The 6th grade Shelby Rising City Student Council members attended the Region 1 Principals’ Youth Leadership Conference at Doane University in Crete on Tuesday, October 22, 2019. The following members, along with a number of students from other school districts, attended the conference: Eli Fjell, Loralie Logan, Nevaeh Martinez, Braxton Siffring, Danica Watts, Kreyton Zimmerman, Logan Lindsley, and Kendall Nickolite.
The Region 1 Principals partnered with Team Concepts to provide our students with a fun-filled day of activities that focused on leadership, creative thinking, problem-solving, and much more. Through our participation in these activities, we hope to help continue implementing and building a positive culture within our school district.
The focus of the conference for the day was: How do I capture the potential of every single person in the room? To answer this question, student leaders learned about the Four Pillars of Kindness and worked together through a variety of team activities.
The Four Pillars of Kindness are:
- Leaders always include. When people feel excluded, they feel rejected. You can’t have anxiety about expect to perform at the top - you won’t reach your full potential. When we (leaders) include others, we help them capture more of their potential.
- Leaders always encourage. Leaders always encourage the people around them to keep going. “Keep going. You can do it.” You might fail a lot, but if you continue to encourage each other and build each other up, you will succeed.
- Leaders always celebrate. Kindness celebrates. Any time you celebrate, you can make anything fun for any person.
- Leaders always trust. In order to lead people, you have to trust them. We have to trust people in order to build a team with success.
Students participated in activities where they quickly learned that each of the Four Pillars is important to a team’s success. Each member of the group was included and knew the important role he/she played. Group members continuously encouraged one another through completing each of the difficult tasks. This encouragement was really seen in a few of the groups as they made special cheers to encourage members that were a little scared to try some of the things they were being asked to do. When a member of the group was successful, everyone celebrated, which made the entire experience much more fun for all participants. Every challenge these student leaders worked on together required a lot of trust in one another. Some students were a little more daring than others, but at the end of it all, trust in each person on the team led to the success of each of the groups.
At the end of the day, it was important to bring our teams back together for one last activity. Student leaders were asked to tell at least one person why they value them as a member of their team. This closing activity was rather enlightening. Students shared with one another that they valued their great ideas, their enthusiasm, that they made sure everyone had a chance to participate in every activity, their ability to always lend a helping hand, and for just making it an enjoyable experience by including them.