Tag: Session

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involver blog Resources

A short toolkit for school council co-ordinators

I created this short toolkit for the Salford School Council Co-ordinators Network.  As with everything we’re doing at involver when we create something we want to give it away for schools to use, play around with and share (that’s why we release everything under a Creative Commons licence). So have a look at this, I think there’s some really useful stuff in there, but it’s not supposed to cover everything, so if there are things you’d like us to add, just drop us an email and we’ll keep expanding it.  This is what’s in there now:

  • Ice breakers (4 school council-related games)
  • Boundaries and possibilities (2 different types of activity to explore what these might be)
  • School Councils are the end, not the beginning (presentation – hopefully it makes sense)
  • (Updated – April 2010) Planning elections
  • Key lines of communication (a worksheet for planning communication)
  • School policy on pupil participation (an essential document for any school that’s serious about pupil well-being – this is a guide to creating one)
  • School council constitution (you can’t really have pupil representation without one – although many try – some scenarios to set you on your way)
  • Tips for great meetings (guides to help you through preparing for a successful meeting, the meeting itself and ground rules to avoid pitfalls)

All three of these downloads have exactly the same stuff in:

[download id=”2″] 2.4MB
You can’t really edit it, but it will look just right with our nice fonts and things.

[download id=”93″] 1.3MB
Best if you might want to edit things and have a newer version of Word:

[download id=”92″] 2.9MB
Use this if you want to edit the file and can’t open newer Word files:

Categories
involver blog Resources

Leadership, codes of conduct and lovely honey

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LOVE + HONEY - Lemon Verbena Salt Scrub 400g - Hand-made from 100% natural ingredients - £7.50 - Contact Golden Co for Salt Scrub pre-orders

I ran a training session for the Golden Company on Saturday. They’re an amazing little social enterprise getting inner-city kids into keeping bees. I guess they’re really trying to address two problems: lack of constructive things for young people to do and the decline of the bee population in England (and World-wide). Anyway, they were great to work with and I thought I’d share the session I ran with them, with you.

They’d asked me to come in to help them create a code of conduct. We had agreed that this would entail looking at leadership as well. How we relate to other people is my favourite thing to train on, I guess because it’s the area in which I’d most like to make a difference. Ultimately what all of this is about is getting people to treat one another well. If that happens then all the other good stuff will just flow.

So for me the most important ideas to get across were:

  • Leadership is about a group, not an individual. One leads only because the others follow.
  • So, everyone in the group has to think about how they’re acting as they might become the leader at any moment,and not necessarily by choice.
  • Those who lead by example will lead better and for longer.

Part of the session was based on pictures I’d pulled from that day’s newspapers and magazines.  So reasonably at random I’d got the Pope, Hitler, the Chinese Army, Obama, Michael Jordan, Cesc Fabregas, David Cameron, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Dreda Say Mitchell, Ferris Lindsay, Craig Bellamy, Spike Lee, Muhammad Ali, Dame Mary Perkins and Nicole Richie.  There were several others too, that I can’t recall right now.

Much of our discussion though focussed on Craig Bellamy. He’s currently the Captain of Wales (at football) as well as playing up front for the Manchester City, the richest football club in the world. He’s arguably the best footballer Wales have (as Ryan Giggs has retired from international football). He’s also set up a charitable foundation in Sierra Leone with a considerable amount of his own money. He has what is often described as a ‘chequered past’ though, having hit an opposition fan, clashed with a Wales fan, allegedly attacked a team mate with a golf club and had several run ins with the police.  How does he fit as a leader, which of these things are relevant? My opinion is that they all are.

If you use this session, I’d love to hear which people you have the most interesting discussions around and what code of conduct you come up with in the end.

Use the ‘More’ button to Download (‘Save’) or Print the session out.

Leadership & Code of Conduct Training Session

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Resources

A whole bloomin’ class council scheme of work!

This is brilliant: our first resource shared by a teacher and it’s an absolute corker! Chloe Doherty gave us this scheme of work she wrote for her year team last year.  She wanted to get class councils off the ground as she recognised without them the school and year councils didn’t really mean much.

This resource has a series of lesson/session plans and a bundle of resources to go with them. Any resources not included in the download below (such as the Boundaries Cards) can be downloaded from involver.org.uk.

As this is a resource written by a teacher and used in her school, I’ve left it just as she gave it to me, other than putting it all in to one document and adding a contents page.

Print or download (’save’) this resource using the ‘More’ button.

Tutorial Activities Class Council SoW

Chloe wrote this last year when she was Head of Drama at Kingsmead School and a Year 8 form tutor. She’s now Head of Drama at Southgate School.  She’s also my fiancée, so all my banging on about student voice and class councils obviously wore her down as she wrote and ran this without any help from me. She sent it to us through the ‘Upload‘ page and it was honestly the first time I’d seen it! I could get all gooey about how she constantly amazes me, but I’ll spare you that.

Kingsmead