leadership worksheets for high school students

3 Great Worksheets to Focus Your Student Leaders

These Worksheets Will Help You Develop Student Leaders

Student leadership is part of a rock solid foundation for strong school culture, but steering students in that positive direction can be a challenge. That’s why our leadership expert, Stephen Amundson, has put together three worksheets designed to address three common leadership issues.

Feel free to use any or all of them as they fit your specific needs. If you’re not sure what your specific leadership needs are, you may want to check out this post which covers some of the basic starting points for student leaders.

FREE Student Leadership Worksheets

The first of the three worksheets addresses what a leader is, and what their role can and should be. This can be a great jumping off point for new leaders, or a valuable way to regroup with more senior student leaders. It also offers an opportunity for self reflection that can be valuable for adult leaders as well

Download the first worksheet, “Leaders Are, Can, & Think.”

It isn’t always easy to keep your student leaders focused and motivated, but I’ve found that most leaders thrive on guided thought exercises like the one in this worksheet. Most student leaders have a strong desire to contribute in a positive way, but they don’t always know how to get from “I want to help” to “here’s the plan.”

Try to remember that direction in leadership is something you obtained over a lifetime, and your students don’t yet have that benefit. They’re still experimenting, observing, and listening. Each experience is an opportunity for them to hone their skills, and each challenge is a chance for them to become an even stronger asset to both their school and their community.

This simple worksheet will help your students to reflect on where they are as leaders. It will also help you to steer them toward growth and agency. Feel free to download, share, and use this student leadership worksheet in your own lesson plans!

In case you missed it, here’s a link to the free worksheet.

Students participating in a leadership activity

Downloadable Leadership Worksheets #2 & #3

The second worksheet is a more focused look at who we want to be as leaders. One of the best ways to find a starting point for any new leader is to look at leadership role models and extract the qualities we see in them which we want to develop in ourselves. This worksheet focuses on that approach, and even offers action steps

CLICK HERE for the second worksheet, on leadership role models, “Who Do You Admire, and Why?”

Finally, the third worksheet takes a more advanced step into leadership, focusing on attitude. If you’ve followed TEEN TRUTH or RISING UP even for a short while, you’ve likely heard of the impact attitude can have. In fact, it’s one of the first things I look for when I’m visiting a campus. CLICK HERE for the third worksheet, on leadership attitude.

Be sure to develop your leadership (both student and adult). It is one of the quickest ways to improve school culture, and can be a massive return on your time. Special thanks to Stephen Amundson for these fantastic worksheets! His site can be found here and is an excellent resource which I highly recommend checking out.

Check out more student leadership activities and continue learning about how to build an inclusive and diverse culture of leadership at your school with our guide to building student leaders .

Ready to take your school leadership to the next level? Check out TEEN TRUTH’s Leadership Summits !

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Business Education | Career Readiness | Leadership

4 Best Leadership Activities for High School Students

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September 8th, 2022 | 7 min. read

4 Best Leadership Activities for High School Students

Brad Hummel

Coming from a family of educators, Brad knows both the joys and challenges of teaching well. Through his own teaching background, he’s experienced both firsthand. As a writer for AES, Brad’s goal is to help teachers empower their students through listening to educators’ concerns and creating content that answers their most pressing questions about career and technical education.

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There's no question that leadership is one of the most sought-after career skills. But among high school students, it’s often hard to find. Your students need guidance and the right projects and activities to help them become the leaders they want to be.

As business and career readiness curriculum providers, we often from hear from teachers who want quality leadership activities for their learners.

To help you inspire your students, we’ve brought together four of the best leadership activities for high school students:

After reviewing these activities, you’ll have a better picture of your options to determine what will work best for your students.

1. Leadership Activity Ideas from Let's Cultivate Greatness

Erin is a high school social studies teacher based in the state of Washington. She writes about developing leadership skills in high school students on her website, Let’s Cultivate Greatness .

On her website, Erin offers suggestions for five fun activities you can use to engage students in your leadership lessons:

Using these topic ideas, an enterprising teacher can quickly turn Erin’s ideas into easy leadership activities to boost student engagement.

One should note, however, that these activities don’t come with premade lesson plans or resources. You’ll need to create these materials on your own to have the most success with these activity ideas.

How Much Do These Leadership Activities Cost and Who Are They For?

Erin openly publishes these leadership activities on her Let’s Cultivate Greatness site so you can use them with your students for free.

If you like these exercises but want a few more resources, you can also purchase a leadership bundle from Let’s Cultivate Greatness on Teachers Pay Teachers.

The Student Council Leadership bundle includes enough activities to use over an entire year and costs $30.

Overall, Let’s Cultivate Greatness offers solid ideas for the teacher who just needs a little inspiration to create better leadership activities in the classroom. While the free resources aren’t for every teacher, you can purchase more complete exercises that you can easily use in many high school classes.

2. Student Leadership Activity and Discussion from Counseling Leadership

Counseling-leadership-activities-high-school

If you’re looking for a more reflective activity to use with your students, consider the Student Leadership Activity & Discussion from Counseling Leadership . Counseling Leadership is a Teachers Pay Teachers curriculum creator focusing on preparing students to be strong and successful leaders.

The activity consists of a simple survey and class discussion. Students rate themselves on a scale of 1-5 based on questions in three overarching categories:

The little things

After students fill out the survey, you can use the suggested questions to start a class discussion about each leadership trait. This discussion could take up to an entire class period, depending on student participation.

Because it requires students to think critically about themselves and their own capacities for leadership, this activity could be a great way to kick start professionalism lessons in your business or career classes.

How Much Does This Leadership Activity Cost and Who Is It For?

This resource is available for $2.99 . However, the engaging conversations you have with your students could be well worth the price.

Having your high school students analyze their own strengths, weaknesses, and capacity to lead can be a worthwhile exercise to frame your conversations on leadership. This makes this activity a solid choice for a teacher looking for an engaging way to start a leadership unit.

Nevertheless, you’ll likely need additional activities to build out your leadership and 21st century skills curriculum.

3. Leadership Activities from Teaching and Motivating Teens

leadership-activities-high-school-teaching-motivating-teens

The Leadership Activities & TED Talk Lesson on Everyday Leadership bundle is designed for students in grades 8-12. It uses TED talk videos (short but engaging speeches from notable individuals) to instruct high schoolers in the fundamentals of leadership.

This leadership exercise includes 12 pages of content between these resources:

These activities were created specifically for a high school audience. In addition, the publisher states that the materials are designed to provide differentiated instruction opportunities to help students no matter how they learn best.

These TED talk activities from Teaching and Motivating Teens cost $4.25.

Overall, this activity is a great way to tie leadership qualities together with other important concepts like collaboration. You can use the TED talk to help students identify and analyze leadership skills and then build upon these conversations through the remainder of your lessons.

4. Engaging and Effective Leadership Resources

ted-talk-leadership-activities-high-school

With this activity, you’ll receive 12 pages of materials, including worksheets for students to respond to and critique six different TED talks:

Since the resources are digital, you can use them when working in person or as a distance learning tool.

You’ll pay $3.50 on Teachers Pay Teachers for just this activity, or you can purchase it as part of the Engaging and Effective Ultimate Ted Talk Bundle for $13.20.

This leadership activity could be a solid choice if you want to use more than just one TED talk in your leadership lesson. With this package, you’ll have the resources to complete the exercise up to six times.

However, since these resources focus on only one type of teaching activity, you may want to consider a broader set of leadership resources to differentiate your instruction further.

Provide Leadership Activities As Part of a Comprehensive High School Business Curriculum

Depending on the type of leadership activities you think would benefit your students the most, any of these resources could help you cultivate leadership qualities in your classroom.

However, we’ve found that for many business teachers, leadership is only one of the topics you may be expected to cover in a course. If that’s the case for you, you may want to consider other curriculum resources to meet your needs.

To help you better understand your options for enhancing your business curriculum, we’ve put together a list of the Top 4 High School Business Education Curriculum Resources .

In this article, you’ll discover some of the best resources you can use to teach leadership and other business subjects:

Discover 4 Popular Business Education Curriculum Resources

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COMMENTS

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This can be a great jumping off point for new leaders, or a valuable way to regroup with more senior student leaders. It also offers an opportunity for self
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