You must have regular check-ins with me throughout the project. (And appraise me of any major developments that occur between check-ins.)
- We will reflect at the end. (I have thought about asking leaders to write a reflection paper.)
- write and evaluate SMART goals for effectiveness.
- identify when to escalate or de-escalate a problem.
- communicate effectively up, down, and across.
- exercise autonomous decision making to solve basic problems with no/little guidance.
After we have gone over the ground rules and students have had training on the basic prerequisite skills, we can move on to individual projects. Students either can brainstorm improvements they would like to make in the band (intune with the larger mission of the organization) or the director can suggest certain needs to be filled.
Note: be aware of focus. All projects must support the larger mission of the band. It may be awesome to have one project “to help the Humane Society find homes for cats,” but unless your band’s mission includes “community service” as a tenet, that project may not be appropriate for marching band. It is your job as a director to ensure that all projects that make the final cut are projects that support the goals of the group as a whole.
When the student has a committed project, we work right here at the start to envision what “success” will look like. If the student’s project is planning a band bonfire, we ask - what is the measure of success? Is it just that the event happens? That at least 30% of the band is in attendance? That there is food? That over half the students who attend respond on a survey that they had a good time? Odds are that there will be multiple criteria and levels that constitute what success will look like. Agree upon the specific metrics for what success will mean up front.
After you have a shared vision of success, you need to identify a timeline with key actions items that need to happen for the event to take place. Continuing with the bonfire example, the first hurdle that will need to be hopped (after administrative approval) would be to find a date and location willing to host the event along with a backup date for a rain-delay. Next, may be getting wood and safety precautions in place. Then, figuring out if there will be entertainment at the fire.
After you have the key action items that need to happen for the event to be a success as you previously identified, every single one of those action items needs an owner and a due date. If two people are taking one action item, one of them needs to be “in charge.”
Finally, after you have your plan in place, set a regularly recurring meeting schedule. This can change as the project gets closer, but an expectation of regular check-ins is your safety net to protect the rest of the band. It is healthy to fail, but our job is to make sure that there is some level of protection to allow students to “fail gracefully.”
Note: I created this Backwards Planning Guide to use with my own students. You may also find it helpful when working with your own students to force the previous conversations.
During - Problem Solving:
After the plan is set, each subsequent meeting is really just three questions:- How are we doing on your key action items?
- Are we on track to hit success as we defined it?
- What do you need from me to make this happen?
Additionally, this time is when you start to learn about specific skills needed for the project. They need to e-mail the fire marshal to let them know that a large fire will be taking place, so they need to learn how to write and send a professional email.
Here is a list of some personal, relational, and technical skills that could be taught or mentored through the regular check-in.
- Personal
- Establishing your personal values
- Emotional self-awareness and management
- Personal goal setting
- Relational
- Conflict Resolution
- Motivating others
- Group Dynamics
- Effective Communication
- Technical
- Email etiquette
- Scheduling Meetings
- The meeting process (scribe, facilitator, agenda)
- Running a sectional
- Backwards planning
Note: Yes, you will need to reteach some of the skills you taught in the planning phase. This is okay is just a part of good teaching. The groundwork you laid when you first approached the material will help as you guide students through it as it applies to the specific case you are working on in the student’s project.
This is also when you will use your director hat to protect the student leader and the rest of the band in the event the student leader needs to fail gracefully. You must actively monitor the active projects for safety concerns or failures that would be entirely detrimental to the ensemble as a whole. You don’t need to “save” the student leaders (failure is healthy), you just have to make sure that if there is a failure, that the rest of the group is (mostly) protected.
After - Reflection:
While you will be reflecting the entire time you are in the thick of the project, the reflection after a project is completed is arguably the most important part in the process. Even failures are “wins” if properly reflected upon and learned from.Good reflection, like good teaching, guides the students to discover their own answers. Use the Socratic Method to prod in letting students identify what went well, what didn’t go well, and what possibilities exist to do things even better. Then, identify a prioritized list of actionable steps that can be taken to address what was brought up and systems of accountability to ensure those steps happen.
Some good starter reflection questions to use:
- How do you feel the event went?
- Did we achieve our shared vision of success (VoS)?
- What did we learn from this project?
- If we were to do this again, how might we do it better?
- What learning from this project can we apply to other projects that are happening right now?
- Why do you think this? (general “why”)
- What, in particular, do you think made it like that? (targeted “why”)
- What specifically could we do to ensure that does/doesn't happen in the future? (strategy)
- How can we make sure that that will happen? (accountability)
3. Ethical Guidance
By empowering students with the tools above, we are unlocking the world. A student who leaves your leadership program will have the tools in her belt to make any idea a reality. We have a professional obligation to ensure that we offer some guidance on how to act ethically towards themself and towards their community.
The choices we make can be broken into three categories: arbitrary, right vs. wrong, and right vs. right.
- Arbitrary decisions (picking out an outfit, choosing what to eat)
- Right vs. Wrong (Do I walk out of the store without paying, or pay?)
- Right vs. Right (the most difficult decisions)
Students must be educated to execute sound judgement on the distinction between “the letter of the law” and “the spirit of the law.” Where the letter of the law is the what the rule physically states, the spirit of the law is the why behind it. If the letter of the law says “no running in the halls” the spirit of the law may be “we want to prevent injuries and accidents that happen more frequently when people run in the halls.”
Where the letter of the law is fixed, the spirit of the law is fluid. The rule “no running in the halls” could have the spirit of safety as mentioned above, or the rule’s spirit could be about reducing noise for students completing work in the classroom, or the spirit could be for both of those purposes. As an ethical leader, it is important to train students to follow both the letter and the spirit of the law as they can lead to very different behaviors.
Finally, teachers must model the ethical behaviors they want to see in their students. I heard a statistic saying 30% of waste is excreted through the skin, but when it comes to absorbing information, that number seems to be reversed to 70%. If we want our students to behave ethically, we must also behave ethically.
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Summary
It is our belief that effective student leadership programs consist of three elements:- Students must be allowed to practice leadership.
- Students must be given the technical, personal, and relational support to succeed in their leadership.
- Students must be guided towards sustainable self-directed ethical practices.
If there is anything we can do to help, please do not hesitate to reach out.
Best,
NT
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