2015 Term 1 GRIP Gold Newsletter

GRIP

Term 1 2015

GOLD MEMBER NEwsletter

Setting Student Leaders Up for an Effective Year Page 4

Helping Student Leaders to Create a Vision

Page 6

inside this issue of the newsletter Latest from our Social Media Page 2

Highlights from the Inaugural Conferences in New Zealand Page 3

2015 GRIP National Leadership Camp Page 8

follow us on instagram @gripleadership Below are some of the pictures that our travelling team posted every few hours on Instagram during recent conferences and school seminars.

Highlights From The Inaugural New Zealand Conferences

The end of 2014 saw the commencement of GRIP Leadership in New Zealand. The GRIP Student Leadership Conference was held for students in Auckland, Christchurch, Dunedin and Wellington. Over 1000 students from 100 schools attended and the feedback from students and teachers was sensational. Plans are now underway to hold the conference annually, including separate conferences for secondary students and offering the conference in additional towns and cities.

Our team members from Australia had a wonderful time working with enthusiastic students and teachers, and enjoying the unique landscape while driving between cities.

Comments from teachers who attended the conferences included: “The content and activities were so relevant that all students were 100 percent engaged.”

Allison Hammett, Hunua School “My students loved the sessions and are looking forward to putting this practical information to use over the next year.”

Adam Williams, Adventure School “A fabulous way to kick start a new student leadership team.”

Pauline Maclean, St Teresa’s School “An awesome day - the students learned heaps!”

Frances Carmody, St Joseph’s Upper Hutt To watch a video with highlights of the New Zealand conferences visit www.gripleadership.co.nz or visit the GRIP Leadership Youtube channel.

Setting Student Leaders Up for an Effective Year

E

veryone appreciates that preparation for a new school year is important. Students prepare with an annual trip to the stationery shop and uniform supplier and teachers prepare with classroom allocations and lessons plans. The first day of school usually involves plenty of discussion about the year ahead and how to get off to a good start.

This leads to a valuable question; do you help set up your student leaders in the same way that you approach your classroom teaching?

Each and every school should decide on the role that they wish their student leaders to play. Consequently, it may not be suitable to place the same importance on the commencement of the student leadership group as on the classroom academic focus. With this in mind, it is worthwhile considering how well the student leaders at your school are ‘set up’ at the start of the year. Do you find yourself waiting until half way through term one before you gather them together to get things going? Do you sometimes hold off on passing over particular responsibilities to the student leaders straight away because the task is urgent and you decide it is easier to do it yourself? Are your student leaders a little ‘in the dark’ about what their year will look like?

The questions above are fairly common situations that teachers face at the start of every year. To help you set up your student leaders for an effective year we have assembled four suggestions on the next page. They are all fairly simple and require minimal time to implement on your part.

Take some time to come up with a clear and specific goal for your student leaders

1. Provide a Clear Goal Many new student leaders are unsure of their role. Do they need to organise events? Do they need to fundraise? Do they need to come up with their own ideas? These are all common questions. Take some time to come up with a clear and specific goal for your student leaders, then make this into a large poster or banner and place this in the area where they will meet. You probably don’t have enough time to formulate a detailed strategic plan for the team, but a clear and visible goal will certainly suffice.

2. Establish a Weekly Meeting Time This is fairly self explanatory. Without this it will be hard for your student leaders to gain any momentum. The meetings may feel a bit disorganised to start with, but having them is an important habit. Use the meetings to discuss and clarify ways to achieve the main goal of the team (provided above). You may decide later to reduce the frequency of the meetings which is fine; it is always easier to reduce the frequency rather than increase it beyond the norm.

3. Appoint a Mentor Teacher to Each Leader If your role is to work with the student leadership team as a whole, in addition to classroom teaching, then it is understandable that sometimes the leadership team is left to the side while you focus on other priorities. To help minimise the effect of this, consider an arrangement where each student leader has one other member of school staff who is their mentor teacher. The role of the mentor is not to supervise or direct the student, or make any decisions about the student leadership team as a whole. The role of the mentor teacher is to have a couple of conversations

each term with their mentee student leader, to encourage them and provide ideas and general assistance. A structure such as this is less demanding on the single teacher in charge and sets up a structure for student leaders to be supported from multiple angles.

4. Schedule Meetings for the Student Leaders to Report If possible, schedule two meetings each term for the student leaders to report their activities to the Principal.

Perhaps two different leaders will have this meeting on behalf of the team on each occasion. The meeting itself is an excellent learning experience for developing leaders, however the real value in this system is the accountability it provides. Knowing that a simple report needs to be given every 5 weeks will encourage student leaders to be intentional and proactive. Some reports will have nothing to do with events or large projects and may instead focus on pastoral observations and relational efforts of the student leaders.

Implementing these four suggestions goes part way to protecting your student leaders from being impacted by the busy times that you will have as a teacher, especially early in the year. If your student leaders are set-up well from the beginning, they are far more likely to be an effective part of your school all year.

Helping Student Leaders to Create a

Vision

G

reat leaders are great storytellers. They have a capacity to draw people into a narrative that is compelling, exciting and significant. People who are experiencing (reading/watching/listening to) a story often identify with a key character, and are drawn into the journey. A teacher working with student leaders has a wonderful opportunity to tell compelling stories, in order to fill the students with vision, and term one is the best time to do it.

With any great story, there are some key elements or characteristics that are required. The same is true for creating and sharing vision with your student leaders. In this short article, we are going to look at four of the key aspects or techniques involved in telling a great story, and have a look at some reasons why you should consider including these when developing your 2015 student leadership team vision. These aspects are: Journey, Characters, Significance, and Show (don’t tell). Let’s dive into it!

Journey

Show, don’t tell Characters

Significance 1. Journey The first key aspect of telling a great story is to take the reader on an engaging journey, or in other words, make sure you tell a story that is worth listening to! A task list is not compelling. A story, a narrative (on the other hand) is. Every good ‘journey’ story has a starting point, a destination, and several key steps along the way. As you help student leaders to create a vision, ask them the following three questions: Question 1: Where are we today?

(An honest assessment of the current situation.)

Question 2: Where do we want to end up?

(What does the destination look like?)

Question 3: What steps will we need to take to arrive at our destination?

(This will allow you and your leaders to go through a creative and systematic process of mapping out the journey.)

2. Characters Stories always happen to (and as a result of) the key characters involved. Who is in your team? Talk to them about their strengths and characteristics. Perhaps talk about the types of people who would be great student leaders – the types of heroes in this story, and then invite team members to become those characters.

Characters in a story also engage and relate with others, just as your student leaders will engage and relate with other students, and so it is important to paint a picture of those on whose behalf the students are leading.

anything that is meaningful within your student leadership team can be celebrated, and this can have a profound effect on the ‘story’ that your leaders are part of. They will build vision and set goals based on this story, so recognising and celebrating people and their effort always goes a long way towards fostering an environment of value and positivity.

4. Show, Don’t Tell This is a key aspect of telling a great story, and one that several Hollywood movies seem to have forgotten recently. It is easy to get stuck into all the detail of the coming months and their work, but if you can show students what is possible, then the vision casting will be far more effective. YouTube is a great asset in this regard, as many schools have made videos about their programs and successes in the area of student leadership. By showing your student leaders what is possible, rather than inundating them with tasks and duties, they will be able to maintain a stronger, more consistent motivation when the challenges of life outside the leadership team come along.

By focusing on these four areas of journey, characters, significance, and show (don’t tell), you will give your student leaders a strong foundation upon which to build a vision for the year that will not only keep them focused and motivated, but hopefully will translate to a significant contribution to the wider school community.

3. Significance Tell them why - tie in key projects and milestones on the journey to the overarching reason for doing this. This is a great opportunity to tie back in to the journey from earlier. The ‘why’ that motivates action is important for people of all ages, and especially so for those who are school age. Along with providing compelling reasons behind the tasks and actions of a student leader, you can help student leaders create a vision by modelling recognition and celebration. Accomplishments, hard work, success, birthdays…

This topic is based on one of the five key principles that will be the focus of this year’s GRIP Leading and Teaching conferences. These conferences are held at locations around Australia and New Zealand, and for all information (including registration), visit the link below: http://www.gripleadership.com.au/leadingandteaching

GRIP Leading & Teaching A Conference for Educators

GRIP national leadership camp SYDNEY

By popular request, we are launching the GRIP National Leadership Camp, to make it possible for more students to experience a longer GRIP Leadership event. Our team is passionate about making leadership training practical, interactive and relational. We know that spending four days with student leaders will give us a wonderful opportunity to help shape those who will be contributing to their schools and to society for many years to come.

Our theme for the 2015 GRIP National Leadership Camp is LEADERS OF CHANGE! Be challenged and equipped by the dynamic presentations from the GRIP Leadership team. Learn from the experience and ideas of students from a variety of schools. Build a great relationship with the GRIP Leadership team members. Develop a personal plan for being a leader who is committed to positive change. Develop a network of other likeminded leaders from around Australia. Register today!

7-10 July 2015 Tops Conference Centre

Visit www.gripleadership.com.au and follow the links to register online.