We Are Leaders

Are these people leaders?  Justify your answer.

This was an interesting task.  Because the students were not familiar with all of the people in the collage, it lead to some interesting discussions about what makes a leader.  We watched a short video clip that explained Ryan Hreljac’s story.     

Once they had a chance to discuss why they thought some of these people were leaders, while other might not be leaders, in their eyes, they were asked to share what they thought was most important about a leader.  I was blown away by the sophistication of their ideas around leadership.

We watched Jesse’s video and as always the students were excited to see what he was doing and hear about our next challenge:  To think of three ways we could be better leaders.


We are Leaders

We started our second lesson with some self-reflection on when we are leaders.   This was a bit challenging for some, as they might not see themselves as leaders, so I gave them some prompts:

·      When are you a leader at school?

·      When are you a leader on teams or in groups?

·      When are you a leader at home?

·      When are you a leader with your friends?

·      When are you a leader in sports/activities?

Our next step was to watch a video about William Kamkwamba, a 14 year old boy from Malawi who built windmills to help his family to irrigate their crops and bring electricity to their home.  They were inspired by his story and this helped them to list some great examples of leadership qualities that made William a leader in his community.  

Next they worked in groups of 5 to come up with as many different leadership qualities and characteristics as they could.  We did a whip around, where you could only share ideas that had not been said before.  Again, I was very impressed with the ideas each group came up with and that gave them a good base of ideas to choose from in order to accomplish the task that Jesse gave us.

March is a short month for us – we have a two-week Spring Break coming up at the end of this week, so this blog post is a bit early.  I think we were able to accomplish a lot with our theme this month. 

We are a K-6 and so our class is one of the leadership classes responsible for leading whole school activities such as Jump Rope for Heart and Terry Fox Run.  Our students are office monitors, peer helpers, lunch monitors, big buddies, and recycling leaders.  Leadership is a huge focus for our class all year long, so this was a great opportunity for us to take a look at what we do and think about how we can be better leaders!

 (I do have a couple more ideas to help students to develop their leadership skills by the end of the year, so I will share those on Google+ when we finish them.)