Portfolio: Classroom Leadership: Top 10 List

I am taking the Teacher Leadership Part 1 AQ. Our culminating task involves creating a leadership portfolio by choosing items from each module of the course to share and reflecting on its contribution to my growth as a leader. I have chosen to share my portfolio as part of my blog.

This entry is from the module entitled Classroom Leadership where we looked at how experiential learning/community connections, school climate (safe and accepting schools policy), being a technology leader, empowering students to become leaders and how teacher leadership begins in the classroom with lesson planning.

One of the assignments was to create a top 10 list of ways you can encourage students to take on leadership roles. I liked that this assignment forced me to think about leadership in a different way - how I can be a leader in my classroom and co-curriculars in a way that will empower others to develop leadership skills? This forced me to think more about how my decisions can impact things beyond curriculum content and put the context of myself as a leader back into the classroom (which is really where I envision myself staying for awhile - and it is instructional leadership that interests me the most).

When creating my list I tried to think about the things that I do every day in my classroom as well as ways that you can empower student leadership outside of the classroom. I also considered the article I had used when researching qualities/skills that made an effective leader and used that to make sure my list was relevant.

My top 10 list ended up as:

1. Provide opportunities for collaboration and rotate roles in the group (promotes communication skills, commitment, and will help students to learn to take different approaches to tasks with different personalities)
2. Use vertical non-permanent surfaces with a rule that the student with the idea cannot be the student with the marker (promotes communication skills, risk-taking, honesty, delegation and approach)
3. Give senior students on sports teams a chance to plan and run practices (promotes delegation, communication confidence, commitment, positive attitude, creativity, intuition and inspiration)
4. Empower student executives of clubs to run the club (be hands-off) (promotes honesty, delegation, communication, confidence, commitment, positive attitude, and creativity)
5. Give feedback about student communication skills (promotes self-awareness)
6. Explicitly teach students to reflect/self-assess (promotes honesty, confidence, intuition and commitment)
7. Give opportunity to give peer feedback (promotes communication, honestly, positive attitude, intuition and approach)
8. Give opportunities for social advocacy (promotes delegation, commitment, positive attitude, creativity, and inspiration)
9. Create a culture of risk-taking in your classroom - growth mindset, model risk-taking (promotes honesty, confidence, positive attitude, and intuition)
10. Celebrate successes to build confidence (promotes positive attitude and intuition)