Character Telestrations: a simple drawing activity that got the students drawing but with limited boundaries. They would start with a blank page, then were tasked with drawing either a head, body, legs or arms of a character - anything they could come up with, so long as it was human. After 45 seconds of constant drawing, they then hand their paper to another student, as they receive one from someone else. They then had to draw one of the missing elements, head, body, legs or arms. This was continued until all the characters were finished.

The students got really excited as soon as I mentioned ‘drawing activity’, but it took them a little while to understand the instructions. I feel like the PowerPoint slide I had for this wasn't informative enough, so that's on me. We plan to bring these characters back as references for their political parties.

Policy Round Table: we brainstormed some ideas throughout the week to run the students through an activity like this, but using policies/commitments we researched from local political figures. As this was getting dull, even for us to look into, we decided to shift the process to letting the students take charge of the researching, and giving them more creative freedom. We initially wanted to go with the researched policy idea because we want to challenge these students with more boundaries to their creativity, helping to keep their ideas smaller yet better thought out.

So what we went with instead was the Policy Round Table. We started off with a walk around the school, and we told the students to look around and come up with ideas of how we could upgrade the school? What features would be cool to have (essentially, loosely thought out policies/commitments). They worked in pairs for this.

After about 15 minutes, we led them to the outdoor yarning circle, and then gave them their first challenge of the activity. Each pair had to join up with another pair, then between the four of them, decide on only three policies/upgrades to keep from all the ones they came up with before. This took them a while, but there were some quality conversations happening all over. We challenged them again by combining their groups of four with another group, making 8 students per group, and again, they had to choose only 3 policies from the ones they had before. We brought them back to the classroom for reflection.

Using the three major parties (the groups of 8) we got the students to read out their three policies, record them onto our slides, then conduct a class vote on which of the three parties, considering their policies, that they preferred. We then ran a class discussion about the challenges the students faced during the Policy Round Tables, deciding how to pick which policies, strategies they used to ensure everyone had a say in decision making, and what factors influenced their decisions.

We were really happy with our decision to swap to this Policy Round Table activity. For starters, the students got to run around outside and enjoy a nice sunny day, but they were really excited to be able to voice all their desires for upgrades to the school, no matter how outlandish they were. The moments when they had to narrow down their options and decide which worked for other people gave us some real lightbulb moments, and headscratchers. We’ll aim to run similar activities in the future, allowing the students to lead their learning, but giving them challenging boundaries that get them thinking critically about their own decisions, and the needs/wants of others.

They enjoyed the real-world aspects of this activity, especially when we got to the end and were narrowing down our policies to 9 across the whole class (3 per party) and discussing the feasibility of each. 

We’re wanting to get them thinking deeper about the achievability of these policies, and who they benefit/detriment. We brought up the needs/wants of teachers and staff when considering fancy additions to the school (one main example being the addition of a zipline across the oval, and the terrifying amount of paperwork and safety considerations for such a thing to exist). Our next session will include the students elaborating on the achievability of their previously chosen policies, possibly creating additional policies, and starting to develop surveys to be used to gather data on the needs/wants of others (will be used to inform their policy development and election campaign marketing later in the term).

We may use the preferential voting slips again, but thankfully we printed out plenty for last session, so we’ll have enough to use again for the following session if we decide to use them.

The final 9 policies were recorded in our google slides presentation for this session, and they will be filtered through the remainder of the term, possibly used as part of the mock election at the end of term.