Every morning, we have first circle with our crazy groups, as I described in my post on Monday. We do a uniform check, have announcements, express our joys, ripples, and appreciations, and generally get some positive energy going. After first circle, we start all of our day's activities. This is where it gets crazy. Sometimes the corps members break into groups, sometimes we are all together, sometimes we are doing team builders and sometimes we are just sitting and taking notes. And believe me, I've taken a lot of notes this week.
On Tuesday, we started off with the Executive Director address. We discussed several topics: the difference between complicated and complex, how losing and learning are connected, and why the team model is so critical to how City Year functions. We also contemplated how we each wanted to make a difference this year. In response to that question, I wrote down a couple things. The first was that I want to change lives, whether it's the life of one person or the life of many, it doesn't matter. I just want to make an impact. I also want to encourage young girls to explore the STEM subjects. I don't know how exactly I will complete that goal, but I know that often times, girls are discouraged from doing those subjects due to societal cues. I hope to make girls realize that they can be whatever they want, and there are a lot of options as far as careers go. They don't have to be limited to the english-related subjects.
The next part of the day was my favorite thing we've done so far, an activity called Leadership Compass. The leadership compass is a power tool about diversity and individual work styles, and the goal of the activity is to gain insight on your own styles and strengths. Everyone falls into a category - north, south, east, or west - and each of those categories describes a leadership style.
North is action. A person who is a North jumps right into projects, is assertive, active, and decisive, likes to be in control. They also enjoy challenges, always persevere, and work at a quick pace. However, there are some downsides to being a North. They can overlook strategic planning, easily get defensive, and have black and white views. A common North viewpoint is "if you want something done right, do it yourself."
South is empathy. Souths understand people, always integrates the input of others, and are supportive of colleagues and peers. They also trust others and for Souths, interaction is primary. The downsides to the South style is that they can lose focus on goals, have trouble saying no, and overcompromise to avoid conflict.
East is vision. They see the big picture, are the creative thinking, idea-oriented people. They also like to experiment and explore and appreciate a lot of information. Easts can lose focus easily, however, and can also have a lack of dependability and attention to detail. Sometime they put too much emphasis on vision rather than action.
West is analysis. Understanding what information is needed, being practical and dependable, and providing planning and resources are all characteristics of Wests. They also look at the critical information, following the procedures and guidelines. That being said, Wests can be stubborn and indecisive, and can often get bogged down with information instead of actually moving forward with a plan.
From this activity, I learned I am a North. I fit many of the characteristics, both the good and the bad. But the goal isn't to be just one direction on the compass. The goal is to learn how to be in the middle, how to take all four directions and combine them into one fluid flow of leadership styles. That is what we are working toward this year, because everyone can always improve on their other directions.
Also on Tuesday, we learned about some parts of City Year culture. There is actually a lot to digest, from the meanings of all the symbols, to power tools, to PITWs, to founding stories, to all the different chants and hand motions and traditions. Everything has a meaning and purpose, and it has all been proven to work. The team leaders and impact people have been breaking up parts of the culture and teaching us a little bit every day. Most of it probably seems a little weird to the outside world, like the "silent applause" or the crazy chants we do, but I am starting to see more and more of what it all actually means.
The rest of Tuesday was broken up into a few more sessions. Inspirational standards covered punctuality, professionalism, and uniform policies. Social Media, as you would expect, covered some of the social media policies. MarComm101, which I think stands for something communication but I am not entirely sure, covered what exactly City Year is trying to do. We also talked more about professionalism and business etiquette. Tuesday was a long day, and not everything was exciting, but it was all stuff we needed to cover.
I'm going to skip Wednesday and cover that in another post.
On Thursday, we did very similar things to Tuesday. We covered AmeriCorps Member Standards and Policies, which was basically all the things we needed to know about our actual term. Each school team has 6-10 members, we have to get CPR certified, there's an Employee Assistance Program if we need it, that sort of stuff. Most of it was covered before, but this was the AmeriCorps official session so they had to cover it again. We also talked about a whole lot of prohibited activities, some obvious (no stealing or having weapons at school) and some were not so obvious (non-displacement and non-duplication). (Side note: this has been a very short version of the actual sessions, these took most of the day).
Also on Thursday, we covered one of the founding ideas of City Year. It's called "Whole School, Whole Child." During our year of service, we will be giving general supports to the whole school, as well as individualized interventions to specific children. In this session, we learned a bit about the different dropout indicators, as well as what we will do to address them. The indicators are as follows: Poor Attendance, Disruptive Behavior, and Course Failure (in math or english). In order to address these problems, we will be creating focus groups of approximately five students, which we will then work with to create individualized plans. We didn't go into a ton of detail, but I am sure that there will be more about it in the weeks to come.
Some of the "whole school" things we will be doing are report card conferencing, family engagement activities, appreciation and recognition days, college and career fairs, and we can even coach a team or start after-school clubs. It is crucial to get the community involved and invested in the education of our students because they need that support system to help them succeed.
Moving quickly into Friday now... today we focused a lot on inclusivity, diversity, and disability. These are all important topics to me personally, and I think they should be to everyone. We did more discussion than notes today, but I did take away a few important things. Diversity is the mix of different people and inclusivity is the involvement of all those people. Our team will not be able to function without all the different perspectives and viewpoints and what have you. We are a group of all directions on the compass, we come from different backgrounds, we are different races and abilities and religions and genders and sexual orientation and are of different socioeconomic status but we are all here for the same reason, and that reason is to serve. We all have different strengths and weaknesses, and today we also learned some tools to manage them. We must suspend judgement, develop connections, we must realize what we can and can't control, and we must always assume the best. If we want to truly make a difference in the lives of our kids, we must be our best at all times. Today was important, it covered a lot of things that needed to be said and will continue to be reinforced.
It has been a long week, as you can see by the length of this post, and I didn't even include the cultural and community activities we did. I'll write that tomorrow, and if you're still even reading this, I apologize for where it may have been sloppy or not worded well. Quite frankly, I'm exhausted; not the bad kind but the satisfied kind, the kind where you know you're doing something great.
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