Youth Leadership Development: What Can Physical Education Teaching Do?

Leadership development has been an important theme in the field of leadership research. It aims at developing leadership skills by implementing a variety of activities and experiences for leaders, future leaders, and the ones with leadership potential. Positive youth development theory emphasized that all young people or adolescents can be found with leadership potential and adolescence is critical for leadership development, indicating that adults and educators have a significant role in helping cultivate leadership in youngsters. However, there does not appear to be much research about youth leadership development. Much research has pointed out that physical activity could be a mean to facilitate leadership education and training. Based on the background and related researches, this presentation first guided leadership development into sport learning, put forward a theoretical developmental model of student leadership embedding in physical education teaching, which included 4 stages: leadership awareness and cognition, leadership learning and acquirement, leadership practice and application, leadership assessment and promotion. And the validity of the theoretical model should be tested further.