Student Leadership Development
In CJC, student leadership development permeates across all students at various tiers – Home Tutorial Groups (Class Management Committee), Co-Curricular Activities and within the House System and at the highest level, in the Student Council. Training and mentorship are provided to help all students to grow as Thinkers with a Mission, Leaders with a Heart. These platforms include Class Management Committee (CMC) Training Sessions, the annual Leadership Training Camp as well as the Leaders’ Dialogue. The 4M Leadership for SOAR framework undergirds the various leadership training approaches.
To establish a coherent approach for effective student leadership development, a central framework is utilized to reinforce the key SLD messages within the college. This guides the planning and delivery of SLD activities that are aligned with and coherent to the overall approach.
The 4 aspects of the 4M Leadership for SOAR framework is as such:
Figure 1: 4M Leadership for SOAR Framework
The framework seeks to design purposeful experiences to empower our student leaders to serve and lead others better (Leadership Rule No. 1: It is not about you) and gain greater self-awareness in the process (Leadership Rule No. 2: It is only about you), well beyond their 2-year journey in the college.
Mastery of Self (Strengths & Skills): Great leaders model the way and lead by example – the first challenge all effective leaders face is to lead from within. Undergirded by the 5 Practices of the Student Leadership Challenge 1, student leaders will deepen their understanding of self which helps to identify and nurture effective leadership behaviors. Together with this, progressive training on how to better understand and harness their talents will be conducted during StrengthsFinder2 training sessions. The intention is simple – a leader should strive to master his/her own talents before inspiring others to do the same.
Moments of Leadership (Opportunities): Chances to show and grow leadership potential abound, but it is what student leaders make of these opportunities that makes them special moments for themselves, their teams and the college. In the journey ahead, student leaders are encouraged to be mindful of the moments that will challenge them as leaders and the decisions they make will define them as who they are and what they stand for. For it is in these precise moments where student leaders will grow both individually and collectively as a community.
Mind-set (Attitude): A student leader’s journey begins by adopting the right mind-set – leadership is everyone’s business 3 in which regardless of status, everyone can serve and make a difference. Additionally, a growth mind-set 4 is fundamental in providing the motivation for student leaders to continue learning and improving so as to serve and enact positive change in our community.
Mentoring (Relationships): At the heart of servant leadership lies the care for people and relationships. The first law of leadership5 states that “If you don’t believe in the messenger, you won’t believe the message”, where role modeling is key. Student leaders must be able and willing to invest in quality relationships - to build their teams and enable others to build them up as well. We embrace this through our school’s motto of “In Veritate, Et Caritate” - In Truth and In Love, where too much love without truth will make one soft, but too much truth without love becomes too harsh. Hence, with our strong culture of care, we embody both truth and love in our mentoring relationships to affirm one another, while also adopting a growth mindset to continually improve and grow to become better persons. The strong caring culture of our college will always be our legacy, one that we are always proud of. The quality of relationships can never be taken for granted and as leaders, we will safeguard this and improve our identity as “One Flame One Family”.
1 The 5 Practices are Model the Way (MTW), Inspire a Shared Vision (ISV), Challenge the Process (CTP), Enable Others to Act (EOA) and Encourage the Heart (ETH) (Kouzes and Posner, 1987).
2 Adopted from StrengthsFinder, (Clifton and Buckingham, 2001).
3 Adopted from Student Leadership Challenge, (Kouzes and Posner, 1987).
4 Adopted from Mindset, (Dweck, 2016)
5 Adopted from Student Leadership Challenge, (Kouzes and Posner, 1987).
Tiered Approach in Student Leadership Development
With a diverse set of student profiles, the tiered design of the approach caters to the implementation of various SLD activities for different groups: specific segments of the student population or entire cohort of students.
This differentiated approach ensures all students receive a baseline level of development while targeted training will stretch positional student leaders with role-specific skills.
Figure 2: Tiered Approach in Student Leadership Development
The intentional development of leadership competencies and dispositions across different platforms (Student Council, House, CCA and Class) is represented in the timeline below:
Figure 3: Student Leadership Development Timeline
The different platforms seek to maximize available SLD opportunities in developing students in various capacities, as well as improve the quality and coherence of the various SLD programmes under different stakeholders.
Students will be exposed to various opportunities during their CJ journey as they develop their leadership competencies and dispositions in authentic settings, leveraging on their talents, based on their level of development to stretch their potential.
With the 70-20-10 Model for Learning and Development6 as a reference, the SLD Team is cognizant of the role and effectiveness of different experiences in developing student leaders, where milestone events (LTC & LD) constitute 10% as formal training in courses, mentoring relationships (20%) through specific job assignments (70%). The intentional connections across the different experiences will be vital in achieving the intended outcomes of SLD.
Our SLD approach is aligned to the guiding principle of inclusivity and the 4M Leadership for SOAR framework, where intentional development of our student leaders will be carried out to achieve the desired student outcome – Building a Generation in Truth and Love: Developing every CJCian to be a Thinker with a Mission, Leader with a Heart.
6 Adopted from Lombardo, Michael M; Eichinger, Robert W (1996)
Figure 4: 70-20-10 Model for Learning and Development
Milestone Events
CMC Training Sessions
The CMC Training Sessions provide opportunities for the CMC leaders to discover their leadership style and learn the importance of having a shared vision in their leadership journey. The sessions are structured into core and elective modules where the CMC leaders are trained in leadership and role-specific skills. Through these sessions, we believe that our student leaders have gained more confidence to serve their peers and community with a greater sense of purpose and mission.
JC1 Leadership Training Camp (LTC)
The LTC seeks to inspire the incoming batch of student leaders to:
- Connect with Self: To inculcate a reflective habit to be deliberate in growing as a leader.
- Connect with and Serve Others: To understand that forging positive relationships is the heart of servant leadership.
- Connect with Purpose: To discover what drives their leadership.
The camp is guided by teacher, seniors and/or alumni facilitators in an experiential learning approach where participants engage in team-based challenges before processing the experience through a series of reflections. More importantly, the LTC helps to develop stronger networking and communication skills amongst the student leaders and fosters a greater college spirit amongst their peers and the rest of the college community, both past and present – for a brighter future.
JC1 Leaders Dialogue
The LD provides the JC1 student leaders with a platform to gather feedback from the student community to better serve them. The student leaders, coming from their various leadership experiences, are empowered to co-create solutions to challenges on the ground, while being aligned to the College’s key directions i.e. strengthening the 4 ‘C’s - (i) College Identity, (ii) College Vibrancy, (iii) Culture of Care and (iv) College Infrastructure and Facilities. This platform also helps to inculcate a sense of community amongst the student leaders as they collaborate together on their work plans for the upcoming year. With such intentionality, the student leaders are able to synergise together for maximum impact on the entire College community.