Finding Leadership Where You Least Expect It

Debbie Willingham
Oct 19, 2009

For a while I had on the wall above my pencil sharpener a blown-up photograph I had taken out west of a buffalo walking down the middle of the road with a long trail of cars creeping along behind him. I put up the caption "Anyone Can Be a Leader!" with the idea that it might be food for thought for my eighth graders. It was! I overheard a couple of them talking about better titles for the photo, so we started having a monthly title change based on their suggestions. Throughout the year we used "Leader of the Pack", "How to Have Total Control", "Learn from Nature's Leaders", "Follow, But Not Too Closely!", "What's the Rush?" and "Leadership Where You Least Expect It", among others.

At the end of the school year I included, almost as an afterthought, a question on my final exam about our exercise throughout the year: "What lessons might we learn from the buffalo photo?" Answers students wrote were both revealing and impressive in their depth. Students in two different classes wrote they had thought about themselves as the buffalo - slow, on their own schedule, not worrying about others' pace or what others think, and that it made them realize that being individuals is not a bad thing, even with peer pressure as strong as it is in middle school. Another wrote that she was so proud when I chose her caption to title the photo that she had secretly taken a picture of it and had it on the refrigerator at home. A student in our gifted program wrote that he thought of himself as one of the frustrated cars and tried to put himself in the actual situation and think about wha t he would have done. He said that if finally made him realize that you can't always bulldoze through everything the way you want, and sometimes it is okay to sit back, take a deep breath, and pay more attention to what is around you instead of rushing through everything. The comment that struck me most was about something I had said to a student that I did not even remember; she wrote that one time when I asked her to be her team's leader on a project, she had been really hesitant because she is not very confident, and it was only when I said "Well who would have thought that buffalo could have been such a great leader and have such great control over the situation he was in?" that she made up her mind that she would really give it a try - and was proud of the job she did.

What are the lessons I learned from using the buffalo photograph with my students? First, we as teachers need to make a concerted, intentional effort to cultivate leadership and soul-searching in our students; they need to be forced to think deeply about situations in general and themselves in particular. In addition, sometimes the things we do as teachers have a different or more far-reaching impact on students than we realize. I thought it was a neat photo and made a cute point, especially since I had taken it myself, but I did not realize how much some of my students really did use it as food for thought and to make a personal analogy. Of course we are caught up in spending every moment on task, but life's little lessons can also be thrown in along the way with a minimum of effort and sometimes a maximum result. In this case by looking for leadership where you least expect it.

Remember, in the Learning-Focused Strategies Model workshops we discuss how students given choices have a greater opportunity to succeed. Success leads to efficacy and efficacy to esteem. As the work of David Perkins (1995) and Lauren Resnick (2001) demonstrates; strategies, ability, confidence and acceleration help produce effective effort which leads to achievement. Choice gives stu dents ownership in their work and classroom situation and can result in sometimes surprising results as students step up and are given the opportunity to lead through choices they have made rather than the role being assigned by the teacher.

How to provide choice and examples of doing so, is also part of Differentiated Assignments K-5 and 6-12.