Year 8 Leadership Week 2024

This is the big question that our Year 8’s were asked to consider during Leadership Week 2024.

We started the week meeting all together in the Grange Theatre. The session started with the hilarious Weetbix challenge. Eight students had to race each other to eat two dry weetbix . If the winner did it in under 45 seconds they would win $50! Sadly no one could do that but the winner did get a chocolate bar.

Then Jessica Swan, former MGS Head Girl spoke to us. Jessica had been working as a Television Journalist since leaving MGS and graduating from Broadcasting School. Currently she is training to become a teacher.

Jessica encouraged us to pick good people to sit at our table. “Good friends make good leaders!” We all need different types of leaders sitting around our table of influence: A Coach (someone who guides you), A Cheerleader (someone that encourages you), An Iron Sharpener (someone that challenges you) and A North Star (someone that inspires you).

Each class then had three sessions in the Kahika Centre working with Mrs Malcom where we explored the qualities of leadership in more depth. We worked in groups to plan a new civilisation called Xtopia. We had to agree on the values that were important to our place and select any leaders from anytime in history who could sit at the table of influence and achieve the aims and values of our society. We had to work together and come up with a unique way to present our project to the class. The winning group for each class won a pizza lunch.

This activity was really challenging and created a lot of discussion and required us to negotiate with each other and think carefully about which leadership qualities we needed to have to achieve the goals we had set.