Recently two of our
Fellowship alumnae and our Executive Director from the Greater New Orleans
region visited Ireland, touring schools and meeting with members of the N.
Ireland DOE to learn about their system and the avenues for teacher-leadership.
The trip was a reciprocal visit after several Irish and British teacher-leaders
visited New Orleans last year as part of an exchange program facilitated by the
British Counsel.
Last week, Alumna Meghan Mekita
wrote some of her key observations about adult leadership in the schools she
visited. Today, she follows up with this post on student leadership.
by Meghan Mekita, Leading Educators Fellow in New Orleans, Cohort 2012
While the high schools we visited taught us about adult
leadership, the primary schools taught us about student leadership. At Victoria
College in Belfast, students have taken over many of the jobs that adults do in
our schools. Older children apply to be mentors to pre-schoolers and
kindergartners. During lunch, the mentors cut food for the younger children and
teach them how to sit and use their utensils properly. At recess, the older
children organize games and teach younger children how to play nice.
What really made our hearts melt, though, was the idea of
the ‘friendship stop’. Somewhere on the blacktop there was a stop sign that
designated the location where any student could stand if they needed help
finding a playmate. The older mentors would swing by, scoop them up, deliver
them to a kind group of their peers, and set everyone up with a new game or
activity.
Student leadership didn’t stop on the playground. Students
as young as 5 were on the student council, working on environmental initiatives
and fundraising for causes that they had chosen as a class. Almost every
student was on a committee, allowing them to build public speaking and
leadership skills from a very young age. In the older grades, these roles were
expanded. A group of seniors in the attached high school applied and were
selected to become prefects. As prefects, they handled duties, such as
correcting uniform infractions, which teachers are normally tasked with. Our
visit to Victoria College made us question our current expectations for student
leadership, and start to think creatively about ways to build student
leadership programs at our schools.
Shira, Julie and I felt lucky to have had this experience. We
have developed relationships with several staff members at the schools we
visited, and we hope that the foundation has been laid for us to continue
asking questions about how their schools began the programs that we saw as
well-oiled machines.
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