Chapter by Chapter Commentary and Summary
by Teirrah McNair
Taken from http://www.hyperink.com/Chapter-By-Chapter-Commentary-And-Summary-b1151a12
Chapter One: Too Good to be True?
If we are putting all of our efforts on the almighty test score alone, I am quite afraid that we are going to create a generation of children who know how to do nothing but take a test well. —Muriel Summers, Principal, A.B. Combs Elementary
In this chapter Covey sets the tone for and gives us a sneak preview of the case he will make in favor of leadership-centered rather than fact-centered education for all children. From his perspective, we have to look at the present offerings in schools today and see if those schools are adequately preparing young people to thrive in a 21st century marketplace. For Covey that preparation is a partnership principally between schools and parents who can join forces and send the same message to young people. Covey presents his pilot leadership training program through the eyes of a parent searching for a good neighborhood school.
The pilot for Covey’s ‘Leader in Me’ program is A.B. Combs Elementary in Raleigh, North Carolina. The statistics, the reputation, and the word of mouth about Combs Elementary is so extraordinarily positive that the parents have to visit to see for themselves. Their visit to Combs is eye opening and answers the question in this chapter’s title, “Too good to be true?”
From the moment they step on campus, these parents get an opportunity to experience Covey’s ‘Leader in Me’ program at work. The parents witness four keys that distinguish Combs from other schools.
Covey is quick to let us know that his “Leader in Me” program is a viable and sustainable program that is being customized and practiced in schools internationally. Customization is an important feature of the program because Covey wants schools to adapt the timeless universal leadership principles in ‘Leader in Me’ but to also to bring the special flavor of each community into the process.
Covey also wants readers to view the success stories of the model programs he will share in depth in later chapters through the lens of each program’s ability to
Chapter Two: ‘What Parents, Business Leaders, and Teachers Want from a School
“They wanted children to grow up to be responsible, caring, compassionate human beings who respected diversity and who knew how to do the right thing when faced with difficult decisions.”
It really does take a village to raise a child capable of thriving in the 21st century workplace. What has to happen is that the village must point a collective finger to the village and hold the entire village responsible for its young people.
In this chapter Covey delivers a moving testimony through the pen of A. B. Combs, school turnaround specialist and current principal, Muriel Summers. Covey inserts an occasional comment, but for the most part it is all Summers and that’s all good.
Summers recounts a powerful story of surveying the village stakeholders and putting in place a new school mission.That mission was a new beginning for the school and the sure pathway to the school’s becoming one of the most imitable schools in the world. The mission was simple: develop leaders one child at a time.
The year was 1998 and Summers’ boss gave her one week to turn around the fledgling magnet school which had little or no drawing power. Summers first gathered the stakeholders at the fulcrum of the situation: the parents. She quickly discovered that parents were not at all concerned about academics. Instead, they were more concerned about their kids walking away with the soft skills necessary to get along with their peers and to make something of themselves.
After consulting with the parents, Summers turned to her own staff to see what teachers wanted for the school. Teachers were clear. They wanted to impact their students in much the same way that special teachers in their lives impacted them.
Next, Summers and the Combs staff rounded up business leaders to hear their advice on the workforce of tomorrow. She discovered,“Most business leaders know all too well that deficiencies in both character and basic life skills in their employees are costing their companies dearly every day and they are desperately hoping that schools can help out in both regards.”
Summers then considered the results of checking in with students, and weighed her question from the Covey seminar on the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Can these 7 Habits be taught to young children?
With the schools future on the line and the needs of the village gathered, Summers answered the question. She proposed a new school theme, a new mission that embraced The 7 Habits.
A.B. Combs Elementary School has never been the same. In fact, the rebuilt magnet school has nearly tripled its student body and draws an abundance of top-notch applicants for open teaching positions. Combs also draws visitors from all over the world who desire to see leadership training at its finest.
Chapter Three: ‘Crafting a Blueprint for Leadership’
“Our school’s vision is To Live, to Love, to Learn, to Leave a Legacy.”
With a vision and theme in tow, the Combs team needed a specific strategy to deliver the leadership principles to students, staff and parents. They had to come up with a way to teach and simultaneously integrate the core principles of 7 Habits into everyday activities at Combs. Here’s what they did step by step:
2. wanting the best for students
3. strong committment to discover and unleash the gifts in each child
improve their decision-making, problem-solving,efficiency, and innovation skills.
Some of the tools had been around leadership circles for years, such as
force-field analysis, Venn diagrams, bar charts, and fishbone diagrams. Others
were less familiar, such as lotus diagrams, spider matrices, and bubble maps.”
Chapter Four ‘Aligning for Success’
My immediate thought after reading chapter three was that A.B. Combs could not have possibly been an overnight success. Systemic change is a term I hear a lot in nonprofit community development circles and the resounding cry is always that this kind of change takes time. That was the case for Combs and Covey illuminates the challenges of bringing forth systemic change at Combs in this chapter.
There were four areas the Combs team needed to focus on.
but hear the buzz and they too came on board. Business leaders went a step further and showed their support by investing dollars in the program.
Because this reform needed to be woven into the very fabric of the school, roles had to change. In effect, everyone on campus had to take on a leadership role and be held accountable for their specific area of responsibility. Teachers and students alike were engaged wholesale in “unleashing the potential in each child.” Students got the experience of applying and interviewing for school wide positions and many were even included in interviewing new staff.
Modeling was the great outcome of the staff training. Combs staff learned to practice what they preached and became living, breathing ambassadors for both 7 Habits and the Baldrige principles. “As a staff, they became committed to utilizing the tools in running the school and each classroom, and in holding themselves accountable.”
The final challenge was aligning reward systems with the new way of life at Combs. Staff decided that creativity and hard work should be emphasized and that exceeding expectations in these categories should get the high marks. Over time the Combs staff was united in insuring that students knew that people at Combs were rooting for their success and were available to help.
Covey did not fail to include a note about the other side of rewards and indicated that consequences for bad behavior also was also included in Combs’ recipe for success.
Even the naysayers and skeptics could not deny the empirical and anecdotal evidence resulting from reforms at Combs. Clearly its mission to draw out the best in all who are involved qualifies it to be rightly called a magnet school.
Chapter Five: Unleashing a Culture of Leadership
A school’s “culture” results from the combined behaviors of the people involved in that particular school. It is sometimes referred to as “the way we do things around here.”
Just as in the previous chapter, Covey reminds us that the success of Combs happened over a sustained period of at least a decade. It was a process, to say the least, and when the time came to launch, everyone was on the edge of their seats. Covey refers to that special piece of Combs history as a major “leap of faith” mainly because Combs was the pilot program.
Covey gives us an insider’s tour of the working of the plan through the lens of a lay anthropologist. His tour begins with the first day of school and he shows us the reformed “behaviors, language, artifacts, traditions (rituals), and folklore” that an anthropologist would study.
school’s intercom, sung, acted out, taught and incorporated into every aspect of
Combs life.
Chapter Six: Rippling Across the Globe
“Today’s business world is very competitive, and most businesses operate on a global basis. To be competitive you have to have a strong foundation of people skills. If we can have the habits developed at this early age, these children will truly be the leaders and the good employees of the future. So it is truly an investment in the future.” - Rick Redmond, Vice President, Criterion Catalysts and Technologies, Canada”
In this chapter Covey turns our attention to the broader picture and allows us to see the Leader in Me program in diverse places. Covey’s goal is to show the “unique twist” each of these schools have put on the program and to further prove that his template for building tomorrow’s workforce works.
First, Covey takes us to schools in the continental United States and he shows us the impact on behavior and morale.
“One of the keys to the success of the leadership theme is that teachers love teaching the material to students. It is visible in the teachers’ eyes, and they are very creative in how they go about it. In a day where we hear so much about bullying going on in schools, what a great process and moment this is to see kids respecting each other. —Dede Schaffner, Seminole County School Board
“Most notably, discipline referrals dropped from 225 the previous year to 74 the year following. And, according to the annual climate survey, parents’ approval of the school rose to 98 percent.”
Next, Covey takes us to Canada and shows us the possibilities of school corporate partnering.
“When a local business learned that Crestwood was teaching the 7 Habits, its employees approached the school with “How can we help?”
“Today’s business world is very competitive, and most businesses operate on a global basis. To be competitive you have to have a strong foundation of people skills. If we can have the habits developed at this early age, these children will truly be the leaders and the good employees of the future. So it is truly an investment in the future.” - Rick Redmond, Vice President, Criterion Catalysts and Technologies, Canada
Covey’s final thought is summed up in what he terms a school’s signature, a quality that he says must be present for Leader in Me to work.
“This is not an off-the-shelf program that teachers stand up and regurgitate verbatim. First they must live and love the 7 Habits and other leadership concepts. Otherwise students will feel the duplicity. But more than anything, they must attach their own personality—their own voice—to what they are teaching. They must make it their own. When they do, it shows up in their eyes, in their language, and in the way they handle discipline matters. At that point, the students begin feeling it and believing it.”
The question is how much rippling can public education stand? The answer is found on the blog at leaderinme.org and at seancovey.com. New results come in regularly and effective February 2012, the Leader in Me program is being implemented in 500 schools worldwide.
Chapter Seven: Moving Upward and Beyond
“The foundation of every state is the education of its youth.” - Diogenes Laertius, quotation on ceiling of Joliet Township High School Central auditorium
Covey opens chapter seven with words that capture the importance of a village truly embracing its youth. As the title indicates, the move was first upward from elementary schools to junior and senior high schools and then beyond to international sites.
While Covey focuses on the Leader in Me’s impact on elementary school students in previous chapters, he takes us to some junior and senior high school campuses “to provide a glimpse of what is happening at those levels—and there are some great things happening. There are also some interesting things happening at district and government levels that I will briefly introduce at the end of the chapter.”
A tiny spark of The Leader in Me was ignited in Joliet, Illinois at a moment where a high school counselor named Tony Contos was fed up with the educational system. Contos wanted desperately to make a difference on campus but his efforts were repeatedly thwarted by school bureaucracy and red tape. A colleague insisted that he read the 7 Habits book. Contos not only got excited, but he was able to see connections between the 7 Habits and the problems his counselees were experiencing. He took a leap of faith and reached out to Covey to see if there were lessons and exercises suitable for high school students. There were no programs for teens at the time, but Contos began to experiment with students and staff and got wonderful results.
Once again, parents saw their children begin to change and wanted to know who or what was responsible. Parents discovered that the culprit was a set of principles contained in a book called 7 Habits and they began to get excited. As the good news about 7 Habits began to circulate in the community a unique funding opportunity became available. A representative from the District Attorney’s office offered to give the school a portion of the proceeds from confiscated goods found at drug raids.
Shortly after Contos’ pioneering efforts to deliver the principles to teens in Illinois, Covey’s son Sean wrote and published 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens.
“Since its release,The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens has sold over three million copies and traveled to schools all over the world, including a classroom in Korea where students are learning a 7 Habits song with actions.”
According to Covey, getting junior and senior high schools to implement the 7 Habits program was a tremendous challenge mainly because of curriculum requirements.
Still, the concept of empowering teens, especially low income teens was very attractive. A cluster of schools in Chicago offered the program in a mandatory class for incoming freshmen. Additionally, each freshman is assigned an advisor for the entire four years. The advisors are trained in the 7 Habits and are able to integrate the program into their advisory sessions. Even without a full immersion in 7 Habits the schools report increased test scores, decreased disciplinary issues and a greater propensity to attend college. A pilot program in California has also experienced a similar impact.
Covey’s most exemplary high school program is at Roosevelt Junior High in Oklahoma City. Marilyn Vrooman, the incoming principal, describes Roosevelt as a school where the “halls were filled with young students whose academic lives were drowning in social issues they were not equipped to handle.”
Vrooman attacked the problem on two fronts: the facility first and then the faculty.
She discovered some special interests the students had and designed student hangouts around those interests. Her intent was to to give them opportunities to experience interpersonal communications in customized settings.
She also took the advice of a book entitled If You Don’t Feed the Teachers They Eat the Students! and built a faculty exercise room. She empowered the teachers with the 7 Habits training and allowed them to incorporate the training into as many student lessons as they saw fit.
One especially significant campus innovation involved a group of young men.
“She received a $10,000 donation to fund the building of a ropes course for teaching leadership skills and hired a contractor to work with fifteen at-risk boys to design, build, and install eight low-level rope elements. The experience allowed the young men to gain a confidence in themselves that they were then able to transfer to their coursework.”
Covey admits that Roosevelt is “not paradise” but it certainly is on the upswing.
The Leader in Me program’s impact is certainly not restricted to the United States. Covey reports amazing results from Singapore, Guatemalan and Japanese schools. In Singapore, for years the trainings were exclusively held for teachers and there was no systematic attempt to bring the program to the students. At the insistence of parents, in 2000 Covey and educators combined forces and developed a Highly Effective Youth (HEY) program that has positively transformed the school culture for adults and youth.
Covey is particularly proud of his accomplishments in Guatemala. In 2005, the minister of education responded to what seemed like an epidemic of national hopelessness by implementing a program called Path of Dreams.
“The more she and her team synergized, the more María came to believe that the habits would empower both teachers and students to “relearn how to dream” and provide them with the tools to make their dreams become a reality.”
Path of Dreams is working and the take away for youth and adults is a burning desire to improve themselves and the country at large.
Covey’s 7 Habits program has literally swept Japan and although it was initially a ‘hard sell in a tough school system’ the results are really extraordinary.
“Today more than ten thousand students a year receive the 7 Habits via cram schools, while another three thousand receive training in the habits from private schools. Since parents must pay for cram schools and private schools out of their own pockets, I believe this says something about what parents in Japan want from a school.”
Covey ends the chapter by emphasizing the growing list of corporations, community groups and school districts contributing to a 7 Habits culture.
“I share the Louisville and Dow Agro Sciences stories—and single out their activities—to emphasize how interested community and business groups are in the well-being of today’s young people and how important they find these basic life skills and principles to be.”
The uncanny thing about this transformation is the culture shock students experience when they graduate or go into a 7 Habits-free environment. For Covey that culture shock may be just the driving force necessary to take his program to yet another level.
Chapter Eight: ‘Making it Happen, One Step at a Time’
“But if change is difficult for a solitary individual, how challenging must it be for an entire school?”
In this chapter Covey gives readers a blueprint for implementing a leadership theme. He calls the process “The Four Imperatives of Leadership” and reminds us that success depends on customizing the process to meet the needs of the school.
That is certainly sound thinking, and it explains why leaders like Martin Luther King led from the trenches. People saw King making sacrifices and practicing what he preached.
People will trust a leader when they believe they are heard and cared for. They also have to know that a leader is true to his or her word.
“That trust has to be present for desirable change to happen in a school.”
The second imperative Covey insists on is clarifying purpose. His definitions for terms we hear everyday are worthy of noting here.
Covey breaks down the aligning into four areas--attracting, positioning, rewarding and developing people. Here’s what it looks like from a human resources point of view.
Covey’s final thought here has to do with sustaining the change. He strongly recommends reevaluating, and refreshing and most importantly keeping the main thing the main thing.
Chapter Nine: Ending with the Beginning in Mind
“Any person who unlocks the unseen potential of others and inspires them toward noble causes is a modern-day miracle worker.”
Covey unleashes his best argument yet for getting the reader to buy into the Leader in Me program. What Covey is hoping for is for us to realize the tremendous difference that can be made when we treat each child like a diamond in the rough waiting to be mined. Who would dare argue with that noble intent?
For Covey, raising up leaders is not only a worthy investment, but should be the primary focus of our educational system. What’s more, he would have us to believe, effective leadership training must come packing the following elements:
That’s the challenge for we who occupy the village. Whether we rise to that challenge is up to us.
Chapter Ten: Bringing it Home
“But, nowadays, so long as a home is within reach of a wireless signal, every cubic inch of that home’s airspace is infiltrated with potentially destructive messages and images that can steal away the identities—particularly the moral identities—of young people.”
Bringing it home is a suitable theme for this final chapter and an opportunity for Covey to reflect on the role of the most sought after stakeholders in the village--the parents.
Parent buy in to any youth program is a challenge that has to be tackled. Covey does not give the reader any magic formulas for engaging parents, but he does suggest that parents will definitely pay attention when their children bring home new and improved behaviors. Covey has a wealth of evidence to prove that leadership development via the 7 Habits does indeed bring about a behavior change. So, school leadership teams should definitely be prepared to train parents as a part of their strategy.
The training for parents, as for other stakeholders, should be rooted in a belief that--”if you treat all students as if they are gifted, and you always look at them through the lens of being gifted in at least some aspect, they will rise to that level of expectation.”
Covey offers several questions that should be raised at parent trainings, as well as five watchwords that will align the parents with other stakeholders.
Questions to Consider
If we are putting all of our efforts on the almighty test score alone, I am quite afraid that we are going to create a generation of children who know how to do nothing but take a test well. —Muriel Summers, Principal, A.B. Combs Elementary
In this chapter Covey sets the tone for and gives us a sneak preview of the case he will make in favor of leadership-centered rather than fact-centered education for all children. From his perspective, we have to look at the present offerings in schools today and see if those schools are adequately preparing young people to thrive in a 21st century marketplace. For Covey that preparation is a partnership principally between schools and parents who can join forces and send the same message to young people. Covey presents his pilot leadership training program through the eyes of a parent searching for a good neighborhood school.
The pilot for Covey’s ‘Leader in Me’ program is A.B. Combs Elementary in Raleigh, North Carolina. The statistics, the reputation, and the word of mouth about Combs Elementary is so extraordinarily positive that the parents have to visit to see for themselves. Their visit to Combs is eye opening and answers the question in this chapter’s title, “Too good to be true?”
From the moment they step on campus, these parents get an opportunity to experience Covey’s ‘Leader in Me’ program at work. The parents witness four keys that distinguish Combs from other schools.
- The school is clean and the writings on the walls (graffitti) are uplifting and motivating
- Students are genuinely confident and respectful in their dealings with peers as well as adults on campus
- Teachers are energized and able to engage their pupils in a variety of challenging learning activities
- Students are involved in problem solving and critical decision making on every level at the school.
Covey is quick to let us know that his “Leader in Me” program is a viable and sustainable program that is being customized and practiced in schools internationally. Customization is an important feature of the program because Covey wants schools to adapt the timeless universal leadership principles in ‘Leader in Me’ but to also to bring the special flavor of each community into the process.
Covey also wants readers to view the success stories of the model programs he will share in depth in later chapters through the lens of each program’s ability to
- honor the universal leadership principles
- bring out the best in each individual child
- promote parent teacher partnership in transferring values
Chapter Two: ‘What Parents, Business Leaders, and Teachers Want from a School
“They wanted children to grow up to be responsible, caring, compassionate human beings who respected diversity and who knew how to do the right thing when faced with difficult decisions.”
It really does take a village to raise a child capable of thriving in the 21st century workplace. What has to happen is that the village must point a collective finger to the village and hold the entire village responsible for its young people.
In this chapter Covey delivers a moving testimony through the pen of A. B. Combs, school turnaround specialist and current principal, Muriel Summers. Covey inserts an occasional comment, but for the most part it is all Summers and that’s all good.
Summers recounts a powerful story of surveying the village stakeholders and putting in place a new school mission.That mission was a new beginning for the school and the sure pathway to the school’s becoming one of the most imitable schools in the world. The mission was simple: develop leaders one child at a time.
The year was 1998 and Summers’ boss gave her one week to turn around the fledgling magnet school which had little or no drawing power. Summers first gathered the stakeholders at the fulcrum of the situation: the parents. She quickly discovered that parents were not at all concerned about academics. Instead, they were more concerned about their kids walking away with the soft skills necessary to get along with their peers and to make something of themselves.
After consulting with the parents, Summers turned to her own staff to see what teachers wanted for the school. Teachers were clear. They wanted to impact their students in much the same way that special teachers in their lives impacted them.
Next, Summers and the Combs staff rounded up business leaders to hear their advice on the workforce of tomorrow. She discovered,“Most business leaders know all too well that deficiencies in both character and basic life skills in their employees are costing their companies dearly every day and they are desperately hoping that schools can help out in both regards.”
Summers then considered the results of checking in with students, and weighed her question from the Covey seminar on the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Can these 7 Habits be taught to young children?
With the schools future on the line and the needs of the village gathered, Summers answered the question. She proposed a new school theme, a new mission that embraced The 7 Habits.
A.B. Combs Elementary School has never been the same. In fact, the rebuilt magnet school has nearly tripled its student body and draws an abundance of top-notch applicants for open teaching positions. Combs also draws visitors from all over the world who desire to see leadership training at its finest.
Chapter Three: ‘Crafting a Blueprint for Leadership’
“Our school’s vision is To Live, to Love, to Learn, to Leave a Legacy.”
With a vision and theme in tow, the Combs team needed a specific strategy to deliver the leadership principles to students, staff and parents. They had to come up with a way to teach and simultaneously integrate the core principles of 7 Habits into everyday activities at Combs. Here’s what they did step by step:
- ‘Begin with the end in mind’ and establish 21st century skills as their schools’ measurable outcome.
- Build on solid ground infused with
2. wanting the best for students
3. strong committment to discover and unleash the gifts in each child
- Build a twofold foundation based on Covey’s habits and Baldridge’s tools
- Teachers learn, teach and give students opportunities to practice Covey’s 7 Habits of Effective People--”Be proactive, begin with the end in mind, put first things first, think win-win, seek first to understand then be understood, synergize and sharpen the saw.”
- Incorporate Baldridge tools as the other strategic part of the school’s foundation. Baldridge enabled the team to focus on measurable outcomes, tap into best practices in education, chart progress and engage students in doing the same. Baldridge was the U.S. Secretary of Commerce in 1981 and was responsible for exposing educators to tools traditionally used to make organizations more effective.
improve their decision-making, problem-solving,efficiency, and innovation skills.
Some of the tools had been around leadership circles for years, such as
force-field analysis, Venn diagrams, bar charts, and fishbone diagrams. Others
were less familiar, such as lotus diagrams, spider matrices, and bubble maps.”
- Adapt current best practices and update regularly.
Chapter Four ‘Aligning for Success’
My immediate thought after reading chapter three was that A.B. Combs could not have possibly been an overnight success. Systemic change is a term I hear a lot in nonprofit community development circles and the resounding cry is always that this kind of change takes time. That was the case for Combs and Covey illuminates the challenges of bringing forth systemic change at Combs in this chapter.
There were four areas the Combs team needed to focus on.
- Bringing people “on board” with the new theme
- Aligning the school’s structure to match the strategy
- Training the staff in the 7 Habits and quality principles
- Aligning the reward systems so that the right outcomes would be reinforced and sustained.”
but hear the buzz and they too came on board. Business leaders went a step further and showed their support by investing dollars in the program.
Because this reform needed to be woven into the very fabric of the school, roles had to change. In effect, everyone on campus had to take on a leadership role and be held accountable for their specific area of responsibility. Teachers and students alike were engaged wholesale in “unleashing the potential in each child.” Students got the experience of applying and interviewing for school wide positions and many were even included in interviewing new staff.
Modeling was the great outcome of the staff training. Combs staff learned to practice what they preached and became living, breathing ambassadors for both 7 Habits and the Baldrige principles. “As a staff, they became committed to utilizing the tools in running the school and each classroom, and in holding themselves accountable.”
The final challenge was aligning reward systems with the new way of life at Combs. Staff decided that creativity and hard work should be emphasized and that exceeding expectations in these categories should get the high marks. Over time the Combs staff was united in insuring that students knew that people at Combs were rooting for their success and were available to help.
Covey did not fail to include a note about the other side of rewards and indicated that consequences for bad behavior also was also included in Combs’ recipe for success.
Even the naysayers and skeptics could not deny the empirical and anecdotal evidence resulting from reforms at Combs. Clearly its mission to draw out the best in all who are involved qualifies it to be rightly called a magnet school.
Chapter Five: Unleashing a Culture of Leadership
A school’s “culture” results from the combined behaviors of the people involved in that particular school. It is sometimes referred to as “the way we do things around here.”
Just as in the previous chapter, Covey reminds us that the success of Combs happened over a sustained period of at least a decade. It was a process, to say the least, and when the time came to launch, everyone was on the edge of their seats. Covey refers to that special piece of Combs history as a major “leap of faith” mainly because Combs was the pilot program.
Covey gives us an insider’s tour of the working of the plan through the lens of a lay anthropologist. His tour begins with the first day of school and he shows us the reformed “behaviors, language, artifacts, traditions (rituals), and folklore” that an anthropologist would study.
- First, Covey shows us an academic free first week of school. Instead of academics, teachers engage students in connecting with the 7 Habits and with each other. “They talk about accountability.They have students create, apply for, and interview for class and school leadership roles. They set personal and class goals and assemble their data notebooks. They have students help write classroom codes of cooperation—what behaviors “are” and “are not” acceptable.They create artwork to go on bulletin boards...”
- Next, Covey shows us Comb-ese, the campus language. “We dwell in possibilities here.” “We tell them we love them every day.” “We focus on what they can do, not what they can’t do.” “We focus on the positive.” “Every child is important.”
school’s intercom, sung, acted out, taught and incorporated into every aspect of
Combs life.
- As for artifacts, classrooms and hallways are laden “with creative ideas and displays, but the key is that they all reinforce the leadership theme and class goals.”
- Traditions are established that, of course, reflect and reinforce the vision, mission and philosophy of the school. These include special events in individual classrooms as well as for the entire school, including a Leadership Day, an Inaugural Ball and an International Festival.
- In the way of folklore, Covey recounts the numerous stories, mostly success stories that demonstrate the impact of the Leader in Me program on the Raleigh, North Carolina community.
Chapter Six: Rippling Across the Globe
“Today’s business world is very competitive, and most businesses operate on a global basis. To be competitive you have to have a strong foundation of people skills. If we can have the habits developed at this early age, these children will truly be the leaders and the good employees of the future. So it is truly an investment in the future.” - Rick Redmond, Vice President, Criterion Catalysts and Technologies, Canada”
In this chapter Covey turns our attention to the broader picture and allows us to see the Leader in Me program in diverse places. Covey’s goal is to show the “unique twist” each of these schools have put on the program and to further prove that his template for building tomorrow’s workforce works.
First, Covey takes us to schools in the continental United States and he shows us the impact on behavior and morale.
“One of the keys to the success of the leadership theme is that teachers love teaching the material to students. It is visible in the teachers’ eyes, and they are very creative in how they go about it. In a day where we hear so much about bullying going on in schools, what a great process and moment this is to see kids respecting each other. —Dede Schaffner, Seminole County School Board
“Most notably, discipline referrals dropped from 225 the previous year to 74 the year following. And, according to the annual climate survey, parents’ approval of the school rose to 98 percent.”
Next, Covey takes us to Canada and shows us the possibilities of school corporate partnering.
“When a local business learned that Crestwood was teaching the 7 Habits, its employees approached the school with “How can we help?”
“Today’s business world is very competitive, and most businesses operate on a global basis. To be competitive you have to have a strong foundation of people skills. If we can have the habits developed at this early age, these children will truly be the leaders and the good employees of the future. So it is truly an investment in the future.” - Rick Redmond, Vice President, Criterion Catalysts and Technologies, Canada
Covey’s final thought is summed up in what he terms a school’s signature, a quality that he says must be present for Leader in Me to work.
“This is not an off-the-shelf program that teachers stand up and regurgitate verbatim. First they must live and love the 7 Habits and other leadership concepts. Otherwise students will feel the duplicity. But more than anything, they must attach their own personality—their own voice—to what they are teaching. They must make it their own. When they do, it shows up in their eyes, in their language, and in the way they handle discipline matters. At that point, the students begin feeling it and believing it.”
The question is how much rippling can public education stand? The answer is found on the blog at leaderinme.org and at seancovey.com. New results come in regularly and effective February 2012, the Leader in Me program is being implemented in 500 schools worldwide.
Chapter Seven: Moving Upward and Beyond
“The foundation of every state is the education of its youth.” - Diogenes Laertius, quotation on ceiling of Joliet Township High School Central auditorium
Covey opens chapter seven with words that capture the importance of a village truly embracing its youth. As the title indicates, the move was first upward from elementary schools to junior and senior high schools and then beyond to international sites.
While Covey focuses on the Leader in Me’s impact on elementary school students in previous chapters, he takes us to some junior and senior high school campuses “to provide a glimpse of what is happening at those levels—and there are some great things happening. There are also some interesting things happening at district and government levels that I will briefly introduce at the end of the chapter.”
A tiny spark of The Leader in Me was ignited in Joliet, Illinois at a moment where a high school counselor named Tony Contos was fed up with the educational system. Contos wanted desperately to make a difference on campus but his efforts were repeatedly thwarted by school bureaucracy and red tape. A colleague insisted that he read the 7 Habits book. Contos not only got excited, but he was able to see connections between the 7 Habits and the problems his counselees were experiencing. He took a leap of faith and reached out to Covey to see if there were lessons and exercises suitable for high school students. There were no programs for teens at the time, but Contos began to experiment with students and staff and got wonderful results.
Once again, parents saw their children begin to change and wanted to know who or what was responsible. Parents discovered that the culprit was a set of principles contained in a book called 7 Habits and they began to get excited. As the good news about 7 Habits began to circulate in the community a unique funding opportunity became available. A representative from the District Attorney’s office offered to give the school a portion of the proceeds from confiscated goods found at drug raids.
Shortly after Contos’ pioneering efforts to deliver the principles to teens in Illinois, Covey’s son Sean wrote and published 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens.
“Since its release,The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens has sold over three million copies and traveled to schools all over the world, including a classroom in Korea where students are learning a 7 Habits song with actions.”
According to Covey, getting junior and senior high schools to implement the 7 Habits program was a tremendous challenge mainly because of curriculum requirements.
Still, the concept of empowering teens, especially low income teens was very attractive. A cluster of schools in Chicago offered the program in a mandatory class for incoming freshmen. Additionally, each freshman is assigned an advisor for the entire four years. The advisors are trained in the 7 Habits and are able to integrate the program into their advisory sessions. Even without a full immersion in 7 Habits the schools report increased test scores, decreased disciplinary issues and a greater propensity to attend college. A pilot program in California has also experienced a similar impact.
Covey’s most exemplary high school program is at Roosevelt Junior High in Oklahoma City. Marilyn Vrooman, the incoming principal, describes Roosevelt as a school where the “halls were filled with young students whose academic lives were drowning in social issues they were not equipped to handle.”
Vrooman attacked the problem on two fronts: the facility first and then the faculty.
She discovered some special interests the students had and designed student hangouts around those interests. Her intent was to to give them opportunities to experience interpersonal communications in customized settings.
She also took the advice of a book entitled If You Don’t Feed the Teachers They Eat the Students! and built a faculty exercise room. She empowered the teachers with the 7 Habits training and allowed them to incorporate the training into as many student lessons as they saw fit.
One especially significant campus innovation involved a group of young men.
“She received a $10,000 donation to fund the building of a ropes course for teaching leadership skills and hired a contractor to work with fifteen at-risk boys to design, build, and install eight low-level rope elements. The experience allowed the young men to gain a confidence in themselves that they were then able to transfer to their coursework.”
Covey admits that Roosevelt is “not paradise” but it certainly is on the upswing.
The Leader in Me program’s impact is certainly not restricted to the United States. Covey reports amazing results from Singapore, Guatemalan and Japanese schools. In Singapore, for years the trainings were exclusively held for teachers and there was no systematic attempt to bring the program to the students. At the insistence of parents, in 2000 Covey and educators combined forces and developed a Highly Effective Youth (HEY) program that has positively transformed the school culture for adults and youth.
Covey is particularly proud of his accomplishments in Guatemala. In 2005, the minister of education responded to what seemed like an epidemic of national hopelessness by implementing a program called Path of Dreams.
“The more she and her team synergized, the more María came to believe that the habits would empower both teachers and students to “relearn how to dream” and provide them with the tools to make their dreams become a reality.”
Path of Dreams is working and the take away for youth and adults is a burning desire to improve themselves and the country at large.
Covey’s 7 Habits program has literally swept Japan and although it was initially a ‘hard sell in a tough school system’ the results are really extraordinary.
“Today more than ten thousand students a year receive the 7 Habits via cram schools, while another three thousand receive training in the habits from private schools. Since parents must pay for cram schools and private schools out of their own pockets, I believe this says something about what parents in Japan want from a school.”
Covey ends the chapter by emphasizing the growing list of corporations, community groups and school districts contributing to a 7 Habits culture.
“I share the Louisville and Dow Agro Sciences stories—and single out their activities—to emphasize how interested community and business groups are in the well-being of today’s young people and how important they find these basic life skills and principles to be.”
The uncanny thing about this transformation is the culture shock students experience when they graduate or go into a 7 Habits-free environment. For Covey that culture shock may be just the driving force necessary to take his program to yet another level.
Chapter Eight: ‘Making it Happen, One Step at a Time’
“But if change is difficult for a solitary individual, how challenging must it be for an entire school?”
In this chapter Covey gives readers a blueprint for implementing a leadership theme. He calls the process “The Four Imperatives of Leadership” and reminds us that success depends on customizing the process to meet the needs of the school.
- Inspire Trust
- Clarify Purpose
- Align Systems
- Unleash Talent
That is certainly sound thinking, and it explains why leaders like Martin Luther King led from the trenches. People saw King making sacrifices and practicing what he preached.
People will trust a leader when they believe they are heard and cared for. They also have to know that a leader is true to his or her word.
“That trust has to be present for desirable change to happen in a school.”
The second imperative Covey insists on is clarifying purpose. His definitions for terms we hear everyday are worthy of noting here.
- mission: the purpose
- vision: the destination
- strategy: the path
- job expectation: the specific roles each individual will play
Covey breaks down the aligning into four areas--attracting, positioning, rewarding and developing people. Here’s what it looks like from a human resources point of view.
- attracting: recruitment (internal)
- positioning: placement (right adults and youth in the right jobs at the right time)
- rewarding: Incentives & accountability-- “How will progress and successes be rewarded? How will people be held accountable for inappropriate actions?”
- developing: training. “It is in the actual “process” of teaching, creating lesson plans, designing displays, and leading school events that teachers, students, and parents best learn the leadership principles.”
Covey’s final thought here has to do with sustaining the change. He strongly recommends reevaluating, and refreshing and most importantly keeping the main thing the main thing.
Chapter Nine: Ending with the Beginning in Mind
“Any person who unlocks the unseen potential of others and inspires them toward noble causes is a modern-day miracle worker.”
Covey unleashes his best argument yet for getting the reader to buy into the Leader in Me program. What Covey is hoping for is for us to realize the tremendous difference that can be made when we treat each child like a diamond in the rough waiting to be mined. Who would dare argue with that noble intent?
For Covey, raising up leaders is not only a worthy investment, but should be the primary focus of our educational system. What’s more, he would have us to believe, effective leadership training must come packing the following elements:
- a mission to equip students to thrive in the 21st century
- a will to make caring a school tradition
- a sharp knife to cut out the non-essentials and to make room for incorporating the mission in the core of every school activity
- a village-centric attitude that will insure that educational reform fits the specific needs of the village
That’s the challenge for we who occupy the village. Whether we rise to that challenge is up to us.
Chapter Ten: Bringing it Home
“But, nowadays, so long as a home is within reach of a wireless signal, every cubic inch of that home’s airspace is infiltrated with potentially destructive messages and images that can steal away the identities—particularly the moral identities—of young people.”
Bringing it home is a suitable theme for this final chapter and an opportunity for Covey to reflect on the role of the most sought after stakeholders in the village--the parents.
Parent buy in to any youth program is a challenge that has to be tackled. Covey does not give the reader any magic formulas for engaging parents, but he does suggest that parents will definitely pay attention when their children bring home new and improved behaviors. Covey has a wealth of evidence to prove that leadership development via the 7 Habits does indeed bring about a behavior change. So, school leadership teams should definitely be prepared to train parents as a part of their strategy.
The training for parents, as for other stakeholders, should be rooted in a belief that--”if you treat all students as if they are gifted, and you always look at them through the lens of being gifted in at least some aspect, they will rise to that level of expectation.”
Covey offers several questions that should be raised at parent trainings, as well as five watchwords that will align the parents with other stakeholders.
Questions to Consider
- “What gifts does this child possess naturally?
- What talents or character traits does this child possess that if nurtured a little more could turn into gifts?
- What gifts, if any, did this child possess at an early age that have since been muted by his or her cultural DNA?
- What have I said to this child within the past three days that has communicated my recognition of his or her gifts?
- What will I say to her or him within the next twenty-four hours that will communicate my recognition of and admiration for those gifts?”