What Kids Learn From The Leaders They Remember (And The Ones They Survive)
I pulled up to the middle school pickup line last Tuesday, and my 7th grader Lila dumped her backpack in the trunk, slid into the passenger seat, and immediately started picking at the loose thread on her gray hoodie. “Mia was the worst,” she said. “I can’t believe we let her be leader.”
It was the day of their end-of-year history group project presentation on the Constitutional Convention. Mia had volunteered first, loud enough that no one else bothered fighting for the role, which is how it always goes in middle school group work. By the night before the presentation, Mia had rewritten all their slides, cut the 2-minute bit Lila wrote about the anti-federalist farmers who refused to sign, and announced she’d do all the talking during the presentation because “no one else will get the dates right.” They got an A-, by the way. The teacher loved it. But Lila and the other two kids sat on the stage and didn’t say a word the whole time.
Lila leaned back against the seat and thought for a minute, then added, “Remember Javi from the ecosystem project last semester? He was leader. I wanted to do a food web meme as the intro, and everyone said the teacher would hate it. But Javi said if she marked us down, he’d take the blame. She didn’t, we got a B+, and I still remember everything about invasive zebra mussels because I actually got to make the stupid thing.”
I’m a former 4th grade teacher, so that line stuck with me. I started thinking back to my own days in the classroom, and the two group project leaders I still think about all the time. One was Lily, a straight-A student who ran for student council every year and always volunteered to lead first. She oversaw a 5th grade westward expansion project that won the school-wide competition. She divided the work perfectly: the quiet kid did all the note-taking, the artistic kid drew all the murals, Lily wrote the speech and delivered the whole thing herself. A month later, I asked the other three kids in her group what they learned from the project. Two of them shrugged and said they couldn’t remember. They just did what Lily told them.
The other group that year had Ty as leader. Ty got sent to the office at least once a week for talking during silent reading and never turned in his homework on time. No one wanted to be in his group at first. But when they got started, he went around the table and asked everyone what part they wanted to do. The new girl, who’d moved from out of state a month earlier, said she wanted to talk about her grandma’s story of moving west when she was 10. Ty gave her the closing spot in the presentation. The kid who struggled with reading said he wanted to build the covered wagon model out of cardboard. Ty said that was the most important job, so that was his. They got second place, losing to Lily’s group. But 10 years later, when that new girl came back to visit me, she didn’t mention the winning project. She mentioned Ty letting her talk about her grandma, said it was the first time she felt like she belonged at our school.
As parents and teachers, we spend so much time telling kids what good leadership looks like: be confident, get things done, hit your goals, get the good grade. We celebrate the loud, high-achieving kids as the natural leaders, and we push our own kids to seek out those leadership roles because we think it’ll help them with college, with jobs later on. But we rarely talk about what kids learn from the bad leaders, the controlling ones who take over and leave everyone else on the team feeling invisible. Those are the ones we survive, and they stick with you just as much as the good ones. They teach you exactly what you don’t want to be, how you don’t want to make other people feel.
When Lila finished talking, we waited in the drive-thru for slushies, and I didn’t offer to email her teacher to complain, or tell her she should have spoken up earlier, or any of that generic advice. I just asked her three questions: What’s the one thing that bugged you most about how Mia led? If you were leader, what’s the first thing you’d do differently? Is there anything small you can do right now to make this feel less frustrating? She thought through it while she stirred her blue raspberry slushie, and came up with her own answers: The worst part was all her research went to waste. If she led, she’d ask everyone what part they wanted to do before anyone started anything. And she could add all her research to the class study guide for the final, so at least other people would get to use it. That was enough. No big fight, no changing the grade, just a small shift that made the situation feel better.
I started doing a tiny version of that in my classroom, too. Instead of letting the loudest kid automatically be the group leader, I had every kid write down one task they wanted to do before anyone picked a leader. The leader’s first job was to make sure everyone got that task, if it was possible. If you wanted to be leader but wouldn’t let other people do the work they cared about, you didn’t get to be leader. That small change cut down 90% of the group project complaints I got every semester.
Last night, Lila added her notes to the study guide, and Mia texted back “thanks, that’s really helpful.” They didn’t work out all their tension, Lila still says she won’t let Mia lead if they’re in a group again. I still get messages from former parents asking how they can get their kid more leadership experience for college apps, and I always tell them this story. Leadership isn’t about getting the top grade or winning the competition. It’s about how other people feel when they work with you. The leaders people remember are the ones who let you be part of something. The ones you survive? They stick with you too, just for a different reason. They show you exactly what matters most when it’s your turn to lead.
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