The Whole Point

Although I have been blogging about many of the fun things that happen at Workshop, most of our time is spent doing "work."  The whole point is to teach leadership skills.  In JAM, we break down the curriculum into three parts that make up our P.I.G. paradigm.  We focus on Personal, Interpersonal, and Group leadership, spending one full day on each type.

Because I spend my time in co-op facilitating activities, I didn't take a lot of pictures.  I did sneak a few of some of their favorite activities.

In the above activity, students had to work as a group to come up with a banner and a chant for their co-op.  Each student was assigned a "role" to play throughout the process, which was representative of the types of people who make up a group.  Roles included things like moderator, cheerleader, elbow greaser, devil's advocate, conflict resolver, etc.  The banners and chants were then presented at our parent luncheon on the final day of Workshop.

In the above activity, students worked in teams in attempt to create the tallest free-standing structure only using newspaper and masking tape.

In this activity, students were given a topic and then had to describe it using only three words.  Each round, there were special rules for how they were to decide on the three words - each time, they had to use a different decision-making technique.  The pictures are the words students came up with for the topic "leadership."

After each activity, we process what happened during the activity, why we did it, and how it can apply to school or life in general.  Every year, I am amazed at the quality of conversations students can have about these topics of life and leadership. They are what keep me coming back year after year.