Helping other reach new heights

On June 12, 2009 the second session of HSSP took place. The structure of the meeting consisted of: icebreakers, a major activity, and a discussion of leadership characteristics.

After the students finished filling out administrative forms, the group took the students outside to play "Big Wind Blows" in Killian Court. In the game one person would stand in the middle and the rest of the students would form a circle around that person. The student in the middle of the circle would then announce their name and then say something about themselves. Then, people who have that same thing in common would then move to the middle of the circle and find a new position in the circle. The cycle would then repeat with a new person in the middle of the circle.

In addition to getting to know each other, that session also helped students reflect and start planning out what they hoped to learn this summer. Students were given 15 minutes to write a letter to themselves stating what skill they wanted to develop, things that they wanted to learn, their plans for high school, and where they wanted to be by the end of the program.

After the letter, we split the students into groups five groups. Each group had a discussion on what leadership was, why leadership was important, and what they could do to be more affective leaders in their communities. While the discussion was informative, I thought that the students really learned the most about leadership when the groups competed against each other in a tower building contest. In the contest each group had 15 minutes to use 25 sheets of paper to build a tower. While it was impressive to see the students apply the leadership skills that they had just talked about into the tower building project (communicating clearly, setting out a plan, and utilizing everyone’s talents), I was touched when one girl said "I'm no structural engineer, but I will make sure to fold as many papers into triangles as I can." While simple, these words were powerful because it showed that being a good leader doesn't necessarily mean being extremely talented, rather it means using the gifts that you have to help the people around you.

LTI Summer Session

On June 29, 2009 members of the LTI family made preparations for HSSP (a condensed version of the spring curriculum for middle school students for the summer). As usual, the meeting consisted of icebreakers, a major activity, and a discussion in the end on how to be a good leader.

The overall focus for this meeting was to highlight the qualities of a good mentor. In our icebreaker, the group split into teams of two. Each team then made an outline a one of their team-members body on the chalkboard. Then everyone drew physical feature to symbolize qualities for a good leader. So for example, one group drew a big head to represent open-mindedness in a good leader.

In addition to showing what skills a good mentor should have, the mentors were put to the test in "extreme mentor." In this activity, each mentor pretended to give a lesson while the rest of the LTI staff pretended to be disruptive students. While this was an extreme case scenario, I felt that this was a very informative. This activity showed each mentor how important it was to get everyone involved, what resources they had available to them, and how important it was to never give up.

After Extreme mentor, we had a discussion to further illustrate how important being a good mentor was. I felt that the discussion was very useful in that it showed how the skill that we highlighted in the icebreaker and the lessons that we learned in extreme mentor were all necessary to becoming not only good leaders, but mentors that can really make a difference.