This year Wakatipu High School (WHS) has a cohort of 67 Year 12 and 13 students who have been giving up their time once a week to either plan or deliver one hour fortnightly sessions with year 9 students as peer mentors in the Stars programme. Last Friday the peer mentors came together on a teachers’ only day for an upskill workshop, followed by a cooked BBQ from programme sponsors Rothbury and their guest speakers Kyle and Lauren.
Our super star peer mentors were introduced to the theory of Adventure Based Learning (ABL) which involves cooperative games, trust exercises and problem-solving activities. Instead of being told the answers, students are presented with a situation, activity, or problem to make sense of and overcome. The aim is to enable peer mentors to facilitate these activities in their fortnightly sessions as an engaging and fun means of learning and understanding that’s relevant to the learning intention.
Cheryl-Kay Phillips, Stars Coordinator, said: “We then explored debriefing techniques and activities to facilitate meaningful conversations. This was an opportunity for the peer mentors to reflect on how their participation in the programme is going and what they can do to make it more rewarding heading into Term 2.
“Lastly, special thanks to Kyle and Lauren from Rothbury who cooked up our delicious BBQ and shared with the group their connection between Graeme Dingle Foundation and therefore Stars at WHS. We love it when our sponsors are eager to make a physical connection to the programmes they support, and even better when they make connections with the students they are impacting along the way.”
Graeme Dingle Foundation programmes are made possible thanks to the charitable support from the community. Thanks to Central Lakes Trust, Wakatipu High School Foundation, Skyline and Kathmandu for their support of Stars at WHS.