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Cultivating Student Leadership

By Larry Ferlazzo

The Harvard Education Letter recently ignited a "buzz" in education circles with a report on four longitudinal studies that tried to identify common childhood characteristics for people who became leaders as adults.

Cultivating student leadership has been a critical part of my classroom practice for the last eight years. I became a high school teacher after spending 19 years as a community organizer. One of the primary reasons I made the switch was that I had witnessed adults making dramatic positive changes in their lives because of the leadership skills they had learned in organizing. Wouldn't it be better, I thought, if people developed these abilities when they were younger?

Here are a few of the strategies that I employ...