6
INTRODUCTION
Imagine walking into a classroom where students are deeply engaged in learning.
There is an atmosphere of respect, trust, and collaboration. Whether individually or in
groups, students actively challenge themselves and support each other. In this imagined
classroom, the teacher provides individual attention to a student or to a small group
of students, while remaining confident that the rest of the class will stay on task. Now
step back for a moment. What you are observing is a classroom where students are
consistently displaying social-emotional leadership: They are in charge of themselves and
their own actions (Leading Self), and they are working well with their classmates (Leading
with Others) on important projects for their learning and growth (Changing Your World).
By focusing on developing a student’s social-emotional leadership, you can start
to create classrooms like the one we’ve described. [For consistency, we use the term
students throughout this book to refer to youth under the age of 18. Likewise, we use the
term educators to refer to any adults who work with youth. This does not mean that this
book is meant specifically for school settings.] Youth need to be competent in leadership
attributes such as resilience, communication, and collaboration, and they need to have
the ability to engage and motivate others in order to face the complex challenges of the
21st century (Ananiadou, 2009; Geisinger, 2016). Research conducted by the Center for
Creative Leadership (CCL) finds that student leadership is related to engagement with
school and with more positive academic and social-emotional outcomes (DePass, Ehrlich,
& Leis, 2019).
The Student Leadership Framework
In order to develop student leadership, it is necessary to understand what student
leadership is and what it looks like. We define it this way: Student leadership is about
building the capacity of all young people to have a greater impact on themselves, their peers,
and their world. Based on multi-year, mixed-methods research with teachers, parents,
administrators, and over 10,000 students in grades 3–12 in public and private schools
in multiple states, CCL has developed a framework for defining student leadership (Leis,
Leisman, Ehrlich, & Kosovich, 2018) and a scale for measuring it (Leis, Leisman, Kosovich,
& Ehrlich, 2018).