Welcome to 7th Grade Leadership!!!
The Seventh Grade Leadership class is comprised of students who work extremely hard to not only learn about how leadership affects our community and the world around us, but they aspire to become leaders themselves one day.This year our Leadership group truly became leaders within our school and our community by researching local leaders, developing questions for interviews, and then aggressively pursuing their chosen leader to attend our "5th Annual Inside the Leaders Studio."
This program enjoys the spirit of interviewing and researching which was inspired by and thus models Bravo television's critically acclaimed "Inside the Actors Studio" with host James Lipton. Our guests this year included:
Police Chief Rodney Monroe
Matt Harris- 107.9 the Link
Fannie Flono- Charlotte Observer Editorial
Maureen O'Boyle-WBT-TV
Dr. Peter Gorman- CMS Superintendent
Bud Berro- Director of Piedmont Region for the Governor
Colleen Odegaard-WCNC-TV Anchor
Martha Whitecotton-Administrator for Levine Children's Hospital
Molly Barker-Founder of Girls on the Run International
James Ferguson-Civil Rights Attorney/Activist
Erica Bryant-Anchor for WSOC-TV
Tommy Tomlinson-Columnist for the Charlotte Observer
Ace & TJ- Kiss 95.1
Jordan Gross- Panthers
Quite an illustrious group indeed! All research and questions were conducted by our wonderful students, as well as letters of invitation and thank you notes. This program helps to expose our students to more "relevant" and "real - life" leadership by focusing on our community as well as the issues within. By conducting their own research and developing their own interview questions, it also assists in enhancing the students' critical thinking ability. At the end of this experience, the Leadership students created a Powerpoint presentation which they shared with the entire Jay M. Robinson staff, which is also a link to the left of this page - Inside the Leaders Studio Presentation.
Also this year, the Leadership students will be working with the National Junior Honor Society (NJHS) in order to help raise enough money to build a school in Ghana. They will sell Pig T-Shirts to other students in the school for money, with the idea that giving an African family a pig will be able to send their child to school for an entire year. The students will also sign up for shifts in the morning to do various things, like "shout-outs" on the announcements and selling gum and candy passes. We will also be doing a soccer tournament fundraiser for each grade level that will help us even more in trying to reach our goal. This is sure to be a wonderful experience for everyone involved.
Taking their extraordinary talents even further, the Leadership students are also participating in a Student Mentor program in preparation for the Reading End-of-Grade testing. Each student will be trained to become the "teacher." Each student will receive materials to read, questions to answer, AND THEN they will be able to develop their own questions based on Marzano's question stems (often utilized in brain based education). We will then discussed the passages, our possible answers, and how to help their fellow students understand how to "deconstruct" the passages and questions. It will truly be a fascinating operation to behold and we are so proud of all involved!!
For the 2009/2010 school year, we hope to develop and utilize our skills with the same programs as above, and hopefully a few other challenging items if time permits!
Leadership Facilitator - Debra E. Miller
and Allie Parker
