5th Grade Leadership Class Learns by Doing on Team-Building Retreat
The Fifth Grade Leadership class recently ventured off to Stony Acres, a 119-acre wildlife sanctuary and recreation area in Marshalls Creek, Pennsylvania, for a day-long team-building retreat.
On the trip, our fifth graders had to make their way through the Challenge Course, a series of activities that require collaboration and creative thinking to navigate. The course consists of obstacles to get up, over, or through and things like rope ladders and logs high up in the air that span the gap between trees and must be crossed.
Due to the course's design, overcoming the various challenges required our students to communicate with each other, consider their peers' ideas, and, above all, work together as a group. Despite taking place in new surroundings, this collaborative approach is familiar to our fifth graders, as it is very much what they experience in their Leadership class.
The 5th Grade Leadership Class
Since its creation in 2015, the 5th Grade Leadership Class has helped Rutgers Prep students grow into leaders. In the class, Lower School Student Counselor Wendy Winograd and Fifth Grade teachers Kyle Lewis and Colleen Vinchur guide the students through a hands-on process in which they take charge of their own learning and classroom discussions.
When last year's Leadership students created a contract for their behavior in the class, they thought deeply about how they interact with one another and how those interactions make them feel. They then discussed important questions like, "What should our rules be for how we treat each other?" and "How should we have a conversation?" The answers to these questions played a key role in the code of conduct that the students, themselves, created.
In fall each year, the class leads the Lower School portion of the Thanksgiving Food Drive, an all-school effort in support of the Franklin Food Bank. They discuss as a group what a community is and just how important the Franklin Food Bank is to ours. They create posters to spread the word, present to all Lower School classes about the importance of community service, and distribute bins to collect donations from each classroom.
In the spring, fifth graders learn a conflict resolution protocol that we call "The Peace Process." When there's a disagreement, how do we go about fixing things? In the Peace Process, each person takes turns discussing the problem. Meanwhile, their classmate must engage in active listening, providing responses that show they understand what's wrong. They end by asking each other what needs to happen in order to reach a resolution and move forward.
Teaching a concept requires truly internalizing it, so after learning the Peace Process, the students actually teach it to our third graders. Afterwards, they reflect on what worked well and what didn't, and, using that experience, they do a similar lesson on kindness with the second graders.
Students in fifth grade demonstrate their leadership qualities outside of the Leadership class as well, taking on several important responsibilities around school. Every morning when the Early Birds program ends, a group of fifth graders walks the younger students in the Early Childhood Education Center (ECEC) to their classrooms. They raise and lower the American flag in front of Elm Farm each day, another job they take quite seriously. They also work with Ms. Tolia, the Lower School Principal, to plan and lead our Lower School Assemblies and do a wonderful job presenting to their peers.
It goes without saying, but we think it's important to provide the Fifth Grade with these opportunities, and we truly love seeing them learn and grow into the leaders of our Lower School as the year goes on.