Student Leadership TEAMs: A Leadership Empowerment Intervention for School (Re)Connectedness

ABSTRACT

Schools face ongoing pressure to increase a sense of connectedness and prosocial behaviors among students, an especially challenging objective when working with marginalized youth. Leadership empowerment interventions can accomplish this while also building student self-efficacy, wellness, self-exploration, and social support. We draw from research on these interventions to examine a new team-focused leadership empowerment intervention (Student Leadership TEAMs; SLTs). Initial qualitative data from four second-grade students appears to support the conceptual basis of SLTs.

KEYWORDS:

• Leadership empowerment
• marginalization
• school connectedness