Year 9: Week 30 – Leadership

We have a problem with leadership in America, and it’s confusing our children.

The qualities that many people think of as needed by great leaders are not reflected in many leaders in our society. The disturbing and confusing part of this for our children and many of us, is that there are a lot of people who don’t seem to care. They don’t seem to care that leaders of businesses, in politics, and other organizations act amorally and use their positions only to serve their own self-interests.

How do we teacher our students to be effective leaders when one of the most powerful leaders in our country, the “President,” regularly lies, apologetically cheated on his wives, and is a racist, sexists, and misogynistic person. Leaders are supposed to demonstrate traits we want to emulate, but instead this leader explicitly preaches behavior that is dissonant with the most basic human values of goodness, like how he argues that strong leaders never apologize.

Leadership isn’t just giving about speeches or having a title. Leadership is how you wield your power in a community to positively influence other people. Sometimes that means that you talk less to allow other people to share their thoughts in a classroom discussion, and sometimes it means that you pick up a piece of trash on the ground to express value to a community.

All great leaders teach, and all great teachers lead. This greatness comes from a belief that all people have potential for growth in a certain subject area importantly as a human being. This greatness is expressed through listening deeply, showing empathy, and validating feelings. This greatness is in wielding power to as a means to give others people power.

We as teachers have to embrace our roles as leaders, demonstrate implicitly what this means and explain explicitly how we are demonstrating for them the leaders that they can be, and need to be to make the world more equitable and just.

There is a part of the teacher that makes us not want to think of ourselves as leaders. There’s something in that title that doesn’t seem to serve our students. It’s not what we signed up for. We want to spend our time teaching student, not leading. However, if we can push past this paradigm, re-conceptualize our idea as leaders, not as what we are seeing in our destructive “leaders,” but rather in the great potential we see in our students, we can have a significant and meaningful impact to our students.

We have to show our students, our communities, and ourselves the value of leadership. Educators are an essential part of the responsibility that we all have as citizens to lead. It is in this work that our children see their power in their society and identify flaws and the destruction of those who claim to be leaders.

I didn’t sign up to be an educator to teach leadership, however I feel fortunate to provide a counterpoint to the “president,” and show a better way forward to my students.