The winter athletic season was a success in many ways this year. While many of our students chose to compete in our popular varsity and JV basketball and wrestling programs after school, another enthusiastic group chose to participate in a brand new activity which focused on building leadership skills.

Leadership 101, led by Athletic Director Nicole Cervantes and Director of College Counseling Marti Kwon, was designed to guide students through professional development exercises aimed at helping them better understand that everyone has capacity to be a leader in their own way.

The group met every day after school to work on a combination of research, discussion, observation, and reflection combined with skill-building exercises, games, and field work. “During the initial days of the activity, the group focused on learning about each other’s unique views and opinions surrounding leaders and leadership. Later, the students did a deep dive into more famous and recognizable leaders from around the world to assess and find commonalities of character and value systems. Eventually, the group went out of the classroom to do field work where they recruited volunteers from the school community to interview and observe,” explained Dr. Cervantes.

Leadership 101 culminated with a student-led presentation to faculty, administration, and students about everything they learned.  At the end of the course, the students said that they had a positive experience and hoped the School would offer Leadership 101 again next year. Several students also commented that they learned a lot about themselves and gained important life skills through the discussions and activities.

Here is what some of the participants had to say about Leadership 101:

“Being a good leader is really important because you can help and motivate people and help everyone achieve the best version of them. I really enjoyed all the fun activities like charades, the obstacle course, the drawing activity and the vision board. The vision board really helped me to know more about myself and my goals. The obstacle course helped me to develop my leadership skills such as communication, listening, collaboration, and strategic thinking. Making presentations also helped me improve my public speaking and organizational skills.” — Maria R. ’24

“In Leadership 101, we learned how to take initiative, organize, and communicate effectively with a group of people in order to accomplish a task. I enjoyed doing team-building exercises and working with other students to achieve a common goal. In the beginning, it was difficult to coordinate activities with the whole class. However, we learned to work better with each other as the course progressed. Good leadership skills are important because they enable me to communicate with others more effectively.” — Vincent I. ’24

“Being a good leader is important. The ability to communicate effectively and work with others to bring out the best in both them and myself will ultimately help everyone be more productive. My favorite activity was the one in which students acted out popular leaders so that their teammates could guess who the figure was. In doing this activity, students were working on improving both verbal and nonverbal communication skills. I found the final presentation the most difficult, given that we were presenting to the administration and teachers. We gained a lot of practice presenting information to various groups of people. This practice helped me become more comfortable speaking in front of a large audience.” — Edward I. ’23

Congratulations to all of the participants in this winter’s innaugural session of  Leadership 101. Keep developing your leadership skills and we’ll see you next year!