by Dr. Jenny E. Grigoropoulos

Elementary adventures

How Can Leadership Qualities Be Infused Through SDGs?

by Dr. Jenny E. Grigoropoulos Elementary School Faculty

To understand the mantle of leadership, one needs to explore plentiful characteristics that a leader should possess and embrace in order to be a whole and educated person. A true leader must be capable and willing to behave and act in a responsible manner, guided by a desirable and anticipated vision, as well as ethical principles and values. Additionally, a leader must be educated and well-informed. As Robin Barrow (1981) articulated, the essential qualities that educated individuals possess must begin with awareness. First, historical awareness, which includes, but is not limited to, history and culture, individuality, sound judgments, respect for others, and the awareness to be active in civic engagement and the personal and social responsibility experienced toward self, community, and the world we live in.

Today’s youth, already eager and passionate to make a difference in the world, while embracing the responsibility for doing so (Jacoby, 2013), will be tomorrow’s leaders, whilst their children and grandchildren will be the leaders of future generations. To ensure that today’s students are prepared to assume their potential leadership roles effectively, we need to provide them with an understanding of the responsibility this entails, and to upscale their emerging leadership skills into desirable actions that contribute positively and sustainably to the world.

Student leadership must be developed to expand individuals’ horizons, shake complacency, and stir the imagination along with the character idiosyncrasies necessary for leaders and leadership. The goal is to produce citizens who are informed about their society and recognize and appreciate the roots of ethics and moral philosophies guiding human behavior. They must also acknowledge people’s natural position in their current community, understanding the human impact on the world in which they live, while applying cognition, reason, and evidence in decision-making (Barrow 1980).

Moreover, these global citizens should feel personally responsible for making a difference in the world, through their commitment to tackling society’s most pressing issues and problems, not only for their generation but for many generations to come. It is imperative to note, that when leadership skills are infused by educational institutions with ethics, empathy, and compassion through mentoring, modeling, and facilitating, students have a better chance to be prepared to assume desirable leadership roles, not only in their own learning but also in their current and future lives. Opportunities to demonstrate and model leadership in the educational setting are available at all times, and when carried out consciously and consistently, the results manifested are profound. Moreover, involving students in their education, putting them in charge of activities and undertakings, as well as inspiring them to be involved in the improvement of their school environment and practices, gives them the groundwork to develop leadership skills and guides them to make good choices for themselves and others. This occurs because leadership consists of learned characteristics, acquired knowledge and skills, and informative daily behavior and actions guided by ethical principles and common sense.

For these purposes, it is essential that lessons taught must be cross-disciplinary and enriched with values and principles guided by the development of desirable knowledge, skills, and ethical principles. Moreover, holistic thinking, meaningfulness, and ethics, must be integrated into the lesson plans and delivery in a harmonious way.

As mentioned previously, vast research shows that student leadership ought to be integrated into curriculum and teaching practices as early as elementary school. However, although this may sound logical, it is not always feasible, given that educators are not trained on how to instill these qualities in practice. During the challenging year of 2020-2021, I decided to enrich my ESL teaching content with the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations. My first goal was to teach my 5th-grade students the SDGs through research, reading, and writing while employing presentation and collaboration skills. The following paragraphs will present my lesson plans as designed, implemented, and presented to my students.

The lesson started with the exposure of the students to the 17 SDGs through videos and documentaries, followed by their summary writing. In continuation, they read articles, which described the 17 goals and chose one goal each to research and write an essay about, which would later be, transformed into a presentation in class. Upon the completion of the presentation, students were called upon to choose the five SDGs that they would like to collaborate on to create their final project. The lesson lasted three months, with some sessions being online during school closure and others being face-to-face. The collaboration of the students was phenomenal. They were setting up Google Meets to work on their projects after school hours; they collaborated and presented online as there was a student who was overseas, and guided and assisted each other in multiple ways as the groups were heterogeneous, involving students with different levels of English proficiency. The outcome was amazing, and students were very satisfied with their work and with what they had learned in the process.

The fifth-grade students who participated were ESL students of varying levels of English knowledge. The idea was inspired by the schoolwide recycling initiative that I had organized with my colleague Stephanie Maxwell in the Middle School. During the entire three months, the students were challenged “to realize their unique potential, academically, intellectually, socially, and ethically to thrive as responsible global citizens” as per the mission statement of ACS Athens. Moreover, aligning with the ACS Athens vision, the project empowered the students to see and seek ways “to transform the world as architects of their own learning,” contributing to the graduate profile of our school: our students are inquirers, knowledgeable, thinkers, communicators, principled, open-minded, caring, risk takers, balanced, reflective and decision-makers. In my lesson planning and delivery, I always kept in mind that students should face real-life problems and use creative methods to become critical thinkers and problem solvers, thus developing capacities and skills of the leaders of tomorrow: knowledgeable and conditioned to activate the best results with reference to sustainability for themselves, the community, animal and plant life and our planet as a whole for present and future generations.

The publication of Ethos makes the projects available to the ACS Athens community, breaking away from the limitations of the classroom. Furthermore, I believe that this information should be shared in order for students to recognize their work and feel proud, confident and acknowledged. In addition, by sharing their work, people in our community may be inspired to follow the path created by the students, thus creating a ripple effect and attracting more individuals to join in working towards the achievement of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals.