Our Leadership is Showing!

First graders have a different idea of leadership.  Before watching our mentor  +Nate Hinze  video on leadership, I asked the children to define the word.  The first responses were being a leader.  I then reminded them that they couldn't use the word or part of the word they were defining in the definition.  There was a long pause in my room before one child raised his hand and said leadership meant being first, like our line leader.  Once the students' heard his idea, they caught on.  Hands went up all over our meeting rug.  Answers ranged from "being in front of the room" to "being the boss" and "telling everybody what to do".

After all that wished to had told their definition of leadership, we watched +Nate Hinze's video.  He did an excellent job of explaining leadership in little kid friendly terms.  He also pointed out several ways my first graders could and do show leadership at school.  My students were so excited by the examples that we had to stop the video a few times due to kids shouting out, "I do that!"

When the video finished, I gave examples of behaviors and the students had to tell me whether the child in the example was showing leadership.  They had no problem telling me which were leadership.  Unfortunately, showing leadership was much harder.

Most of them started with the examples from the video, which was great.  The problem was that like most first graders, they didn't think their actions through.  They got the action but didn't quite get the timing.  We would be in the middle of a lesson and a child would notice pencils needed to be sharpened, so he/she would get up and go to sharpen them.  In other cases they would try to help someone with reading or a math fact, but their way to help was to either tell them the answer, write or read it for them, or make a not nice comment while they were helping.

It took re-watching the video several times as well as multiple reminders but my kiddos finally understood what leadership entailed and that it wasn't about being first or bossing people around. I now have a roomful of proud leaders in my class who are more than happy to tell everyone they see how they are leaders.

 
Here are some of the ways they show leadership.

https://youtu.be/ft_8FrTJEtg