What I Learned When My 4th Grader’s Class Was Looking for Officers and Team Members
The crumpled neon flyer fluttered out of Lila’s backpack when she dumped it by the front door last October, half stuck to a juice box that had leaked through her math notebook. I peeled it off and held it up: Our 4th Grade Community Winter Coat Drive is Looking for Officers and Team Members – sign up by Friday!
“Ms. Henderson pulled me aside after morning meeting and asked if I was gonna run for event coordinator,” Lila said, tugging her rain boots off and dropping them by the mat. “All the girls that sit at the front table are running. I don’t wanna do that.”
I paused, my first instinct already bubbling up – the same one my mom had given me when I was her age, when my class was also looking for officers and team members. You should put yourself out there, I almost said. Leadership looks good on middle school apps. But then I remembered how that went for me: I ran for secretary, won, hated every minute of it, forgot to bring the sign-in sheet to every meeting, and quit halfway through the semester. I closed my mouth and asked instead, “What do you wanna do?”
“Sorting team,” she said immediately. “You just show up on Saturdays and put coats in bins by size. No talking in front of the whole class, no remembering to bring stuff to meetings. That sounds fun.”
I nodded, and that was that. She signed up the next day, and a week later I volunteered to chaperone the first sorting day at the community center, just to get a sense of how it all worked.
The event coordinator was Zara, one of the popular front table girls, bubbly and quick to smile. She’d made a big banner to hang by the door, which was great. What she’d forgotten was the size labels for the bins, extra trash bags for the torn coats that couldn’t be donated, and the contact info for the shelter driver who was supposed to pick up the full bins at the end of the day. The treasurer had a perfect spreadsheet of all the cash we’d collected from the grocery store drop-off, but she’d spent the first hour scrolling TikTok on her phone because no one had told her what else to do.
Lila showed up 10 minutes early, wearing her old paint-stained overalls, carrying a pack of extra sharpies she’d grabbed from our junk drawer at home. When Zara said she didn’t have labels, Lila just pulled out her sharpies and wrote the sizes on the side of each bin herself. When I mentioned we had way more toddler coats than we needed and almost no sizes for teens, Lila cut a piece of the extra banner off, wrote “We need teen coats most! Drop yours here” in big bubble letters, and propped it by the front door. When no one wanted to haul the full, heavy bins out to the parking lot, she grabbed the handles of the smallest one and started walking, and the treasurer finally got up to help her. She spent an hour wiping down dirty coats that just needed a quick wipe to be donated, work no one else wanted to touch.
By the end of the day, I was already turning the whole thing over in my head. So much of the time we talk about these group sign-ups – when schools or scouts or clubs are looking for officers and team members – we automatically frame officer roles as the prize. The “good” roles, the ones that build the skills kids need, the ones that look good on paper. But what I saw that day was that the whole drive would have fallen apart without the team members who showed up to do the unglamorous work. Officer roles are great for some kids, but they’re not the only way to build responsibility, or teamwork, or any of the other skills we say we want kids to have.
I’ve since changed a few small things in how I talk about these opportunities with my kids, and they’ve worked so far. First, I don’t lead with “Are you running for a leadership officer role?” anymore. Now when a sign-up comes home, I have Lila and her little brother read through every role out loud, then I ask “Which of these jobs would you want to do every week? No wrong answer.” That gets them talking about what they actually enjoy, not what they think they’re supposed to want. Second, I don’t praise officer roles as better than team roles. When kids talk about their roles, I ask specific questions about the work, not the title: “What did you sort today?” or “Did you get to bring the cookies you wanted to the meeting?” instead of “How does it feel to be coordinator?” Third, I point out team work in everyday life: when we go to the food bank, I note that the people stacking cans are the reason people get their groceries, same as the person who organizes the whole drive.
The coat drive wrapped up before winter break. The four officers got called up at the school assembly to get personalized certificates with their names printed on them. All the team members got a small thank you sticker, which Lila immediately stuck to her water bottle right next to her junior roller derby sticker. Last week, her Girl Scout troop sent home a form looking for new troop officers and team members for the spring. She signed up for the snack committee, a team only role, and told me it’s the best job because she gets to pick what cookies we bring.
I still catch myself sometimes, scrolling through parent groups online and seeing people talking about making sure your kid grabs leadership roles early, and I feel that little twinge of worry. But then I look at Lila’s water bottle, that sticker all crinkled from being dropped a hundred times, and I remember that Saturday at the community center. We’re not raising resumes, we’re raising people who know what work they like, and who will show up to do it. It’s still a work in progress, but letting kids pick the role that fits them, instead of pushing them for the title we want, seems to be working okay for us right now.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » What I Learned When My 4th Grader’s Class Was Looking for Officers and Team Members