How can one expect to enter a group of leaders as an outsider and expect that people will listen?
The key is that you really can't.
What you really are doing is figuring out what students already know about leadership, and open up discussion on the topic of leadership. The students already know a lot about leadership, they live it every day as class presidents that have a lot more responsibilities than I would have ever expected of myself at their age. They have learned to lead by example as they are expected to help keep class behavior in check and inspire students to be known as a motivated class rather than a rowdy one.
What we did today was help come up with activities that would help them explore how they could actually apply leadership. The activities involved problem solving, creativity, trust, and collaboration - but most of all inspired communal leadership. In some situations they really did prove that values like collaboration were imperative to them as leaders, both in theory and in practice. Yet, in some situations a single student would step up and lead the activity while others stood by because they figured only one person could lead at a time. They didn't choose to engage as a whole to succeed in a shared vision, rather they permitted one student to be in control and thus eliminate all other possible ideas that might have helped with problem solving. There was a constant expectations for us, the older DU students, to help them out (which in most cases we avoided doing because we wanted them to work together rather than do it for them). At the end of the day, however, each team achieved success and we were all so proud of the end result. As the goal was to focus on leadership, we helped point out to students when we found discrepancies between what students said they valued in leaders versus how they actually acted when faced with various challenges that demanded leadership. When you point out the them this discrepancy, they are far more likely to adjust how they complete the activity in the future and are more aware of their self as a leader.
In all, it was a valuable experience. I learned about leadership just observing and conversing with Our Lady of Mt. Carmel students. They were bold and they were willing to try new things. I felt weird stepping in as foreigner and trying to teach students who were obviously leaders how to lead, but I feel like we all learned from each other, and as we did the activities together, we learned did learn the meanings of all of Kouzes and Posner's 5 practices: encourage the heart, inspire a shared vision, model the way, challenge the process, enable others to act. And even if our students didn't know the exact phrases for these practices, they knew the concepts and understood what they meant in their daily lives.
It was a successful day and I am so happy to have been a part of it!
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