Why ICS Bangkok Teaches Leadership Before Middle School

At the International Community School of Bangkok, leadership training doesn't wait for high school. Fifth graders write and read aloud essays on what makes someone worth following, then take turns running a weekly chapel segment for the rest of the elementary campus, a rotating, teacher-nominated role students there call the 4B Legends. It's a modest program, but it lines up with recent education research: leadership skills form earlier than most schools assume, and teaching them earlier pays off longer than expected.

The clearest illustration of that idea came not from a teacher but from a ten-year-old. In an essay she read on the school's podcast, Students Incorporated, a fifth grader named Amy described a video she'd watched in class: a tree falls across a road during a storm, and a line of school buses sits stuck behind it. No adult moves. Then a boy climbs down from his bus and starts pushing on the trunk, knowing full well he can't shift it alone. Other kids follow him out into the rain. Eventually the adults do too, and the road clears. "The little boy was a small spark that lit a small fire," Amy said, reading from her essay. "A small act causes a big act."

A Job, Not Just a Lesson

That framing, leadership as something you do rather than a trait reserved for the confident or popular, runs through the whole unit fifth grade teachers built around it. Donnie Weimer, ICS Bangkok's elementary principal, described the philosophy behind it on the episode: "I believe every teacher is a leader," she said, arguing that leadership in elementary school is less about assigning titles and more about helping students notice the influence they already have over their peers. Kids who are quietly setting the tone for what's "cool" in a classroom, she pointed out, are leading whether anyone calls them that or not. The only question is whether they're leading well.

The essay assignment, aimed at the oldest students in the elementary division, asks them to define a "good leader" using real-world scenarios, researched quotes, and sometimes the language of servant leadership directly. One student, Heen, wrote about a group project where the assigned leader bosses everyone around, does none of the work, then blames the team for a low grade, the opposite of a leader who explains calmly and helps. Another, Staffson, wrote about honesty and communication, citing Nelson Mandela's description of a leader as a shepherd who "stays behind the flock," and Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech as proof a strong message still depends on how well it's communicated. A third, from a student named Mercy, leaned on the philosopher Aristotle and a line attributed to Bill Gates about leaders "who empower others." None of it reads like a rehearsed seminar; it reads like ten- and eleven-year-olds working out, in real time, what responsibility feels like when nobody's forcing it on them.

The formal leadership role, 4B Legends, sits on top of that essay unit. Each quarter, a small group of fifth graders nominated by their teachers takes responsibility for leading a themed chapel segment for the entire elementary school, built around a set of schoolwide values the students refer to simply as "the four B's."

From a Bake Sale to a School Tradition

Meryl Lee, ICS Bangkok's elementary curriculum and instruction coordinator, who joined the school in 2018 as a fifth-grade teacher, told the story of how the program got there. It didn't start as a leadership initiative. Fifth grade classes ran occasional fundraisers, bake sales mostly, to buy small gifts for staff who rarely got recognized, like the cleaning staff. Around the same time, teachers noticed a gap in a reading unit: students studied essays about leadership without ever being asked whether they understood what it actually meant. Teachers reworked the unit around servant leadership, tying it to ICS's broader goal of graduating students who "communicate well and share their ideas and really change the world for good."

From there, the program kept adding pieces: a writing partnership pairing fifth graders with third graders, a fifth-grade worship team leading singing in chapel, and finally the 4B Legends role itself, now in its second year. Lee was candid about the selection criteria.

They're chosen because they're role models, not because they're perfect.

That distinction, she said, is often the most important thing the fifth graders in the role learn: leadership isn't about having it all figured out, but about being willing to be visible, including when you mess up, in a way that helps the people watching you.

The Research Is Catching Up

What ICS Bangkok built through trial and error now has real research behind it. A cluster randomized controlled trial published this year by a team led by Professor David Lubans at the University of Newcastle in Australia tested a near-identical structure at scale: a program called Learning to Lead, run across 20 schools and more than 1,800 students in New South Wales, trained students aged 10 to 12 in leadership behaviors over six lessons, then had them deliver movement-skills sessions to younger peers aged 8 to 10. The results, reported by the university in February 2026, showed the older "leaders" gained measurable leadership effectiveness as rated by teachers, seven percent more time on task in class, and better wellbeing. The younger students they led gained too: more physical activity and higher confidence in their own abilities. "Children look up to other children," Lubans said. "When older students are trained to be positive, motivational leaders, it creates a ripple effect."

The case for starting leadership and social-skills instruction early goes back further. Economist Yann Algan of HEC Paris and colleagues followed a group of boys from low-income Montreal neighborhoods who received two years of coaching in social skills, cooperation, empathy, self-confidence, starting in 1984. Their follow-up, published in the American Economic Review in 2022, found the boys who got the training had meaningfully higher lifetime earnings and less reliance on social assistance than a control group who didn't. The mechanism wasn't academic, it was social: kids who learned early to work with others and regulate their own behavior had more doors open to them as adults.

Schools have been moving this direction for years, if unevenly. A 2024 report from CASEL, the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, found 83 percent of U.S. principals said their schools used a formal social-emotional learning curriculum by the 2023-24 school year, up from 46 percent six years earlier. The same report found stronger SEL implementation tied to better classroom engagement and more positive school climates, echoing what Lee and Weimer described about ICS's own program: leadership that's practiced, not just read about, changes how a school feels, not just test scores.

Leadership in the Small Moments

The clearest evidence the idea has taken root wasn't in the fifth-grade essays but in a Q&A the show recorded with a class of second graders. Asked how they'd shown leadership with friends, one student described stepping in during a game of tag to help kids who'd been "frozen" get back in, rather than waiting to be tagged out himself. Another said leadership meant walking an injured classmate over to a staff member for help without being asked. A third, asked how parents had helped at home, said the lesson boiled down to "mind your own business," which the host, after a laugh, reframed as a genuinely reasonable leadership principle for a seven-year-old.

None of it was dramatic. That was the point. Weimer, asked how parents could support leadership development at home, gave an answer that tracked with the research: skip the formal titles, and focus on character first, teaching kids to do dishes, be kind to siblings, finish small jobs they've been given. "Character development is the most important, right?" she said. The leadership titles, chapel roles, and essay units are downstream of that. The tree in the road isn't the exception. It's what happens when kids who've spent years practicing the small stuff finally get a chance to use it.

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