The Leader in Me

Talking about leadership is such an empowering topic.  Every person has leadership qualities in them.  It's just knowing how to use your strengths to be one.  Kieran Block challenged us this month in his video, Inclusive Leadership,  to try different leadership roles in group settings.

We started out using Poll Everywhere to see what students thought leadership was.  They also had a chance to share who they thought of when they thought of the word leader.  The answers were varied, but I wasn't surprised to see our class mentor to pop up.  Check out the video.

I decided to use a program that inspired many in Canada back in 2004 to spark some debate in my classes.  The Greatest Canadian was a show that showcased some amazing leaders in our country.  After their stories were told, Canadian had a chance to vote on who they felt was the Greatest Canadian of all time.  I allowed my students to do some research about the top ten finalists from the show.  From their research, they had to decide who they felt was the most influential Canadian of all time.

Once they had their person, we got into small groups.  They had 5 minutes in each group to share their reasons and debate.  At the end of the five minutes, students wrote down on a sticky note what student in their group emerged as the best leader.  We repeated this two more times with the students in different groupings.  At the end of the class, all students had a sticky note with three names on it.  They had to choose one name of someone who stood out as the best leader of the three.  After I collected the sticky notes, we had a discussion about what characteristics stood out to make their classmates good leaders.  It was neat what a variety of leadership skills were valued.  From that, we talked about leadership styles and how some styles work better for others.

With by secret ballots stowed away for next class, I tallied up the votes to see who the leaders in my classes were.  Some were not surprises, but I had a few that were.  I chose the top four from the votes for each class and each leader had to lead a team into preparing for playing the Heads Up game.  I created a game pack on the app with the names of the 10 Greatest canadians.  The "leader" student had to get his group to give him or her the clues.  How effective they were as a team when they got the iPad would be determined on how well the team prepared together.  They all had a lot of fun and learned how to best work as teams.