Practicing Leadership
This activity aims to build better understanding of vocabulary terms using a role-playing activity.
Discuss
Now that you have more information about leadership skills, how can you use them? These skills are important for expressing your needs, handling challenges, and setting goals. These are skills you can practice in many places like home, school, in your community, and when you work. Using these skills can help you get supports you need to achieve your goals. Let’s practice what this could look like!
Interactive Opportunity
Use role playing to practice leadership skills, collaboration, and decision-making.
- Situation: Assign or allow students to choose a project where leadership skills are needed. This can be a real or imaginary project or one from the Leadership Scenario Cards.
- Roles and Responsibilities: Assign or allow students to choose who is the Team Leader and who are the Team Members. One person is identified as the Team Leader and the remaining group members are Team Members. In smaller groups or if needing to demonstrate how to role play, the instructor may also join as a Team Leader or Team Member.
- Plan the Project: Have students work together for about 10 -15 minutes to discuss the project. They should be able to identify a goal and next steps to share out afterwards.
- The Team Leader facilitates or leads the meeting. They clearly communicate the goal of the project. During the discussion, they support Team Members to share ideas. When wrapping up the discussion, they help the team decide on next steps and assign tasks.
- The Team Members share their ideas and make suggestions. They work through how tasks and responsibilities can be divided fairly and work to reach an agreement on a goal for the project and next steps.
Review
Have students share what they decided to do with their project. Try using these prompting questions to continue or start conversation.
- What project did they choose?
- What did they discuss on how to plan for the project and what next steps they should take?
- How did they choose to divide the responsibilities?
- How did they handle any disagreements?
- What is something the Team Leader did to support collaboration and decision-making with the group?
- What did the Team Members do to collaborate and work together? Were any Team Members leaders in their own way? If so, how?
Resource