"The Leader in Me" (Covey, 2008) is an approach to fostering social and emotional learning that has been adopted by more than 3,000 schools across the globe, but which has received relatively little empirical attention. Grounded in the seven habits from Stephen Covey's (1989)" The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People", the…

The Good Behavior Game (GBG) is a classwide group contingency shown to reduce disruptive student behavior. We examined the feasibility of training young students to lead the GBG in one first-grade and three kindergarten classes. We also examined teacher preference for teacher-led GBG, student-led GBG, or no GBG using a concurrent chains procedure.…

Primary school approaches to student voice and leadership rarely change, despite concerns about manipulation and tokenism. This single case study investigated an approach to student voice and student leadership in an Australian primary school that was very different to a traditional student council. Thematic analysis of school documents and staff…

Recent policies in Ethiopia put students at the heart of school improvement through structures for peer leadership and school-level consultation, evaluation and decision-making. This article draws on an ethnographic study of a government school in Tigray, Ethiopia, to explore how the participation and influence of students is achieved and mediated…

Culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) students have different home languages and cultures from many of their peers, In our context, these students suffer from higher school drop-out rates than their peers and are far behind their peers in sciences. This study investigates the interactions of a nine-year-old child whose home language is…

This study examines whether and how principals take their lead from students, and use student voice, to create more responsive schools, and more responsible models of leadership. I consider issues of student agency and voice within four very different elementary school settings. Further, I consider the challenges students face, and the ways…

Student involvement in leadership activities is now common in English schools. It is generally assumed to have beneficial learning outcomes and there is some research which suggests that this is the case. However, there is still work to do to detail these learning outcomes--and to assess them. I present one case in which primary school students…

The development of an inclusive community is underpinned by values that support an appreciation of diversity. This paper is based on a larger research project, "student leadership in a primary classroom", which developed different ways for students to interact with each other. The focus not only promoted full student participation in…

Over the past few decades, service-learning has surged in popularity. Although most programs are implemented in high school and college classrooms, service-learning has the potential for great impact in middle school. The present article evaluates a pilot service-learning program for fifth- and seventh-grade (N = 86) children in a large, urban,…

In this article, the author shares her experience teaching at Rita Cannan Elementary, in Reno, Nevada, and describes how she and her colleagues teach lessons on citizenship education that are part of their social studies program. She describes an approach she used, which focused on student leadership rather than teacher intervention, that led to…