Burn Bright Leadership Workshop

Ice skating… spiders… Smurfette… egg, chicken, dinosaur, Superhero… Ping-pong poke!

These are not ordinarily words that we would expect to be connected, but for Year 5, these words represent the stories, key messages, and inspiration they received during last week’s Burn Bright Leadership Workshop.

As the Year 6 Leaders of 2023, Year 5 spent last Tuesday engaged in challenges, activities and lectures designed to upskill and support them to view their leadership opportunity through the lens of being a positive influence on others and understanding that a leader is first and foremost a role model.

The workshop was split into three sessions: Starting Our leadership Journey, Expanding Our Leadership Abilities and Putting Leadership into Action. The girls have reflected on the key messages within each of these and listed their thoughts below.

Group challenges: the games taught us about teamwork and all the skills involved in working together. It made the workshop engaging and interactive, helping us to learn about the key ideas in a fun way – Claudia Rennie-Meyenn.
Being a positive role model: the younger years are always looking up to you as a leader . Being a positive role model is about setting a good example for them. We want to create a safe and happy school, a place all girls will want to come. By cheering others on and encouraging them, it helps others to build courage. We heard a great example of this in one of the facilitator’s stories where she was cheered on by her sister to catch and free a spider from her house – Ella Chong.
Putting others first: one motto we learnt was “Think WE not ME!”. This will be something I remember as I work with others, compromising and collaborating for the benefit of the group. One of the workshop facilitators shared an example of this from when she was at school and went ice skating. Her friend who was great at ice-skating spent all her time helping others and picking them up when they fell down. Although she could have skated the whole time, the friend focussed on helping others – Sarah Reif.
Communication and listening to others: the games and challenges helped us to bond as a cohort and taught us that communication is key to the success of groupwork! Things can go really well or horribly wrong depending on how you communicate! Listening is a huge part of this! When you listen, you’re able to get feedback, take on board the ideas and perspectives of others and both ideas and individuals can evolve – Asha Meagher.
Participating in the whisper game which including Smurfette, Buzz Lightyear and Minecraft, taught us that we need to be careful with how we listen and communicate. People listen and repeat what they hear with their perspective and interpretation added and we see this with rumours. While we can’t control what people do with what they hear, we can make sure we only say positive and constructive things – Chelsea Fallshaw.
Decision making and courage: making decisions in leadership involves taking a chance, being brave, collaboration, compromise, considering strategies. The Ping-pong poke challenge also helped us to remember that we need to have focus on our goals when decision making – Isla Roberts.
Taking initiative: I learnt initiative in leadership is different to using initiative in the classroom, it is about looking around and seeing where there is need and helping – Sara Malavich.
Building trust and taking responsibility: building trust takes time, between both the leaders and those you’re leading. Responsibility is about stepping up and being a person others can rely on and also about taking ownership of the role you play even when things go wrong – Bonnie Turnbull.
Appreciating difference: using the analogy of Superheros, we talked about everyone’s differences as their unique superpowers. We each have our own strengths – Anja Baker.
Goal setting and vision: this was helpful to get us thinking about what we want to achieve next year and how we could create positive change in the Primary school – Daisy Sewell.
Resilience: Leadership is not always going to go the way we plan! We will need to be able to bounce back in the face of challenge and learn from our mistakes – Chloe Cosman.
Developing school spirit: going into the workshop it thought this only applied to Sports Carnivals, but now I know this is much more and all about the enthusiasm, supporting others and citizenship you show all year round – Clemmie Reuss.

Year 5, you showed such enthusiasm and commitment to leadership during the workshop. We look forward to all you will do next year as Year 6 leaders and know the Primary School is in very supportive hands.

Rebecca Woodcock
Acting Head of Student Wellbeing