Customer Reviews

Leadership 101: Developing Leadership Skills for Resilient Youth Facilitator's Guide

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This author has created a semester-long guide for a high school leadership class. She covers the theory and some of the skills of leaders. As such, it is more cognitive than not, and even though she uses daily class exercises and feedback, it is not experiential. Her curriculum guide does not involve group projects or group process. She is oriented more toward intellectual and using ego-ideals than experience. She has midterm and final exams in this book.

Nevertheless, many of her points are well taken and worth reading.

For teachers interested in building classroom experiences that affect skills of leaders (e.g., active listening, self-concept and self-esteem, values, vision and goals, stress management), you might consider Susan Fritz's Interpersonal Skills for Leadership (Prentice-Hall, 1999), even though it is written for a college-level class. Using both MacGregor and Fritz, you will be able to create a very interesting set of cognitive and experiential lessons, aimed at both conceptual and skill-building outcomes.

After years of having a leadership class that only enrolled certain students, our school revamped how we wanted to teach leadership and selected this curriculum because of its academic/activity-based format. I have used Leadership 101 for three semesters and every time I am rewarded with an engaging approach to teaching leadership. Each of the activities promotes energetic discussion and creates an atmosphere where the students need to take on leadership roles within their class.

I am finding that the students who are taking the leadership class are more diverse than when we did selection based on club participation, student council, etc. This curriculum allows any student to evaluate his/her own leadership skills and creates a good setting to test newly acquired leadership skills. The author also has a website and is very accessible through emails, which helped me as a new leadership teacher. Leadership 101 is a terrific resource with clear format and explanations for using in your leadership class.

"Developing Leadership Skills for Resilient Youth" is an essential tool for people interested in developing leadership programs for youth. MacGregor has hit upon the perfect combination of formatted lessons and flexable curriculm sugesstions.This comprehensive facilitator's guide and the accompanying workbook provide an outstanding basis for developing a leadership program for any school or youth organization. Furthermore, this book can be used as a tool to measure and evaluate leadership skills and abilities for youth. MacGregor has easily achieved her goal of designing a resource which "establishes a foundation for youth leadershipeducation programs for adolescents and young adults"