A student leader is any student who influences their peers in a positive manner. A student leader acts beyond their standard academic responsibilities in ways that influence their school or community. Leadership can be developed in students of any age. At the elementary age, leadership skills can help young students navigate lifestyle occurrences. At the secondary and collegiate levels, leadership skills guide students in long-term decision making processes. Students may seek leadership opportunities in extra curricular clubs, sports, academic support, or private organizations. These outlets place students in age-appropriate scenarios in which they can observe, practice, and execute skills as they lead their peers.
Developing leadership among student populations is important because it encourages student agency in their academic and extracurricular pursuits. By increasing engagement in academic and extracurricular pursuits, student leaders are more likely to see a positive gains in their academic performance overall. [1] In addition, effective student leaders who represent various ethnic groups may influence stronger identities and relationships among their communities. [2]
Without proper guidance, students' leadership may fall short or cease to be continued after graduation. In order to guide student leaders to success and efficiency, they benefit from individualized mentoring as opposed to a broad leadership development approach. [2] Students who engage in more leadership development and engagement have greater social awareness, self-control, and have greater chances of pursuing higher education. [3]
Ideally, mentoring student leaders will provide them with more transferable skills. Specifically, students who have held leadership positions should have a greater locus of control. [3] With such skills, students will be more willing and able to reflect on their actions and practices in order to make more beneficial choices for their futures.
Leadership development can begin as early as the elementary level. Even small children can fill classroom roles such as line leader or engage in student-led conferences. [4] Educators may utilize techniques like cooperative learning and Social-Emotional Learning practices or programs such as Leader in Me to establish students' leadership skills. At this level, students can develop foundational leadership skills such as communication, goal-setting, and teamwork. [5] These skills not only provide individual young students with tools for academic and behavioral success, but could also enhance learning environments by creating a more positive school climate. [6] As students mature they will be able to apply these early foundational skills in future leadership positions.
Upon entering secondary school, students are placed in environments where have greater autonomy and responsibility. Through their academic pursuits, students may be able to develop the leadership skills of active listening, collaboration, and problem solving. If given the opportunity to participate in extra-curricular activities, they may then take on more formal leadership roles such as athletic team captains, club leaders, or class presidents. Through such positions, secondary students can develop more collaborative leadership skills such as task management and putting others first. [7]
At the collegiate level, students may pursue leadership positions through a variety of methods. Some may be paid, such as Resident Assistants (RA's) or Teaching Assistants (TA's), while others are unpaid, such as Greek Life or Student Government leadership. Some student leadership positions are made available through an application process. At this stage, students should master their ability to manage tasks and peers, collaborate with others, and produce innovative ideas and projects. These leadership positions can be a gateway for many students as they enter the workforce.
A student leader could be any of the following roles:
Mentorship is the patronage, influence, guidance, or direction given by a mentor. A mentor is someone who teaches or gives help and advice to a less experienced and often younger person. In an organizational setting, a mentor influences the personal and professional growth of a mentee. Most traditional mentorships involve having senior employees mentor more junior employees, but mentors do not necessarily have to be more senior than the people they mentor. What matters is that mentors have experience that others can learn from.
In education, a curriculum is broadly defined as the totality of student experiences that occur in the educational process. The term often refers specifically to a planned sequence of instruction, or to a view of the student's experiences in terms of the educator's or school's instructional goals. A curriculum may incorporate the planned interaction of pupils with instructional content, materials, resources, and processes for evaluating the attainment of educational objectives. Curricula are split into several categories: the explicit, the implicit, the excluded, and the extracurricular.
The buddy system is a procedure in which two individuals, the "buddies", operate together as a single unit so that they are able to monitor and help each other. As per Merriam-Webster, the first known use of the phrase "buddy system" goes back to 1942. Webster goes on to define the buddy system as "an arrangement in which two individuals are paired .”
A resident assistant (RA), also known by a variety of other names, is a trained peer leader who coordinates activities in residence halls in colleges and universities, mental health and substance abuse residential facilities, or similar establishments.
A student council is an administrative organization of students in different educational institutes ranging from elementary schools to universities and research organizations around the world. These councils exist in most public and private K-12 school systems in different countries. Many universities, both private and public, have a student council as an apex body of all their students' organisations. Student councils often serve to engage students in learning about democracy and leadership, as originally espoused by John Dewey in Democracy and Education (1917).
Student affairs, student support, or student services is the department or division of services and support for student success at institutions of higher education to enhance student growth and development. People who work in this field are known as student affairs educators, student affairs practitioners, or student affairs professionals. These student affairs practitioners work to provide services and support for students and drive student learning outside of the classroom at institutions of higher education.
Residence Life is the comprehensive program that surrounds the experience of living "on and off campus" in a residence hall at a college or university. Residence Life is usually structured with planned events, a code of conduct and ethics, and a relatively large array of staff.
An extracurricular activity (ECA) or extra academic activity (EAA) or cultural activities is an activity, performed by students, that falls outside the realm of the normal curriculum of school, college or university education. Such activities are generally voluntary (as opposed to mandatory), social, philanthropic, and often involve others of the same age. Students and staff direct these activities under faculty sponsorship, although student-led initiatives, such as independent newspapers, are very common. However, sometimes the school principals and teachers also bring in these activities in the school among the students.
Cooperative learning is an educational approach which aims to organize classroom activities into academic and social learning experiences. There is much more to cooperative learning than merely arranging students into groups, and it has been described as "structuring positive interdependence." Students must work in groups to complete tasks collectively toward academic goals. Unlike individual learning, which can be competitive in nature, students learning cooperatively can capitalize on one another's resources and skills. Furthermore, the teacher's role changes from giving information to facilitating students' learning. Everyone succeeds when the group succeeds. Ross and Smyth (1995) describe successful cooperative learning tasks as intellectually demanding, creative, open-ended, and involve higher-order thinking tasks. Cooperative learning has also been linked to increased levels of student satisfaction.
Daughters of Mary Help of Christians Siu Ming Catholic Secondary School (天主教母佑會蕭明中學), founded in 1973, is a girls' secondary school in Kwai Chung, Hong Kong. It is administered under the Grant Code and using English as a medium of instruction, or being an "EMI school".
Peer mentoring is a form of mentorship that usually takes place between a person who has lived through a specific experience and a person who is new to that experience. An example would be an experienced student being a peer mentor to a new student, the peer mentee, in a particular subject, or in a new school. Peer mentors are also used for health and lifestyle changes. For example, clients, or patients, with support from peers, may have one-on-one sessions that meet regularly to help them recover or rehabilitate. Peer mentoring provides individuals who have had a specific life experience the chance to learn from those who have recovered, or rehabilitated, following such an experience. Peer mentors provide education, recreation and support opportunities to individuals. The peer mentor may challenge the mentee with new ideas, and encourage the mentee to move beyond the things that are most comfortable. Most peer mentors are picked for their sensibility, confidence, social skills and reliability.
The Anglo-American School in Sofia (AAS) is a private school founded in 1967 in Sofia, Bulgaria under the sponsorship of the American and British embassies.
In larger school systems, a head teacher principal is often assisted by someone known as a vice-principal, deputy principal, or assistant/associate principal. Unlike the principal, the vice-principal does not have quite the decision-making authority that the principal carries. Although they still carry nearly the same authority among students, vice-principals do not have the same power on the board. Experience as an assistant principal is often a prerequisite for advancement to a principalship.
Student engagement occurs when "students make a psychological investment in learning. They try hard to learn what school offers. They take pride not simply in earning the formal indicators of success, but in understanding the material and incorporating or internalizing it in their lives."
After-school activities, also known as after-school programs or after-school care, started in the early 1900s mainly just as supervision of students after the final school bell. Today, after-school programs do much more. There is a focus on helping students with school work but can be beneficial to students in other ways. An after-school program, today, will not limit its focus on academics but with a holistic sense of helping the student population. An after-school activity is any organized program that youth or adult learner voluntary can participate in outside of the traditional school day. Some programs are run by a primary or secondary school, while others are run by externally funded non-profit or commercial organizations. After-school youth programs can occur inside a school building or elsewhere in the community, for instance at a community center, church, library, or park. After-school activities are a cornerstone of concerted cultivation, which is a style of parenting that emphasizes children gaining leadership experience and social skills through participating in organized activities. Such children are believed by proponents to be more successful in later life, while others consider too many activities to indicate overparenting. While some research has shown that structured after-school programs can lead to better test scores, improved homework completion, and higher grades, further research has questioned the effectiveness of after-school programs at improving youth outcomes such as externalizing behavior and school attendance. Additionally, certain activities or programs have made strides in closing the achievement gap, or the gap in academic performance between white students and students of color as measured by standardized tests. Though the existence of after-school activities is relatively universal, different countries implement after-school activities differently, causing after-school activities to vary on a global scale.
Leadership studies is a multidisciplinary academic field of study that focuses on leadership in organizational contexts and in human life. Leadership studies has origins in the social sciences, in humanities, as well as in professional and applied fields of study. The field of leadership studies is closely linked to the field of organizational studies.
Academic achievement or academic performance is the extent to which a student, teacher or institution has attained their short or long-term educational goals. Completion of educational benchmarks such as secondary school diplomas and bachelor's degrees represent academic achievement.
Girls Quest is an organization for girls founded in 1936 by Ruth Uarda Zirkle Kauth. The organization was created to enrich the lives of teen girls and to help them become active members of their communities and to reach their full potential. The girls enjoy outdoor education experiences, leadership training and they have year-round mentors. Girls Quest has helped over 300 disadvantaged girls from the New York and Catskills region for over 70 years. The girls ages are 8-17, and they participate in educational experiences that promote literacy, ecological awareness, teamwork, peer support and role-modeling, creative expression, problem solving, and leadership.
In the United States, elementary schools are the main point of delivery of primary education, for children between the ages of 4–11 and coming between pre-kindergarten and secondary education.
The most commonly used definition of school belonging comes from a 1993 academic article by researchers Carol Goodenow and Kathleen Grady, who describe school belonging as "the extent to which students feel personally accepted, respected, included, and supported by others in the school social environment." The construct of school belonging involves feeling connected with and attached to one's school. It also encompasses involvement and affiliation with one's school community. Conversely, students who do not feel a strong sense of belonging within their school environment are frequently described as being alienated or disaffected. There are a number of terms within educational research that are used interchangeably with school belonging, including school connectedness, school attachment, and school engagement.
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