Three years is long enough to observe the effect on participants of a program. It took five years for one administrator’s decision in Kigali, Rwanda to fully unfold: he committed to introducing his school to the iLead Student Leadership Curriculum, cohort by cohort, grade by grade. Here is what the people in this one school had to say after three years of a values-based leadership program in their institution.
What Teachers Notice in the Classroom
Ask a teacher about the effects of a values-based leadership program in their school one year into implementing it, and they may tell you a story. Ask these same teachers three years into the process and they may tell you a different kind of story.
Teachers in Kigali started to realize their own behavior in the classroom had changed. They would find themselves spending less time on managing their students’ behaviors and more time in their curriculum because peer-based leadership and accountability, student-driven classroom management, and students holding each other to the standards of a common classroom culture had become normalized practices in their rooms. Teachers who spent years trying to deal with the same behaviors from year one were now able to mentor students who held regular leadership roles with younger students using the same curriculum and philosophies. The job of an educator didn’t get easier as their expectations dropped. For teachers, it got easier because the responsibility was shared with students who held their peers to a higher standard.
This has a very positive net impact on staff, it allows them to stay in their schools for a long period of time. It is possible to teach from a common culture and to have a lower administrative burden and change how educators think of their work at all levels.
What Parents Observe at Home
Parents are a tricky audience. They don’t easily give their trust and take it with them when they leave. A parent doesn’t read a case study. But they might notice if their child began clearing his plate at the dinner table without anyone asking or using conflict resolution language at home that they certainly didn’t teach.
Parents in the Kigali community began to describe their kids differently after year two and three, not as students who were simply performing well, but as people who were evolving themselves into better people. That’s the mark of a good values-based leadership program, isn’t it? Grades are a measure of performance. Character is everywhere.
Parents who witnessed this change over the course of three years were some of the program’s strongest advocates because they didn’t need the school to tell them. They witnessed it first-hand.
What Students Say About Themselves
The best results after three years of a values-based leadership program were reported by the students themselves. At first a student might say they had a class with a teacher but those same kids were calling it who they were by year three. Older students who had taken the course now found themselves mentoring young ones because they had come to see themselves as leaders who help others grow. This is the multiplication mindset taking root, these students becoming leaders in their own right.
By the time the program had reached 3,000 students at this school over five years the language of values-based leadership wasn’t just something these students knew. It was theirs to begin with. By year three they had completed the curriculum and moved on to sharing it with others.
The Ripple Beyond One School
But what happened in Kigali didn’t just happen in one school. Argentina’s years of experience with the program that trained more than 200,000 leaders led to other schools, administrators and parents asking the same questions, and people started to wonder about what was happening elsewhere. If time and resources are available, a values-based leadership program gets widespread attention. And the effects of it don’t just stay in the building where it was started, but ripple outwards and build a consciousness around leadership and character similar to that of the Kigali community.
Teachers see less chaos in their classrooms and more cooperation among students. Parents see a young adult in their child, who uses better character to manage life. Students see themselves as leaders and influencers of those around them long before they hold any sort of title. It takes three years for all these effects to become apparent, to cascade on each other and to develop an almost exponential growth in the culture of one school building. Character is the foundation of leadership and a foundation takes time to construct and once it is there, nothing can shake it.
If your school is ready to start its own three-year story, explore the iLead Student Leadership Curriculum and learn how Maxwell Leadership Foundation works with schools to transform lives, strengthen communities and change the culture of an entire building at maxwellleadership.org.
“The most powerful ripple in any room belongs to the person who chooses to serve, not the person who is seen.”
What We Learned in Paraguay
The Stage Is a Microphone, Not a Generator
This is the core misunderstanding of how influence works. Most of us believe leadership influence flows like a broadcast signal: the more prominent the speaker, the more powerful the signal.
But influence doesn’t work like a broadcast. It works like a ripple. Ripples are generated by contact — by the specific, personal, relational moment in which one person’s character touches another’s.
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