Classroom role assignment: A pathway to sharing leadership with students

Keywords: Leadership, roles, experiential activity

Abstract: The first two authors teach an undergraduate leadership course and wanted to facilitate leadership skills development by providing students with multiple opportunities to lead and influence others in the classroom. We developed a semester long activity in which we shared leadership with our students by assigning specific classroom leadership roles to student groups. Each student group was then empowered to shape the culture of the classroom and actively participate in meeting classroom goals. The presenter will provide an overview of leadership in the classroom, encourage discussion and conversations about which aspects of classroom leadership tasks can be shared with students, and how roles may be used to generate student involvement and leadership. The presenter will then provide details about the nature of the experiential activity that they used in their classroom and how it impacted learning and leadership.