Introduction

The focus today in K-12 education is reading, writing and arithmetic. Teaching to the “standard,” be it history, grammar, foreign languages, math or science is seen as the way to improve student test scores, the holy grail of measuring student performance and achievement.  The No Child Left Behind Act has guaranteed that this will be the approach for the next decade.

This approach is as strong on content as it is weak on “context.”  Teachers when I was in K-12 spent significant and enormous energy on teaching students why it was important for them to learn.  Although the word “leadership” was not often used especially in the 60’s when I was in the K-6 levels, by the time I reached high school in the late 60’s each student at C.E. Byrd High School in Shreveport, Louisiana was taught the importance of learning enough to be a leader, to be able to influence, if not control, your own destiny and to be knowledgeable enough to make the right decisions to lead your own life and use your leadership skills to contribute to others.  The context for learning was forcefully and effectively made and student performance in that school reflected the success of creating, teaching and instilling this leadership context into the student body.

Today, through the use of technology, leadership can be taught to K-12 students.  Since teachers of all subjects have almost universally not received leadership development training, they are not capable of teaching leadership to K-12 students.  The time is right with Leadership High Schools opening up in Chicago and San Francisco and other major cities and the bottom falling out in our public schools of giving students the right context for learning.

The Proposal

I propose the creation of a series of courses in leadership to be delivered to K-12 students via the internet, cable in the classroom and other approaches that could include, if funding were available, workbooks, an interactive website and other supportive educational media.  I am aware of a foundation already creating film clips of students in the K-12 range discussing their “leadership experiences.”  I will draw from a large body of developing leadership, teaching approaches, multi-media technologies and content in developing these courses.  These courses will be equally suitable for use in public schools, private schools, home schooling and other learning environments (libraries, community centers, recreation centers like the Boys and Girls Clubs where I formerly served as Chairman of the Board of Directors.

A children’s version of my upcoming book:  The Leadership Era: The Handbook for Defining Your Role in the 21st Century could serve as an online or paper text book for this course.  My first book, Breakthrough, Inc.: High Growth Strategies for Entrepreneurial Organizations, published by Financial Times/Prentice Hall is now available on line through a unique arrangement with the publishers.

As the person who raised most of the $50,000 to fund cable TV in the new Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, Maryland in the late 1990′s, as a Member of the Board of Directors of the International Leadership Association and Co-Chair of its 2004 Annual Conference on “Improving Leadership Around the World,” I am uniquely qualified to build this course.  I have built other online courses on leadership and boards of directors and am currently in negotiation with the National Institute for Trial Advocacy about building a first of its kind leadership development course for lawyers.  I have written nearly 30 articles on leadership and spoken to hundreds of audiences on the topic.

Budget and Timeline

At this concept stage, I have not prepared a budget or timeline for this project.  The goal would be to work intensely and make these courses available for the 2005-2006 school year.  I expect that the age grouping for the courses would require that a course be built for 1st and 2nd graders, a separate course for 3rd and 4th graders, for 5th through 8th graders, and two courses for high schoolers, one or 9th and 10th graders and one for 11th and 12th graders.  While some of the content will overlap, each age cohort will require customization in the course.

We can include online tests, online or paper handbooks and can help students create paper and online journals where they can track their “leadership experiences.”

Conclusion

The public school systems and the 1.5 million children in home schooling can not learn the leadership lessons they need to learn to be effective learners, effective citizens and lead effectively.  Only through the world of modern philanthropy can such a series of courses be built.  While they may be some business model that allows these courses to generate revenue, the best distribution system for these courses will be a blend of books, supportive materials, film, internet, DVD, CD and using all available technology tools to promote a wide distribution.

These courses would first be built in English, but there are many other languages and many other “cultures” that would benefit greatly from these types of courses.

I welcome your thoughts and comments on this concept paper for leadership courses for our K-12 students.

The recent Klein/Rice Panel on Education concluded in March, 2012 that our Pre K – 12 schools are so bad, they are a national security threat. Do you think this is so?

Also, what do you recommend that we do about this?  Our nonprofit organization, THE LEEEGH, now has 19 courses to offer to train teachers and principals, plus all staff at Pre K – 12 schools to help them meet the new demands on educators.  Please see: www.trainingforeducators.org.

1. LEADERSHIP TRAINING FOR TEACHERS
2. LEADERSHIP TRAINING FOR PRINCIPALS AND ADMINISTRATORS
3. COMMUNICATIONS
4. GOAL SETTING AND GOAL REALIZATION
5. TIME MANAGEMENT
6. NEW TRENDS IN PREK-12 EDUCATION
7. STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT FOR EDUCATORS
8. CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT
9. INSTRUCTIONAL STRATEGIES
10. LEADING CHANGE IN SCHOOLS
11. STRATEGIES FOR CLOSING THE ACHIEVEMENT GAP
12. BECOMING COMFORTABLE WITH TECHNOLOGY IN THE CLASSROOM
13. DEVELOPING AN EFFECTIVE CLASSROOM ENVIRONMENT
14. CLASSROOM MANAGEMENT
15. FORMATIVE ASSESSMENTS
16. MANAGING STUDENT ATTENTION
17. HYBRID INSTRUCTIONAL STRATEGIES
18. DIFFERENTIATED INSTRUCTION
19. CREATING A WORKSHOP ENVIRONMENT IN THE CLASSROOM

Herb Rubenstein, Founder and Executive Director, THE LEEEGH, INC.

We ask this question because clearly many of the job duties of a teacher are leadership duties and require leadership competencies.  We are dumbfounded that so few teachers are trained in leadership either in their training to become a teachers or in professional development courses after they are certified.  We have started this blog thread to ask sincerely why you believe teachers do not receive leadership training.  Librarians must take a leadership course to receive a Master’s in Library Science, but teachers have no such requirement.  We hope you will shed light on this important question with your comments?

Everyone in education has witnessed wars between teachers and principals.  Sometimes teachers are right.  Sometimes principals are right.  However, whenever a teacher and a principal go to war, the students and education in general, becomes the biggest loser.  We are now training teachers, and soon will be training, principals in leadership.  We show all educators when to collaborate and when to rely on an expert to deliver a technical solution to a problem best approached from the point of expertise, and not collaboration by nonexperts.  Teachers are leaders and if there is a principal who thinks that he or she can treat teachers as mere followers or order takers, and not as leaders in their own right, then this principal will be in for a rude awakening as our schools become more transparent.  In the future any teacher vs. principal battle will be fought out on the pages of facebook, the tweets of twitter, the videos of youtube, and the discussion groups of linked-in.  What used to happen outside of public view in schools will now become quite public, and wikileaks will not be to blame.  We train teachers and principals to treat each other as leaders and we believe the future of PreK-12 education depends on it.

Every time we train teachers in leadership, we find that teachers are not trained in the art of delegation.  Cynics might think that teachers are at the bottom of the totem pole in education and they have no one to  whom to delegate, but they are wrong.  There are many opportunities that teachers have to delegate, but they just don’t have the training or the leadership confidence to make the effort to delegate many of the tasks they do that could be done equally well by others who want to support teachers.  In our leadership training of teachers, we use a new phrase that we believe has never been used in education by a teacher. It is: Ask not what you can do for others. Ask what others can do for you so you can do more for others.  Teachers will always give back 100% of what they have to offer students, their school and education.  The more teachers can learn to invite others to help them, and manage them effectively, which are leadership skills, the better the teacher’s life will be and we believe the better student outcomes will be.

Going back to Robert Fox’s seminal article in 1956, Teaching Is Leadership, it is clear that we have come a long way in education and in the wrong direction.  In 2011 teachers are not viewed in the profession, by themselves, by their principals, and by many key stakeholders in education as “leaders.”  Teachers are not factory workers who best follow orders to produce flawless goods. Teachers are not functionaries who merely deliver someone else’s pre-designed curricula.  Teachers are not order takers.  Teachers are not merely followers of school administrators.  Teachers are leaders.  However, if we had listened to Robert Fox in 1956 by now we would have developed a strong stable of leadership courses for teachers as they are being trained to become teachers.  Or, we would have developed a strong stable of professional development courses for teachers in the area of leadership development and certified these courses for continuing education credit.  We have done neither on the scale needed to give teachers the skills they need to be the leaders their jobs call upon them to be.  Our book, Leadership Development for Educators, is a start in the right direction, but with 3.7 million PreK-12 teachers, we need to gather every resource we can to fill this huge hole in teacher training.

I agree with much of Frederick Brown’s blog submission on leadership improvements needed in schools (February 9, 2011, Learning Forward, www.learningforward.org). However, I do want to add that principals are not the only “school site leaders.”  In our book Leadership Development for Educators we have re-started a trend, started in 1956, that views teachers as leaders.  Teachers need to be trained in leadership development.  Teachers are leaders in their classrooms, in their relations with parents, in their relations with their students, and in relation to their schools.  We have relied for far too long n “principals” as the only bona fide leaders in the schools.  Modern business, the military, the universities, and even the Boy Scouts all follow the belief that they succeed because of leaders at every level.  Until we begin to treat teachers as leaders and train teachers in leadership development, we are shortchanging schools, students, parents, and most of all, teachers.