Leadership. The active, imperfect struggle, the exercise of character and values, and the willingness to be in dialogue with diverse viewpoints and to take risks. Our classrooms and communities, and indeed entire nations, depend on it.
We know that leadership and citizenship are linked, and that they must be cultivated. The healthy, effective, and benevolent functioning of groups depends on this. To lead well, the journey is lifelong. It relies heavily on becoming self-aware, and educators are in the ideal position to prepare students for this work.
Every day teachers create a context for leadership. They see capacities in students and in themselves. They see hope for the future and continue to create a better, brighter world. Our foundational language continues to offer guiding themes and light, so we offer it now.
Thank you for all you do!
Emily Tymus Ihrke
Editor, gcLi Leadership Blog
Creating a Context for Leadership: gcLi’s Founding White Paper
From 2003, By Todd M. Warner; Catherine O’Neill Grace, Editor
THE GARDNER CARNEY LEADERSHIP INSTITUTE (gcLi) stands firmly upon the belief that teachers can make students better leaders. It’s as simple, and as powerful, as that. We believe that students encounter opportunities to demonstrate leadership every day — and every day teachers can recognize these moments and capitalize on them.
“Leadership” is a complicated word. In its essence, leadership is about focusing and directing human relationships — as is teaching. Good leaders create a context that motivates others to move beyond their perceived boundaries. Teaching and leadership are two iterations of one enterprise: maximizing human potential. As with teaching, leadership is about seeing and seizing opportunities to take responsibility within community.
Located at the Fountain Valley School in Colorado Springs, Colorado, the Gardner Carney Leadership Institute seeks to support teachers at all levels as they address the issues of effective leadership with the children and young adults in their charge. Just as the lack of an informed and empowered electorate threatens democracy, the absence of informed and inspired leadership threatens all human communities.
“Teachers who have the capacity to create leaders — to transform those who, in turn, might transform others — sustain the democracies and societies in which we live. Through their actions, they help maintain a process of dynamic transformation that is the beating heart of any vital school, culture, or nation,” says Bruce Shaw, director of Shady Hill School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “This is the ultimate goal of leadership formation. We hope our students will apply their learning to the betterment of humanity, the furthering of democratic principles, and the expansion of human rights throughout the world.”
Indeed, in today’s small and super-connected world, the need for skilled leadership is more critical than ever. Thus the gcLi believes that leadership is a life skill that should be considered central to education. It is a practice whose essential elements can be understood, articulated, and learned.
…Psychologist and author Michael Thompson, Ph.D., recalls, “I recently had an opportunity to have lunch with Gen. John Grinnals, the Commandant of the Citadel. He told me, ‘We don’t have students whose SATs are in the same range as the Ivy League… However, the employers line up at the door to get our graduates, because every one of our graduates has had a chance to lead a group of his or her peers, and has been evaluated on his or her leadership ability.’ The moment he said that I wondered, ‘Could you say that about every high school graduate?’ And my resounding answer was ‘No.’ Most schools don’t work at leadership for every child. We often work at public speaking for every child; we certainly work at academic skill and physical skills and artistic skill for every child — but not leadership. The Gardner Carney Leadership Institute fills that gap.”
The gcLi is founded on the premise that young people need to develop a thoughtful awareness — indeed a reverence for — leadership qualities in themselves and others. We believe that teachers are the best conduits for conveying this reverence to young people. But they need training and support to do it well.
“The gcLi has a clear sense of the powerful role of teachers in the work of developing young people’s leadership. It recognizes the relationship and rapport that can exist and the possibility for leadership formation that can be effected by a teacher,” says James B. Lemler, dean and president of Seabury-Western Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois, and a leading contemporary thinker on leadership. “The vision for the program includes a powerful vision of teaching, as well. Teachers become leaders as they shape the leadership of students. This will require reflection on the part of faculty about their own purpose and pedagogy. They will grow to see this as part of the work of teaching and will be well equipped to do this work.
“The gcLi will have a remarkable and transforming effect on teachers and students alike,” Lemler adds. “It will strengthen the identity and work of teachers in their teaching, and it will provide the means for recognition and development of the capacities for leadership in students.”
The gcLi values and will explore the many modes available to teachers for calling forth leadership in young people. As the Institute develops, we intend not only to provide opportunities for teachers to hone their skills at eliciting leadership through the Teachers’ Forum, but also to conduct ongoing research, in partnership with a college or graduate school of education, about how most effectively to foster this life skill in young people. In time, we will begin publishing our findings and offering symposia.
“The gcLi will focus on professional development to improve the quality of human interaction in schools,” says Pearl Rock Kane, director of the Klingenstein Center for Independent Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. “It will prepare teachers to use what they learn as they carry out their usual duties, rather than giving teachers more to do. It acknowledges that leadership can be learned.”
Our intention is to have a significant impact on the emerging discipline of teaching educators to create what we call “leadership contexts.” A leadership context is a social environment that allows students to think beyond their assumptions and perceived limitations, engaging them in the process of becoming more deliberate citizens.
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We believe that leadership moments abound at all educational levels, from the kindergarten classroom to the senior seminar… A growing body of research suggests that student success is inextricably bound up with social, emotional, and ethical development — and the teacher-student relationship has a direct impact on that many-faceted development. The gcLi Teachers’ Forum will support teachers as they grow in understanding and directing their relationships with students. They will leave the Teachers’ Forum more aware of the assumptions implicit in their teaching styles and their approaches to students. They will be equipped with strategies to strengthen their connection to students and to empower them to direct those young people more consciously and deliberately…
By using experiential events, simulations, and psychometric assessment tools, the gcLi Teachers’ Forum will help teachers assess and appreciate and expand their own perspectives and assumptions, and put them to work in the service of leadership. This will make the connection between teaching and leadership more explicit. We believe that leadership-oriented teachers can maximize human potential and create investment and ownership of leadership ability in their charges.
The third essential aptitude involves the development of a personal framework to help teachers foster leadership in their students. This framework will include three tangible elements. Teachers will: (1) Learn to see teachable moments; (2) recognize and further develop their language of discourse, their presence, and their assumptions to help them capitalize on leadership moments; and (3) learn how to give more effective feedback to students.
All teachers are artists, but great teachers are the Picassos of the educational establishment. For the teachers, motivation is intrinsic in their classrooms as they create a context in which students become leaders. They seem instinctively to transform the classroom, the athletic field, even the school hallway, into a Learning Organization that inspires leadership.
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Read the full gcLi Founding White Paper here.