West Leadership Weekly Round Up: October 1st - 5th

Another busy week here at WLA as we matched our students with their mentors and groups and lined up our Mentor Leader interviews and applications!

Students sharing presentations about each other after mentor matching!

Monday and Tuesday were spent doing our speed matching activity where students are given the opportunity to interview everyone in the class and then decide their top 3 selections for a mentor / mentee. This is one of my favorite activities in the YESS curriculum as it offers students a chance to get to know their classmates further and really make their own decisions on who they would like to support throughout the year. Last Friday I had students complete this speed matching questionnaire in advance in order to accelerate the process and have them spend more time in their interviews. The interviews went rather smoothly with high school students encouraging middle schoolers to ask questions and participate. In addition to facilitating the process, I also got a chance to play DJ (something I could apparently work on according to the students). 

Wednesday and Thursday students were matched with their mentors and mentees. We also set up our seating charts. Several students who were not here on Monday or Tuesday were also matched and the vast majority of students got their top choice so they seemed pretty pleased with the selections. Now that students are matched, the real work begins as I expect students to be supporting both their mentees and mentors as well as their table mates throughout the year. We will be doing ongoing mentor training as well now that the matches have been confirmed. After we got this set up, I had students complete a Google presentation with each student creating their own slide for their group. On Friday students presented their slides to the class and we discussed how they can continue to support each other this school year. One of the requests for the slide was to have a picture of yourself. Many students were a bit apprehensive of this so I allowed them to include baby pictures instead, which of course many of them agreed to. We finished the week by doing our Fishbowl questions and working on our t-shirt designs. We will be finishing these designs this week as well as starting our Healthy Relationships unit. Stay tuned! -Ben