Programs Overview | Flynn Elementary | Leadership Project | Gloria R. Davis Middle School

Leadership Workshops | Leadership Service Project
    
Each week students participate in a 1 ½ hour workshop focused on a specific quality of leadership. Workshops emphasize interactive learning in which students share their perspectives and apply leadership concepts in group activities. Active participation is critical to each student's leadership development. Workshops begin with an icebreaker/check-in activity to bring the group together and introduce the topic. The next forty minutes of the workshop are dedicated to exploring the topic through exercises and group discussion. Students then work for thirty minutes planning the service project as a team, with an emphasis on tasks and issues related to the workshop's leadership topic. At the end of each workshop, students discuss lessons and difficulties that arose during the activities and close with an opportunity to offer anonymous words of thanks and encouragement to their team members.
Weekly Workshops
Week 1 - Introduction: Leadership and Goal Setting: Setting and understanding goals is often the first step towards success in any endeavor. This workshop begins with an introduction to the project and each other. Students offer their perspective on what leadership means and together develop a working definition. Discuss how to be community leaders by helping others, taking initiative, and serving as role models. Introduce goal setting strategies and develop team and individual goals for the project.

Week 2 - Effective Communication and Feedback: Understanding different styles of communication and providing constructive, respectful feedback are important to strong leadership and effective projects. Students explore the topics of communication and feedback and discuss individual and team strengths and weaknesses. Introduce roles and division of labor when undertaking large projects. Discuss how leadership skills can help when you are not the leader.

Week 3 - Adapting to Change: Developing the flexibility to meet and leverage changing circumstances is a valuable tool to overcome any challenge. Explore strategies for managing change and how students can incorporate these strategies in their lives and the service project. Discuss life after high school.

Week 4 - Financial Management: Managing money and getting the most out of your resources. Discuss topics such as financial planning, spending, saving, and investing. Activities demonstrate different strategies and their potential for success or failure. Students plan a budget for the service project.

Week 5 - Ethics: Integrity, responsibility, and empathy can be valuable tools when making decisions. Through a game that mimics inequitable endowments of resources, students compete to complete a task.. Discuss the results, disproportionate advantages and disadvantages, cooperation, and selfishness. Discuss analogies in students' lives, in a local context, and in the context of the group's service project.

Week 6 - Marketing Your Skills: Identifying and communicating past achievements and current goals can help create new opportunities. Students learn how to effectively represent their accomplishments in a resume and how to communicate their abilities in an interview. Students receive a resume template and begin developing a resume, incorporating the leadership project