The Hidden Benefits of Cocurricular Challenges
Tuesday 19 November 2024
St Leonard’s College offers diverse cocurricular activities that foster creativity, teamwork, and problem-solving, equipping students from Year 5 with valuable collaborative skills.
St Leonard’s College has a deep commitment to offering the broadest possible range of experiences to its students, who can take part in cocurricular activities across many fields, including sport, outdoor education, performing arts, debating and academic challenges.
All of these activities are intrinsically beneficial in their ability to extend a child’s learning and expand their thinking.
Some of our cocurricular activities are, on the surface, purely intellectual challenges. It is easy to look at competitions like Future Problem Solving or Ethics Olympiad and only see an exercise involving the chance to develop stronger problem-solving skills or a greater ability to discuss thorny moral issues, but there is another significant benefit which is easy to miss.
While these competitions, and others like them, require both deep knowledge of specialised content (for example, the ethical dimensions of autonomous vehicles came up this year) and a high degree of creativity, they are not won by these skills alone.
The most extraordinary aspect of these programs is that they demand a very high degree of collaboration. Future Problem Solving and Ethics Olympiad both require the participants to work creatively as a team in order to succeed. It’s not enough to have the best ideas and to express them as an individual; students have to agree on which ideas are the most suitable response to the prompt, and they have to be capable of dividing the work between themselves. This is far from easy at any age, but our students do a fantastic job of it, starting as early as Year 5.
It is a privilege to work with highly talented and experienced teachers including Hayley Kuperholz and Meg Scott, supported by the Director of Pedagogy, Charles Neave, to foster creativity, teamwork and collaboration in our students. I am looking forward to completing this year’s competitions and preparing for the next round of collaborative challenges in 2025.
By Sam Haines, Head of High Potential Learning, Prep to Year 6