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Grade 12 – Senior Year

Leadership & Professional Development

Leadership as a learnable skill: study how effective leaders communicate, decide, build trust and lead teams and projects — then lead a real project of your own from start to finish.
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About Course

Leadership & Professional Development treats leadership as a set of learnable skills
rather than an inborn trait. You will study how effective leaders communicate, make decisions, build trust and
lead teams and projects — and then practise those skills by leading a real project of your own from
start to finish.

The course draws on research throughout, and is honest about what the evidence does and does not support.
By the end, you will have led a project, evaluated it honestly, and developed a personal leadership
philosophy and leadership stories you can share with an employer or admissions panel.

What you will study

  • Unit 1 — Understanding Leadership: leadership as a learnable skill, the main theories,
    leadership styles, and leading without a title.
  • Unit 2 — The Self-Aware Leader: feedback and blind spots, emotional intelligence, and
    credibility, values and your leadership philosophy.
  • Unit 3 — Starting Your Leadership Project: choosing a project, goals, stakeholders and
    the proposal, planning, and tracking and adjusting.
  • Unit 4 — Leading a Team: how teams develop, psychological safety, delegation and
    accountability, motivation and recognition, and meetings.
  • Unit 5 — Decisions, Problems and Ethics: how groups decide, root-cause problem solving,
    and ethical leadership under pressure.
  • Unit 6 — Communicating to Lead: speaking with purpose, delivery and nerves, and
    persuasion and the pitch.
  • Unit 7 — Conflict, Negotiation and Difficult Conversations: conflict in teams and
    mediation, negotiation, and difficult conversations as a leader.
  • Unit 8 — Delivering and Growing: evaluating and closing your project, networks, mentors
    and sponsors, and professional presence and your leadership story.

How the course works

Your leadership project runs alongside Units 4 to 7, with a checkpoint in each unit. Each unit includes
teaching lessons, interactive activities and a quiz marked automatically. A mid-course assessment follows
Unit 4 and a final assessment closes the course, including an evaluation of your project.

Your supervising adult

Each student needs a supervising adult — a teacher, coach, club adviser, employer or organisation contact —
to approve their project before it starts and to make sure it follows the rules of any school or organisation
involved. The leading is the student’s own.

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What Will You Learn?

  • Understand leadership theories and styles, and when each works
  • Build self-awareness, emotional intelligence and a personal leadership philosophy
  • Lead a team: delegation, motivation, accountability and meetings
  • Decide, solve problems and reason ethically under pressure
  • Speak, brief and pitch persuasively, and handle conflict and negotiation
  • Lead a real project from start to finish and tell your leadership story with evidence

Requirements

  • None. This elective is open to students in Grades 10 to 12. Each student needs a supervising adult — such as a teacher, coach, club adviser, employer or organisation contact — to approve their leadership project.

Audience

  • Students in student government, clubs, athletics or employment, and any learner planning to take on responsibility in a workplace, community or organisation.

Course Content

Getting Started
<p>How this course works, what you will learn, and how you are assessed.</p>

  • Course Overview and Learning Objectives

Unit 1: Understanding Leadership
<h2>Unit Introduction</h2> <p><strong>Most people picture a leader as someone with a title — a captain, a president, a manager.</strong> This unit starts somewhere more useful: <strong>leadership is something people do, not something they are</strong>, and it can be learned in the same way as any other skill.</p> <p><strong>You will look at what leadership actually is</strong>, what a century of research has found about it, the main styles leaders use and when each one works, and <strong>how to lead when nobody has put you in charge</strong> — which is where almost everyone starts.</p> <p><strong>By the end of this course you will lead a real project from start to finish.</strong> Unit 3 is where you choose it. This unit gives you the ideas you will be testing in practice.</p> <h2>Unit Learning Objectives</h2> <p>By the end of Unit 1 you will be able to:</p> <ul> <li>Distinguish leadership from authority and management</li> <li>Explain what the evidence says about whether leaders are born or made</li> <li>Describe the main leadership theories and their limits</li> <li>Choose a leadership style to fit a situation</li> <li>Lead and influence without a formal position</li> </ul>

Unit 2: The Self-Aware Leader
<h2>Unit Introduction</h2> <p><strong>A leader's habits are magnified.</strong> When a team member has a bad day, it affects their work. <strong>When a leader has a bad day, it can affect everyone's.</strong> This is why self-awareness matters more as responsibility grows.</p> <p><strong>Personal Development Skills built the foundations</strong> — understanding yourself, your strengths, your values and your emotions. <strong>This unit applies them to leading others:</strong> how to see the impact you actually have, how emotional intelligence shows up in leadership, and why credibility is the foundation of everything else.</p> <p><strong>You will finish the unit with a first draft of your personal leadership philosophy</strong> — a short statement of how you intend to lead. You will test it during your project and refine it in Unit 8.</p> <h2>Unit Learning Objectives</h2> <p>By the end of Unit 2 you will be able to:</p> <ul> <li>Use feedback to reduce your blind spots as a leader</li> <li>Recognise how strengths can become weaknesses when overused</li> <li>Explain emotional intelligence and apply it in leadership situations</li> <li>Explain what makes a leader credible</li> <li>Draft a personal leadership philosophy</li> </ul>

Unit 3: Starting Your Leadership Project
<h2>Unit Introduction</h2> <p><strong>This course asks you to lead a real project from start to finish.</strong> This unit is where it begins.</p> <p><strong>You will choose a project that meets a real need, define what success looks like, identify the people it affects, write a one-page proposal, and plan the work</strong> — then learn how to track progress and adjust when things change, as they will.</p> <p><strong>Your project will run alongside Units 4 to 7.</strong> Each of those units includes a <strong>project checkpoint</strong>, where you apply what you have learned to what is actually happening. <strong>Unit 8 is where you evaluate it and close it.</strong></p> <p><strong>Start small and finish.</strong> A modest project led well teaches far more than an ambitious one abandoned halfway.</p> <h2>Unit Learning Objectives</h2> <p>By the end of Unit 3 you will be able to:</p> <ul> <li>Choose a leadership project that meets the course requirements</li> <li>Write goals and success measures, and map stakeholders</li> <li>Write and present a one-page project proposal</li> <li>Plan tasks, timeline, roles, resources and risks</li> <li>Track progress and adjust when the plan changes</li> </ul>

Unit 4: Leading a Team
<h2>Unit Introduction</h2> <p><strong>Your project is now under way, and it depends on other people.</strong> This unit is about leading them well.</p> <p><strong>Most of a leader's time goes on ordinary things done consistently:</strong> helping a group become a team, deciding who does what, keeping people motivated when the novelty wears off, following up on commitments, and running meetings that are worth attending.</p> <p><strong>None of this is glamorous. All of it decides whether a project succeeds.</strong></p> <p><strong>This unit includes your first project checkpoint</strong>, where you apply what you have learned to your own team.</p> <h2>Unit Learning Objectives</h2> <p>By the end of Unit 4 you will be able to:</p> <ul> <li>Describe how teams develop and what a leader does at each stage</li> <li>Build psychological safety in a team</li> <li>Delegate clearly and hold people accountable fairly</li> <li>Motivate and recognise people, including volunteers</li> <li>Plan and facilitate effective meetings</li> </ul>

Unit 5: Decisions, Problems and Ethics
<h2>Unit Introduction</h2> <p><strong>Leaders make decisions that affect other people</strong>, often with incomplete information and limited time.</p> <p><strong>Personal Development Skills covered how individuals make decisions and reason about ethics.</strong> This unit covers what changes when you are deciding <strong>for and with a group:</strong> choosing how to decide, avoiding the traps groups fall into, solving problems at their root rather than their symptoms, and <strong>holding to your values when pressure pushes the other way.</strong></p> <p><strong>Your project will give you real decisions to practise on.</strong> Unit 5 includes a project checkpoint focused on them.</p> <h2>Unit Learning Objectives</h2> <p>By the end of Unit 5 you will be able to:</p> <ul> <li>Choose how a group should make a decision</li> <li>Recognise and prevent groupthink</li> <li>Find root causes and test solutions</li> <li>Use a pre-mortem to anticipate failure</li> <li>Apply ethical tests and raise concerns under pressure</li> </ul>

Unit 6: Communicating to Lead
<h2>Unit Introduction</h2> <p><strong>Much of leadership happens through speaking</strong> — briefing a team, rallying people when energy drops, pitching an idea to someone who can approve it, answering hard questions.</p> <p><strong>English II covered rhetoric and the three appeals. The Independent Study and Capstone course covers presenting a finished project with slides.</strong> This unit focuses on <strong>speaking as a leader:</strong> getting a clear message across, speaking without a script, managing nerves, and persuading people to act.</p> <p><strong>Speaking is a skill that improves quickly with practice</strong> — and almost nobody improves without it. <strong>This unit asks you to practise aloud and to record yourself.</strong></p> <h2>Unit Learning Objectives</h2> <p>By the end of Unit 6 you will be able to:</p> <ul> <li>Structure a spoken message around one core point</li> <li>Brief a team so they understand the purpose, not just the task</li> <li>Speak without a script using simple frameworks</li> <li>Use voice and body to support your message, and manage nerves</li> <li>Persuade and pitch to decision-makers, and handle questions</li> </ul>

Unit 7: Conflict, Negotiation and Difficult Conversations
<h2>Unit Introduction</h2> <p><strong>Every team that does real work has conflict.</strong> The question is not whether it happens but whether it is handled well.</p> <p><strong>Personal Development Skills covered assertive communication, boundaries, and conflict and repair between two people.</strong> This unit covers what changes when you lead: <strong>resolving conflict between other people, negotiating on behalf of a team, and having the conversations leaders are most tempted to avoid</strong> — telling a teammate their work is not good enough, delivering bad news, and hearing criticism of your own leadership.</p> <p><strong>This unit includes the final project checkpoint before evaluation.</strong></p> <h2>Unit Learning Objectives</h2> <p>By the end of Unit 7 you will be able to:</p> <ul> <li>Distinguish task conflict from relationship conflict</li> <li>Choose a conflict-handling approach to fit the situation</li> <li>Mediate a conflict between two team members</li> <li>Prepare for and conduct a negotiation based on interests</li> <li>Plan and hold difficult conversations as a leader</li> </ul>

Unit 8: Delivering and Growing
<h2>Unit Introduction</h2> <p><strong>Your leadership project is reaching its end.</strong> This final unit is about finishing well and carrying what you have learned forward.</p> <p><strong>You will evaluate the project honestly against the goals you set, close it properly, and reflect on your own leadership using the evidence in your project log.</strong> Then you will look outward: <strong>building the relationships — networks, mentors and sponsors — that help leaders grow</strong>, and <strong>developing the professional presence and leadership story</strong> you can share with an employer or admissions panel.</p> <p><strong>By the end of the unit you will have a revised leadership philosophy, backed by real experience.</strong></p> <h2>Unit Learning Objectives</h2> <p>By the end of Unit 8 you will be able to:</p> <ul> <li>Evaluate a project against its goals using evidence</li> <li>Run an after-action review and close a project properly</li> <li>Build and maintain a professional network deliberately</li> <li>Find mentors, be a good mentee, and understand sponsorship</li> <li>Describe your leadership with a specific, honest story</li> <li>Revise your personal leadership philosophy using evidence</li> </ul>

Course Completion
<p>Final assessment and full-course review.</p>

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Rapid Grad Academy

Rapid Grad Academy

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90 Students
35 Courses
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$25.00
  • Grade 12 – Senior Year
  • 1
  • September 26, 2026
  • Certificate of completion

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