Midway ISD Launches 'Leader in Me' to Cultivate Student and Staff Leadership
This year, Midway ISD launched Leader in Me, a district-wide program aimed at cultivating leadership and life skills in students and staff.
Leader in Me is rooted in Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People:
- Be Proactive: Responsibility, choice, accountability, initiative, resourcefulness
- Begin with the End in Mind: Vision, commitment, purpose
- Put First Things First: Focus, integrity, discipline, prioritization
- Think Win-Win: Mutual benefit, fairness, abundance
- Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood: Respect, mutual understanding, empathy, courage
- Synergize: Creativity, cooperation, diversity, humility
- Sharpen the Saw: Renewal, continuous improvement, balance
“We are taking what we are doing in our schools from the elementary level to the high school level to build leaders in our community,” Hewitt Elementary First Grade Teacher Annie Jones said. “We set goals as a campus, as staff, as students that really just instill good habits in our students.”
Hewitt elementary teachers sat down earlier this month to discuss how their campus can develop goals for the Leader in Me program that are uniform throughout their entire school.“Keeping those goals uniform is going to help [students] continue to build habits,” Jones said. “They’ll already know what they’re striving for year after year if their goals continue to stay the same and look the same.”
The Leader in Me program also fosters personal growth, encouraging students to set goals outside of school as well.
“The parents and the families really benefit from this because we are growing and building habits that we can use both at home and at school,” Jones said. “We talk every day about habits that we’re trying to build, not only in our classroom, but in everyday life.”
Jones said the Leader in Me program is building leaders every day—at Hewitt Elementary and in Midway.“
We believe in this firmly,” Hewitt Elementary Third Grade Teacher Susan Posey said. “We offer so many programs for students, and I think Leader in Me is the biggest thing to grow them academically, but it also grows them as a person—and we’re trying to grow good people, and it’s all going to start here.”
