Teaching leadership skills to elementary school students revealed more than Faith imagined.
What makes a great leader?
That’s the question Faith and her 14 classmates hoped to answer as they delivered Lead for the Lord!, a day-long leadership conference for Grade 7 and 8 student leaders from local Christian schools.
For inspiration, the Business Leadership class attended a TEDx conference at the University of Waterloo. Those bite-sized, practical talks offered a flavour of how to create and facilitate Lead for the Lord!
Back at LCH, students brainstormed what leadership qualities to cover and how to engage young students with those topics. “Just lecturing to them won’t work,” says Faith, a Grade 11 student. “We made every presentation as interactive, fun and entertaining as possible, while still teaching them about leadership.”
Teaching leadership through challenges
One group played a game where visiting students were blindfolded and had to navigate obstacles based on the verbal commands they heard. Another LCH team acted out scenarios and asked the audience to describe the leadership style demonstrated in each situation.
“A big hit was the egg drop,” she says, where students partnered with others (not from their own school) and collaborated on building and launching a device that protects an egg from cracking. “That got them talking about who won the competition and how they could have done better.”
Learning to lead with others
Faith’s group invited a recent LCH grad to speak. “She shared about her experience as a student leader at high school,” she says, “and what she gained from working alongside her peers.”
Working together became a theme as Faith and her classmates planned the logistics and content for the whole event—from recruiting student leaders to arranging buses, from facilitating sessions to serving food.
“We were split into groups, often with people we don’t normally work with or know really well,” she adds.
“Learning to work and interact with others put my leadership skills to the test. I had to figure out how to lead in a godly way…which then flowed into how I could model that to the kids.”
Organizing the event also taught Faith about her own leadership. “I’m quite independent and like to do my own thing at times,” she says. “This project was big and had to be done as a group. I’ve learned—and I’m still learning—how to do more things with people instead of alone.”
“Hosting Grade 7 and 8 children from Christian elementary schools was a big deal for us. We wanted to represent LCH well to the kids—and show them how we lead as Christian high school students.”
