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Leadership Skills · Renzulli Learning

Renzulli Leadership Assessment: Identify and Develop 21st-Century Leadership Skills in K-12 Students

Leadership in the 21st century is not about authority — it’s about influence, collaboration, and inspiring others. Built on Dr. Joseph Renzulli and Dr. Sally Reis’s research at the University of Connecticut, the Renzulli Leadership Assessment lets students reflect on their leadership confidence and gives K-12 educators the inquiry-based activities, projects, and roadmap to develop these skills.

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A short demo of how the Renzulli Leadership Assessment helps K–12 educators identify and develop students’ communication, teamwork, problem-solving, and decision-making skills.

5+
Core leadership skill areas: communication, teamwork, problem-solving, planning, decision-making
15+
Countries where the SRBCSS Leadership Scale has been validated
K–12
All grade levels — assessment and development tools for every classroom
40,000+
Renzulli enrichment activities aligned to leadership skill development
The case for leadership

Why Is Leadership Crucial in the 21st Century?

Quick answer Twenty-first-century leadership is not positional — it is the capacity to influence, collaborate, and inspire others toward a shared outcome. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs reports consistently rank leadership, social influence, and people management among the top skills employers will demand through 2030, and college admissions officers increasingly prize evidence of student leadership over GPA alone. Decades of research by Dr. Joseph Renzulli and Dr. Sally Reis at the University of Connecticut show these skills are teachable — and most effectively built through interest-driven, inquiry-based work.

Renzulli Learning has specifically added the Renzulli Leadership Assessment to its platform to help K-12 educators measure and develop student leadership abilities. The platform develops leadership through application and practice within its inquiry-based learning activities — not as a separate program, but woven into the work students are already doing.

Four reasons leadership matters more than ever

  • Authority is no longer enough. Modern teams are flatter, more cross-functional, and more remote than at any point in history. The students entering today’s workforce will lead through influence and persuasion far more often than through formal hierarchy — and those skills require deliberate practice.
  • The world’s hardest problems demand collective action. Climate, public health, AI governance, civic polarization — none of these yield to individual brilliance alone. They require leaders who can convene, listen, synthesize differing perspectives, and move groups toward action.
  • Employers and colleges are explicitly asking for it. The World Economic Forum identifies leadership and social influence as a top-10 core skill for the 2025–2030 labor market. NACE’s annual employer surveys consistently rank leadership in the top five attributes recruiters seek on a resume. Selective universities now treat demonstrated leadership as one of the strongest non-academic admissions signals.
  • Leadership compounds across every other 21st-century skill. A student who can plan, persuade, and collaborate gets more out of every academic experience — from group projects to sports to extracurriculars to first internships. Leadership is the multiplier that turns individual ability into collective accomplishment.

Despite all of this, fewer than one in three U.S. high school graduates report having had a meaningful leadership role in school. The Renzulli Leadership Assessment exists to close that gap — first by surfacing where each student stands today, and then by giving educators the inquiry-based activities, projects, and roadmap to develop these skills in every classroom, club, and team.

Renzulli Leadership Assessment — building 21st-century leaders through influence, collaboration, and inspiration
Start with the roadmap. The Renzulli Leadership Roadmap is a free, printable PDF guide for educators, coaches, and administrators. It walks you through how to assess, teach, and strengthen leadership skills using the Renzulli Learning platform — perfect to share with your principal, athletic director, club sponsors, or district leadership team.
Core leadership skill areas

What Leadership Skills Does the Renzulli Assessment Measure?

The Renzulli Leadership Assessment measures — and the Renzulli Learning platform develops — the core leadership skills that research, employers, and college admissions officers identify as essential for success in the 21st century:

Communication

Articulating ideas clearly, listening actively, and inspiring others to act — the foundation of every leadership context.
Influence skill

Teamwork & Collaboration

Working effectively with others, building consensus, and contributing to shared goals across diverse perspectives.
Collective action

Problem-Solving

Identifying challenges, generating solutions, and making decisions under uncertainty — the practical core of leadership.
Critical thinking

Planning

Setting goals, organizing resources, and sequencing actions to turn vision into outcome.
Executive skill

Decision-Making

Weighing trade-offs, taking responsibility, and acting with judgment — including thinking about how to help others.
Judgment skill

These skills are based on Dr. Joseph Renzulli’s Scales for Rating the Behavioral Characteristics of Superior Students (SRBCSS) Leadership Characteristics Scale — one of the most widely validated leadership rating instruments in K-12 education, used in over 15 countries.

Assess and develop

How Renzulli Learning Helps You Identify and Develop Student Leaders

Renzulli Learning now offers opportunities for all students to assess their leadership potential. Some students have a great deal of confidence in their ability to be a leader but lack opportunities at school or home to apply these skills. Other students lack confidence in being a leader, even though you see great potential in them. The first step in developing leaders is learning how confident they already are about leadership — which is exactly what the Renzulli Leadership Assessment measures.

When students complete the Renzulli Leadership Scale, they actively begin to think about leadership. Positive leaders have important skills that can be improved and developed — problem-solving, working in a team, communication, planning, and thinking about how to help others. Renzulli Learning helps students improve their leadership skills over time by focusing on these areas, both in and out of the classroom.

What Leadership Skills Are Crucial For

Academic and personal success

Teaching students how to be leaders enables them to learn skills that help them succeed in life beyond school.

Executive function development

Leadership opportunities teach students executive function skills — planning, organization, decision-making — alongside collaboration.

Critical and creative thinking

Leadership contexts demand independence, critical thinking, and creative problem-solving applied to real-world challenges.

Confidence and positive impact

Leadership skills increase confidence and enable students to make a positive difference in areas of personal interest.

Research base

The Research Behind the Renzulli Leadership Assessment

Quick answer The Renzulli Leadership Assessment is grounded in over 50 years of research by Dr. Joseph S. Renzulli and Dr. Sally M. Reis at the University of Connecticut’s Neag School of Education. Foundational works include the SRBCSS Leadership Characteristics Scale, the most widely validated K-12 leadership rating instrument worldwide, and Renzulli’s Operation Houndstooth co-cognitive factors framework, which positions leadership as essential to talent development for the 21st century.

The Renzulli Learning platform is built on five decades of research by Dr. Joseph S. Renzulli — Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor and Emeritus Director of the Renzulli Center for Creativity, Gifted Education, and Talent Development at the University of Connecticut — and his collaborator and spouse Dr. Sally M. Reis, also a Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor at UConn’s Neag School of Education. Their work on the Schoolwide Enrichment Model (SEM), the Three-Ring Conception of Giftedness, and the role of leadership in talent development directly informs the Renzulli Leadership Assessment and the inquiry-based enrichment activities that build leadership skills.

Key Research Publications by Renzulli, Reis, and Colleagues on Leadership

Foundational instrument
Renzulli, J. S., Smith, L. H., White, A. J., Callahan, C. M., Hartman, R. K., Westberg, K. L., Gavin, M. K., Reis, S. M., Siegle, D., & Sytsma Reed, R. E. (2010, 2013). Scales for Rating the Behavioral Characteristics of Superior Students (SRBCSS) — Technical and Administration Manual. Mansfield Center, CT: Creative Learning Press. View SRBCSS instruments ›
The SRBCSS Leadership Characteristics Scale is one of the most widely used K-12 leadership rating instruments in the world. It has been translated, adapted, and validated in over 15 countries including China, Germany, France, Korea, Saudi Arabia, Italy, and Brazil — and forms the foundation of the Renzulli Leadership Assessment.
Peer-reviewed validation
Renzulli, J. S., Siegle, D., Reis, S. M., Gavin, M. K., & Sytsma Reed, R. E. (2009). An investigation of the reliability and factor structure of four new scales for rating the behavioral characteristics of superior students. Journal of Advanced Academics, 21(1), 84–108. https://doi.org/10.1177/1932202X0902100105
Peer-reviewed psychometric validation of the SRBCSS scales used as the basis for teacher nomination of high-ability students — including the leadership domain — in gifted and enrichment programs.
Renzulli framework
Renzulli, J. S. (2002). Expanding the conception of giftedness to include co-cognitive traits and to promote social capital. Phi Delta Kappan, 84(1), 33–58. Read the paper ›
Introduces Operation Houndstooth, Renzulli’s framework for the co-cognitive characteristics — optimism, courage, romance with a topic, sensitivity to human concerns, physical/mental energy, vision/sense of destiny — that turn ability into leadership for a changing world and the development of social capital.
Renzulli framework
Renzulli, J. S. (2012). Reexamining the role of gifted education and talent development for the 21st century: A four-part theoretical approach. Gifted Child Quarterly, 56(3), 150–159. Read the paper ›
Renzulli positions executive function and leadership as the “yeast” that helps cognitive ability and creativity rise into accomplishment. Identifies five categories of leadership: action orientation, social interactions, altruistic leadership (empathy and dependability), realistic self-assessment, and awareness of the needs of others.
Renzulli framework
Reis, S. M., & Renzulli, J. S. (2020). The three-ring conception of giftedness and the Schoolwide Enrichment Model: A talent development approach for all students. In T. Cross & P. Olszewski-Kubilius (Eds.), Conceptual frameworks for giftedness and talent development (pp. 145–180). Prufrock Press. Read the chapter ›
Reis and Renzulli demonstrate how the Schoolwide Enrichment Model (SEM) — the foundation of the Renzulli Learning platform — develops the leadership behaviors of planning, persistence, collaboration, and creative problem-solving in real instructional contexts.
Renzulli framework
Reis, S. M., Renzulli, S. J., & Renzulli, J. S. (2021). Enrichment and gifted education pedagogy to develop talents, gifts, and creative productivity. Education Sciences, 11(10), 615. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci11100615
Open-access article documenting how SEM-based enrichment pedagogy cultivates the leadership and executive function skills that turn potential into productive achievement.
Renzulli framework
Reis, S. M., & Renzulli, J. S. (2023). Using SEM pedagogy to inspire future leaders and change agents. In C. Fischer et al. (Eds.), Recognizing potential – developing talent – making education sustainable: Contributions from talent research (pp. 317–329). Waxmann. View publication ›
Reis and Renzulli’s most recent treatment of how Schoolwide Enrichment Model pedagogy explicitly inspires future leaders and change agents — aligning directly with the developmental purpose of the Renzulli Leadership Assessment.
Why teach leadership

Why Teach Leadership? And How and Where Can It Be Done?

Current research on this important topic indicates that students can learn initial leadership skills and improve their emerging skills over time. Educators understand that teaching students how to be leaders enables them to learn skills that help them succeed in life. Experiencing leadership opportunities in school teaches students about executive function skills, how to work more collaboratively with others, solve problems, develop independence, and think more critically and creatively. Learning leadership skills can increase students’ confidence and enable them to work at making a positive difference in areas of interest.

How and where can this be done? Leadership can be learned in many contexts:

Clubs & extracurriculars

Student government, debate teams, robotics clubs, service clubs — structured spaces where students can practice influence, collaboration, and decision-making.

Athletic opportunities

Team captaincy, peer mentoring, training partnerships — sports give students immediate, repeated leadership reps in high-stakes contexts.

Projects & PBL

Project-Based Learning investigations through Renzulli Learning give every student a chance to plan, lead, and present authentic work.

Regular classroom activities

Group work, peer teaching, classroom roles — daily opportunities for low-stakes leadership practice.

Teachers can lead by example, demonstrating the qualities of good leaders — empathy, kindness, fairness, listening skills — and modeling the behaviors of strong leaders. Teachers can profile great leaders by bringing in guest speakers or using Renzulli Learning to highlight enrichment opportunities that present positive leaders. Teachers can also assign projects and books about excellent leaders and use real-life case studies of successful leaders. Multiple opportunities exist for teachers to use Renzulli Learning to teach leadership skills.

Platform tools

What Renzulli Learning Provides for Leadership Development

Each Renzulli Learning tool plays a specific, research-grounded role in identifying and developing leadership skills:

Renzulli Leadership Assessment: A brief student self-assessment based on Dr. Renzulli’s validated SRBCSS Leadership Characteristics Scale. Students reflect on their confidence across communication, teamwork, problem-solving, planning, and decision-making. Educators get a starting point for conversation, goal-setting, and targeted enrichment.
Leadership Roadmap (Free PDF): A downloadable, printable guide that walks educators, coaches, and administrators through how to assess, teach, and strengthen leadership skills using the Renzulli Learning platform.
Enrichment Database: Over 40,000 inquiry-based, interest-matched activities. Renzulli and Reis’s SEM research shows that this kind of authentic, choice-driven work is one of the most effective contexts for developing leadership behaviors in real instructional settings.
Project-Based Learning (PBL) Tools: SEM Type 3 investigations require students to plan, persist, collaborate, communicate, and produce authentic products — the exact behavioral context where leadership develops.
Personal Success Plan (PSP): A student-driven goal-setting and progress tracker. Setting goals, planning actions, monitoring progress, and reflecting on impact are foundational leadership behaviors — the PSP provides structured practice.
Renzulli Profiler: A 20–30 minute interest and learning style inventory. Matching students to leadership opportunities they care about is the most reliable way to build sustained engagement and confidence.
Executive Function Assessment: Leadership and executive function develop together. Pairing the Leadership Assessment with the EF Assessment gives educators a complete picture of the planning, self-regulation, and adaptive thinking skills that underlie effective leadership.
Why assess, why teach

Why Assess and Teach Student Leadership?

SRBCSS (Renzulli) Operation Houndstooth SEM research

How Renzulli Learning addresses the questions every leadership-focused educator faces:

The Question Renzulli Learning’s Answer
Why assess leadership?
How can educators develop student leaders when classroom time is already pressured?		 The first step is understanding how confident students already feel about leadership. The Renzulli Leadership Assessment — based on Dr. Renzulli’s validated SRBCSS Leadership Characteristics Scale — gives educators a concrete starting point and gives students metacognitive ownership of their growth.
Confidence gaps
Some students feel confident in leadership; others have untapped potential they don’t recognize.		 The assessment surfaces both groups. Confident students get opportunities to stretch and lead. Students who underestimate themselves get a structured way to reflect, set goals, and build confidence over time.
Why teach leadership?
Research shows leadership skills can be taught and improve with practice — but how do you do it without adding another program?		 Renzulli’s 40,000+ enrichment activities and PBL investigations build leadership skills through authentic learning — the exact mechanism documented in Reis & Renzulli’s Schoolwide Enrichment Model research.
Where does it happen?
What contexts develop leadership best?		 Clubs, athletics, group projects, PBL investigations, and regular classroom collaboration. Renzulli Learning provides the assignment infrastructure and activity library to make leadership development happen in any of these contexts.
Teacher modeling
How can teachers model leadership and make it concrete for students?		 The Leadership Roadmap gives teachers a step-by-step path for modeling empathy, fairness, and listening skills, profiling great leaders, and using Renzulli Learning to assign projects that showcase real-world leadership.
Equity & identification
How do we surface leadership talent in students who may be overlooked?		 The SRBCSS Leadership Scale is specifically designed to identify leadership potential through behavioral characteristics — not just GPA or test scores. The Renzulli Leadership Assessment gives every student a chance to reflect on and demonstrate leadership confidence, regardless of academic profile.
From the field

What Leadership Development Looks Like in Real Classrooms

“The Leadership Assessment gave me data I didn’t have before — which of my students see themselves as leaders, and which ones have potential they don’t recognize yet. From there, I could match the second group with PBL projects where they could practice leading without being put on the spot. By the end of the year, three of those students were running their own classroom initiatives.”
Middle School Teacher · Renzulli Learning Certified Educator
For elementary classrooms (K–5) Use the assessment to introduce the language of leadership early. Then build small leadership opportunities into Renzulli enrichment activities — line leader, group recorder, project organizer. Young students develop the confidence and language of leadership inside the work, not as a separate lesson.
For middle and high school (6–12) Older students benefit enormously from explicit leadership reflection. The Leadership Assessment plus the Personal Success Plan turns abstract leadership skills into a concrete personal growth practice — goal-setting, monitoring, mentoring others — that pays off in academics, athletics, college applications, and life beyond school.
Frequently asked questions

Renzulli Leadership Assessment: Common Questions

The Renzulli Leadership Assessment is a brief student self-assessment built into the Renzulli Learning platform that helps K-12 educators identify students’ leadership potential. It is grounded in Dr. Joseph Renzulli and Dr. Sally Reis’s Scales for Rating the Behavioral Characteristics of Superior Students (SRBCSS) research at the University of Connecticut — including the Leadership Characteristics Scale, validated and used in over 15 countries. Students reflect on their leadership confidence, and educators use the results to assign targeted activities and projects from the Renzulli Learning enrichment database.
Leadership in the 21st century is not just about authority — it is about influence, collaboration, and inspiring others. Complex problems require collective action and strong leadership to guide solutions. The modern workplace demands individuals who can take initiative, motivate teams, and drive innovation. Leadership skills are transferable and valuable in all aspects of life.
Some students have strong leadership confidence but lack opportunities at school or home to apply those skills. Other students have great leadership potential but lack confidence in themselves. The first step in developing student leaders is understanding how confident they already are about leadership — which is exactly what the Renzulli Leadership Assessment measures. Once students complete the assessment, they begin actively thinking about leadership, and educators get a concrete starting point for goal-setting, mentoring, and targeted enrichment.
Yes. Current research demonstrates that students can learn initial leadership skills and improve emerging skills over time. Teaching leadership gives students executive function skills, collaboration capacity, problem-solving ability, independence, and creative and critical thinking — alongside increased confidence to make a positive difference. Renzulli and Reis’s Schoolwide Enrichment Model (SEM) research shows that interest-driven, inquiry-based activities are one of the most effective contexts for leadership development.
The Renzulli Leadership Roadmap is a free downloadable PDF guide for educators, coaches, and administrators. It walks you through how to assess, teach, and strengthen leadership skills using the Renzulli Learning platform — including how to use the Leadership Assessment with students, how to interpret results, and how to assign Renzulli enrichment activities and projects that build leadership skills across grade levels K–12. Download the Roadmap PDF.
The Renzulli Leadership Assessment is grounded in over five decades of research by Dr. Joseph S. Renzulli and Dr. Sally M. Reis at the University of Connecticut’s Neag School of Education. Foundational works include the SRBCSS Leadership Characteristics Scale (Renzulli et al., 2010/2013); the psychometric validation by Renzulli, Siegle, Reis, Gavin, & Sytsma Reed (2009) in the Journal of Advanced Academics; and Renzulli’s Operation Houndstooth framework (Phi Delta Kappan, 2002; Gifted Child Quarterly, 2012), which positions leadership as essential to talent development for the 21st century. See the Research section for full citations.
The Renzulli Leadership Assessment was developed by Dr. Joseph S. Renzulli, Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor and Emeritus Director of the Renzulli Center for Creativity, Gifted Education, and Talent Development at the University of Connecticut. Dr. Renzulli is the author of the Schoolwide Enrichment Model (SEM), the Three-Ring Conception of Giftedness, and dozens of validated student assessment instruments. His collaborator Dr. Sally M. Reis is also a Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor at UConn’s Neag School of Education and a co-author of much of the foundational SRBCSS Leadership Scale research.
Renzulli Learning combines the Leadership Assessment with a database of 40,000+ inquiry-based, interest-matched enrichment activities and Project-Based Learning investigations grounded in Renzulli and Reis’s Schoolwide Enrichment Model. Students develop leadership skills through structured opportunities to communicate, collaborate, plan, problem-solve, and make decisions — both independently and in teams. The Personal Success Plan (PSP) gives students a concrete way to set leadership goals, monitor progress, and reflect on growth.
Leadership can be developed in many contexts: clubs and extracurriculars (student government, debate, robotics, service clubs); athletic opportunities (team captaincy, peer mentoring); projects and PBL investigations (planning, leading, presenting authentic work); and regular classroom activities (group work, peer teaching, classroom roles). Teachers can also lead by example — modeling empathy, fairness, and listening skills — and use Renzulli Learning to assign projects about excellent real-world leaders.
Resources

Leadership Resources from Renzulli Learning & UConn

Start with the Roadmap, then explore the platform tools and Renzulli Center research that power Renzulli Learning’s approach to leadership development.

Explore other Renzulli Learning assessments and tools:

Platform Overview Renzulli Profiler Executive Function Assessment Cebeci Test of Creativity Project-Based Learning Personal Success Plan G&T State Alignment 21st Century Skills

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