I wrote these tutor/form time activities a while ago for a school I was working with in Coventry, not sure why I haven’t posted them until now. Often elections are just sprung upon a school without any preparation. No one thinks to explain to the whole school why they should choose to stand, or how they should choose who to vote for. What this ends up with is the same people (and the same kind of people) getting elected every year.
Each one of these short sessions leads people towards an understanding of why they should stand to be a representative, or what they should consider when they are voting.
Download the whole lot here [download id=”229″] or read more …
There are 5 sessions plus the election itself. They are all participative sessions, but the resources should enable any teacher to feel confident facilitating the sessions.:
A) What is democracy?
There’s more to democracy than just voting, it’s an ongoing process. It’s not about others making decision for you, it’s about you being involved in the decision.
[download id=”230″]
B) What is a School Council?
The kinds of things the School Council might deal with.
[download id=”231″]
C) How does the School Council communicate with the whole school?
Explain the structures of the decision-making and the School Council in our school. Explain about recall. Explain structure of form/tutor groups to Year/House council to School Council. and frequency of meetings.
[download id=”232″]
D) What is a representative?
What qualities are needed by a representative?
[download id=”233″]
E) How do our elections work?
The processes for nominating, standing and voting are explained. Explain terminology of closed ballot, etc. Explain that the whole year/house will be electing year/house reps to School Council from the reps who are elected as form/tutor reps.
[download id=”234″]
The eventual voting process is ‘blind’, by which I mean people vote for a manifesto, rather than voting for a person. The school this was written for originally choose to run their election in this way to avoid it being a popularity contest and instead base it on policies and ideas.
[download id=”235″] (PDF) or [download id=”236″] (Word)
Practicalities
You can run any of the sessions on their own, but I think they probably work best as a series.
They’re each 15 minutes long, but could usefully stretch if you had the time.
It says they are for ‘vertical’ tutor groups of about 20, but they should work just as well with larger groups and groups based on age.
Files
You can download all 5 activities (including instructions and all resources) here: [download id=”229″]
Or you can download them individually if you want:
- [download id=”230″]
- [download id=”231″]
- [download id=”232″]
- [download id=”233″]
- [download id=”234″]
- [download id=”235″] (PDF) or [download id=”236″] (Word)
Each download is a zip file containing:
- Instructions (in Word and PDF format)
- An (animated) PowerPoint slideshow illustrating the key points
- PDFs Posters of the essential bits of the slideshow for those who don’t have a projector/IWB
- Any worksheets (in Word and PDF format)
If you can’t download zip files and need the files separately send me an email and I’ll get them over to you: asher@involver.org.uk