Can we groom leadership? learning from student leaders

Not much is known about how a student becomes a leader. Given that some scholars believe a leader is not born but made, we reflect on what makes someone a leader. Our intention in pursuing this research is to understand how a student grooms him/herself as a leader and is eventually made a leader. A student leader normally has certain characteristics that need probing if we were to have a pool of potential leaders. Yet, we feel that there has not been an adequate and formalized curriculum which grooms students to become leaders. Drawing input from the first phase of pilot study, this paper explores student leadership and student leader characteristics. The student informants were selected from two elite boarding schools in Peninsular Malaysia. Their feedback shows that student leaders have positive (self) identity characteristics which enable them to become leaders. The enabling factors come from various sources but more importantly, from within self. Knowing how to groom leaders among students will assist not only teachers and administrators, but also educators everywhere in the goal of character building. Preliminary findings suggest that we should have more research on identity construction among students