I created Leader of the Week (LoW) to give students another way to view and analyze current events. At the beginning of the 2017-2018 school year, I had been the teacher of the seniors in my class for the previous two years. Needless to say, they had mastered Article of the Week (AoW) and needed a fresh viewpoint to continue looking at the news.
The 2018-19 school year brought me to a new district where students were occasionally studying AoWs in their freshmen and sophomore English classes.
Leader of the Week focused on actions, events, speeches, and movements of “leaders” and invited students to analyze, discuss, and reflect on whether or not leadership was shown.
The Leader of the Week unit was based on The Article of the Week unit that was developed by Kelly Gallagher. Gallagher’s purpose for assigning these non-fiction texts is to provide his students with information to enhance their prior knowledge and background in order for them to be stronger readers, writers, and thinkers.
I, too, recognized that my students needed more context with certain topics, books, issues, and articles, beyond the study of AoWs, so I assigned Leader of the Week assignments (LoWs) from 2017 to 2019.
Check out my archive of Leader of the Week articles to see what current events and people we considered to be leaders.
Note: Articles are subject to the copyright protections specified by the original source.