Teacher Stories #2: Turning Chaos into Leadership — Supporting an ESTP Student

By: Mikaela Ostrander

Every student brings a unique energy and way of seeing the world — and sometimes, that energy can feel overwhelming in a busy school environment. As educators, our challenge is to understand what’s behind the behavior and use that insight to guide each student toward success.

Today, I want to share a story about one of those students — an ESTP — whose journey from chaos to leadership taught me the power of personality-informed intervention, clear language, and consistent support.

When I First Met Her: The Campus Ruler

She’s the classic ESTP but with a long traumatic past— energetic, bold, and always on the move. Together with her close friend, an ISTJ, they roamed the school, breaking rules and testing limits.

What made this partnership interesting is that while she was the rule-breaker and the leader, her ISTJ friend was actually the natural rule-follower, affiliative, and someone who provided her with connection and loyalty.

Understanding the ESTP: Leadership Without Choice

ESTPs often don’t realize they have options beyond what’s immediately in front of them. They’re deeply influenced by their environment — noises, lights, or people can easily trigger reactions.

They crave attention, need to feel loyal connections, and have a pragmatic, hands-on style. But without clear boundaries or alternatives, their natural leadership can look like defiance.

The Turning Point: Supporting the ISTJ First

My first step was to work with the ISTJ friend — helping him to check in to class and stay on task. Once he was back in class, I was able to get the ESTP attention attempt to re-direc ther tunnel vision—

This shift opened the door to working directly with her.

Using Clear Language and Structured Choices

We were able to snap her out of her tunnel vision by offering her appropriate choices on ways she can earn time with her friend. Anytime a behavior happened, the team had her “protocol/language” script on hand, to support her through the experience shew as giving and guide her to learning how to give a better experience. 

A huge part of an ESTP is that they want to be the leader of the “WOLF PACK.” There are four types that REALLY require a solid group of friends, or “wolf pack.” Those types are the ESTP, INFJ, ISTJ, ENFP. 

But, for an ESTP, they more specifically take on a natural leadership role. So, with this knowledge, a lot of her social emotional lessons were designed around that — teaching her how to become a strong, positive leader; and how that can increase her connection, influence and respect as someone other children want to follow and be loyal to.

SEL Lessons Rooted in Strengths

Some other social-emotional learning we focused on was:

• Learning safe and positive choice-making and why it’s important as a leader

• Working through boredom without breaking rules

• Gaining and losing privileges as well as connections and loyalty based on choices

• Defining what a “good leader” truly looks like

We made sure to appreciate her efforts privately and always valued her thoughts — which helped her feel seen and respected.

The Outcome: Real Change and Growth

Since then, she has stayed in class consistently. When behavior issues come up, she willingly leaves the environment she is becoming unsafe in, and talks through the situation calmly with a safe adult. The team continues to use the script and have knowledge of the personality types to support those social emotional lessons and strategies has been an absolute game changer.

We use a RED, YELLOW, GREEN behavior tracker to monitor some students’ daily conduct. When I first started working with this ESTP student, she was on a partial-day schedule and had numerous RED marks throughout her day. Fast forward to the 2024-2025 school year, and she consistently recorded between 80-100% GREEN days each month—most months falling in the 95-100% range. Her turnaround has been truly remarkable.

She can still exhibit bullying behaviors and needs ongoing guidance to channel her leadership skills positively. But that’s a lifelong journey for her. If all educators and caregivers understood this and approached her with that awareness, she could be supported in ways that lead to far better outcomes than her own upbringing.

The hope is that she learns to choose her “wolf pack” wisely—surrounding herself with positive influences—and leads them in a way that reflects her strengths and growth.

I can’t wait to see what next year brings for her. 

What This Story Shows Us

• Personality-informed approaches unlock powerful behavior change

• Supporting close peers can shift dynamics effectively

• Clear, consistent language builds self-regulation

• SEL rooted in strengths creates lasting growth

• Discipline is about connection and repair, not just punishment

FOR THE TEACHER TRAINING on the 16 personalities; OR JUST MORE TRAINING IN GENERAL ON THE 16 PERSONALITIES AND HOW TO IMPLEMENT IN THE CLASSROOM - HEAD TO WWW.MINDCHILD.NET