Facilitate and Summarize a Guided Leadership Circle
Individual facilitation and summary reflections of a small group on a weekly leadership reflection twice during the course.
In every class students will lead a group of their peers (4 to 5 students) in examining, discussing and reflecting on the weekly applied leadership topics. Student will also practice listening in order to summarize the collective thoughts and expressions of the group.
The main objective of this model is to increase collaboration among students and allow them to organize and express learning through reflections. It provides students a better understanding of various perspectives that each group member can bring to a team experience.
The leadership circles will be modelled after the talking circle, a traditional way for Native American people to solve problems and share information. It is a very effective way to remove barriers and to allow people to express themselves with complete freedom. It also allows for a more equitable space for all learners to express and share ideas and thoughts.
Students will form small circles and the role of the facilitator is to guide the discussion in a clockwise direction around the circle until every student has had the chance to report, relate, reason and reconstruct the topic. The facilitator will open the discussion and ensure that only one person in the circle at a time is speaking. Members of the circle may take their turn or pass to the next member until they are ready to engage in the discussion.
On completion of the discussion, the facilitator must summarize the discussion in order to report back to the main group the strongest themes emerging from the discussion. Note that the participants may decide that some information is not to be shared with the larger group (personal experiences or examples). The summaries should be posted in the discussion space in the D2L site by the person who summarized. Please make note of the facilitator on the summary and the attendance on your summary.
NOTE: ALL students will have pre read the assigned chapter and started to think about the main questions that will be posed during the discussion.
4Rs Model
The 4Rs Model for Reflective Thinking is a modification of Bloom’s Taxonomy model that suggests that while students can report on what they learned from an experience; they should also be able to reconstruct and relate to what they learned from the experience for a future event. The 4Rs model argues that the level of reflective thinking can follow a hierarchy from Reporting to Relating to Reasoning to Reconstructing. The following table shows how different prompts from the facilitator can help students along these stages.
Level Stage Sample Prompts
1 Reporting What’s the best way to reflect on my experience or knowledge of this topic? Can I capture the moment in images or words?
2 Relating Have I experienced something like this before? What were the similarities and differences with past experiences?
3 Reasoning What were the significant factors in my experience? How does it fit within the framework of the course?
4 Reconstructing What would I do differently if faced with the same situation? Can I come up with new ideas for future situations?
Text, ALD, “Context Setting”, (p 1 – 28)
Article, Thiessen, S. (2012). Leadership Development for First Nations Governance in British Columbia. In T. Rippon and G. Kemp (Eds.), Governance and Security as a Unitary Concept (pp. 199-230). Victoria, BC: Agio Publishing House
Questions for guided discussion
1.What is your story? (Take from the my life path exercise you completed as homework)
2.Can you identify your own personal 5 top values – what are they and why? How do you practice them each day?
3.Do you think authenticity is important to leaders? Why? How can we be authentic? What do authentic people do/act?
4.What model for leadership competencies best explains the scope and interconnectedness between the competencies to you? Why?
Book Name: if needed
Bolea, A., and Atwater, L. (2016). Applied leadership development: nine elements of leadership mastery. Routledge, New York, NY