By Caitlin Hickerson, LL’15, Student Activities & Service Learning Coordinator, Horace Mann School
My colleague, Emily Dutton, returned from the 2011 gcLi Leadership Lab energized to introduce a new approach to leadership training. As an advisor to Horace Mann Middle Division’s Governing Council, she knew the shortcomings of elections and the difficulties of working with a large group of students trying to accomplish meaningful projects with little time to plan. Her solution was to create HM Lead, an application-based student group that met after school and was made up of committees that reflected various aspects of student life: Student Activities, Sustainability, Service Learning, Student Concerns, Diversity, and Peer Mentoring. As a part of this model, each committee was advised by a faculty member, and students were trained in leadership skills at an annual day-long retreat.
HM Lead represented a paradigm shift for our school: creating an intentional structure focused on leadership that could be enacted, reviewed, and improved. In this article, I want to give you an insider’s view to the assessment and improvement work we have done at Horace Mann over the past two years to iterate HM Lead 2.0.
Challenge 1: The application was heavily skewed towards one type of leadership style.
The first version of HM Lead included many excellent aspects of our gcLi training, such as asking students to identify their leadership style, leadership experiences, and ideas they had for the community. Our efforts to attract diverse types and balance our committees, however, weren’t always successful. This was in part because our school skews heavily toward Achievers, giving us few Diplomats – those leaders who attend to the social and emotional relationships in the group.
New Approach: Ask applicants about their process, not their achievements. Upon reflection, we realized that most students were equating leadership with coming up with ideas for others to execute. As a committee-based program, we needed students who could work and support each other. In response, we adjusted the questions on our application to get a better sense of students’ social-emotional and executive functioning skills. Below is a sample of the new questions, from which they choose one in each category:
Choice 1: Your teacher picks partners for classwork, and you are paired with someone whose personality is very different from yours. Talk about what that is like for you.
Choice 2: You get to choose a person to partner with on a class project. What type of person do you pick and why?
Choice 1: Tell us about a time you set a goal for yourself. How did you make sure that you would meet your objective?
Choice 2: Think of a long-term project you have been assigned at school. What steps did you take to keep moving along in a timely manner?
Challenge 2: Student interest clustered in the same committees.
Initially, students ranked their top three interests and committed to work on that issue for the year. However, some committees were consistently more popular than others and these pre-teens felt limited by the year-long commitment to only one area. In addition, it was not clear that the committees we had created truly reflected Student Life. For example, while Sustainability was an issue of concern, the students did not consistently feel inspired or empowered to make change in this area. This situation led to unbalanced committee sizes and uneven enthusiasm.
New Approach: Restructure committees and shorten timeline. Currently, there are no permanent committees. The students apply to the program and choose their projects each trimester. In the first trimester, the projects are pre-determined either by upcoming school events or by the prior year’s committees. For example, the first trimester saw a Movie Night Committee and the creation of a survey conducted by our students to determine the needs of the student body. By third trimester, we were working on Service Learning Day and a Candy-Gram Appreciation Project. While this new, dynamic approach requires a great deal more management by the faculty advisors, it gives students a greater voice.
Challenge 3: Follow through.
It can be an enormous challenge for middle school students to finish something they started. Our goal was to give our leaders the opportunity and latitude to take responsibility for a project. But it often ended in frustration for the faculty advisor who watched the students come up with several great ideas, but lacked the motivation, focus, or skills required to complete the task. In addition, with seventy students total and uneven committee sizes, some groups were so large that there was often a diffusion of responsibility.
New Approach: Become leaner and more efficient and scaffold better. First, we pared down HM Lead to a maximum of forty students, making it harder to get lost in the group. Second, to focus the group’s work, each project has a deadline. Third, the projects are predetermined in the first round and gradually become more student-directed, allowing advisors to model achievable projects before handing the reins over to the students. Fourth, leadership training is incorporated throughout the year, reminding students of the importance of leadership skills and to continue to build on them.
So what does HM Lead look like now? In the spring, we make the applications available to rising seventh and eighth graders. Sixth graders and new students have the chance to apply in the fall, and we reserve spots for them. They join us for the second round of projects. The year begins with an opening meeting, including team building activities, leadership style analysis, and committee sign ups. These committees meet every week after school for an hour.
When the projects end, we have a second whole group meeting that includes leadership training (such as planning or public speaking), feedback sessions, and the next committee sign ups. Once the second projects come to an end, we give feedback and we meet as a group for additional training. At this meeting, HM Leaders ideally share new ideas based on the survey results, and committees are formed to work on those projects until the end of the year.
The learning continues for us all as we move forward. Leading from the Middle comes with distinct challenges as well as special rewards. We have seen some wonderful successes as we empower students the space and time to make their visions into realities. On balance, we believe we have been effective at creating habits of mind in our students. Habits of mind that will guide students to success in school and beyond in their future. I believe that the more we are able to balance the right amount of independence with support at this critical stage of life, the more capable these students will be at taking the reins when they are handed off. Unquestionably, it is my hope as that in the long run, these students will view leadership as an opportunity to work together for a common cause. To step in. To lead.
Caitlin Hickerson is a 2015 graduate of the gcLi Leadership Lab. As the Student Activities and Service Learning Coordinator at Horace Mann School’s Middle Division, her mission is to create opportunities for students to engage meaningfully with their community both in and out of school and empower them to create these opportunities for themselves. Recently, she developed a leadership curriculum for Maru-a-Pula School in Gaborone, Botswana. This is her tenth year as a History teacher at Horace Mann. Caitlin is a graduate of Bryn Mawr College and Fordham University.