High Wire

Highwire - A leadership experience by Katene, Aisea and Shoneve ,Daytona, Sharn and Thomas For the last five weeks, the student leadership team have been going to High Wire in Red Hill. The aim of High Wire is to help us become better leaders. Each week we have been given a focus word. During the first week we focused on respect. The activity was rock climbing. We played a game practising the skills we needed to climb the wall. Following that we climbed the wall as a team. We had to respect the skills of each person in order to get to the top. It was a challenge, but Thomas managed to make it to the top. I guess we all have a lot to learn. The second week the focus word was selflessness. A good leader is selfless and puts the team before themselves. We made pizza - it was really tasty. We had to bring our pizzas back to class and share it with someone we trusted. Some of us shared with our friends, some shared with our teachers and some with our parents. It was hard to share such a delicious treat. The third week the focus word was encouragement. To practise leadership while problem solving we had to try to get across a confidence course as a team, facing the challenges of the course. We chose Thomas to be blindfolded to complete the course. We all communicated with him and told him what to do. We had to work out the best way to guide him through the course and encourage him to complete it. It was hard to lead him over the skinny piece of wood, but we went slowly and he made it in the end. The fourth week the focus word was trust. On this day we got to bike and absail. It was painful…(for some of us). We had to trust each other to get down the cliff. The mountain bike track was hard work and we had to ride over different terrain and through trees. They trusted us to do this independently. The main challenge on this day was to stay together and build trusting relationships. Trust is easy to lose and hard to gain back. The fifth week the focus word was pride. We took part in an archery challenge where the goal was to get a bullseye. We had to show pride in what we had achieved. It was hard to have pride because we were scared of having too much pride and didn’t want to look like show offs. Thomas was the best at archery - and he was the quietest about it. Taking part of highwire has taught us to make better choices while putting our minds and bodies to good use. We didn’t realise that being leaders meant making tough choices and sacrificing for the team. Now that we have a better understanding, maybe we can leave our mark on the school and be remembered as leaders with great Mana.