West Leadership Weekly Round Up: September 4th - 8th

Hello!

We had another excellent week at West Leadership Academy! Our week was shortened due to the Labor Day holiday on Monday but we were still able to accomplish a lot in our time together.

With the holiday on Monday and Tuesday being an early release day, our YESS students started the week with peer planning and tutoring. We worked together to identify courses where tutoring and homework help would be beneficial and then got to work in small groups. Many students shared a need for support in Math and English and so we decided to dedicate time each week to tutoring in those areas. From there we spent our Wednesday class creating shared agreements with one another that helped us establish a set of classroom community rules and expectations for one another. Our students did a good job sharing what their needs were in order to be successful and how they can support one another to accomplish their goals this year.

With our classroom agreements in place, students were introduced to the social-emotional skills curriculum on Thursday and Friday. We began by speaking about some relevant vocabulary such as social and emotional learning, meta-cognition, social awareness, and self-efficacy. Students had some excellent questions and shared their excitement with the prospect of learning more in our upcoming lessons.

Our week was wrapped up by a visit from the YESS Institute's College Navigator, Emily Webster. During Emily's visit, students got an opportunity to ask questions and speak about the college and post-secondary process. Our seniors also got to meet with Emily individually and discuss their specific goals and aspirations. Emily will be regularly working with our WLA students to help guide them through the complicated college and post-secondary environment and we are certainly looking forward to having her as a resource this year.

Next week looks to be another fun one as we will be working through our unit on community and getting a better understanding of how peer mentoring can be so impactful. We are looking forward to it!