As the senior members are transitioning into their study leave, I have had to inevitably step up and take a more prominent leadership role with my co chair. However, fully undertaking this new role presents a lot of responsibility, organisation, discipline amongst other challenges (LO2, demonstrate challenges have been undertaken, developing new skills in the process). Below is a mind map of some of the queries and questions my co chair and I had upon leading this service. Given we are student driven, it is important we sustain our presence and remain consistently engaged and aware upon our current & future tasks and projections. Personally, one of my biggest challenges has been decreasing our reliance on the senior members and to step out of the ‘shadowing’ and observing position. I also need to acquire more knowledge and understanding regarding our group’s statistics and progress regarding the solar panels (and their efficiency), and more generally, how they operate, what they are made of, and what their efficiency is. As a group, in order to consolidate our solar expertise and background knowledge, we have agreed to collaboratively create a document with different headings (to indicate different areas of knowledge) and for each individual to research upon an area they are unfamiliar with or lack knowledge in. As a result, we hope to have a compilation of many useful statistics, data and information upon our own solar production but also general knowledge upon solar energy. In turn, this should help all members (especially new ones) to familiarise themselves with our field.

One other challenge is to think ahead in the long term and plan and cater to our realistic abilities. As co chairs, it is vital for us to consider LO3- demonstrate how to initiate and plan a CAS experience. We reflected that currently, we were working on numerous different projects at once, which appeared overwhelming and confusing. Given that these tasks were dispatched amongst different members, less members were working on 1 task meaning our working style was inefficient and slower. Therefore, to ensure our group is as efficient and effective as possible, we decided to prioritise certain tasks so that we can put in more effort cohesively into each task and also ensure all members are on the same page upon what the group was working on. An example was prioritising and expanding our class giving programme to Primary & middle school, and postponing our work on curriculum integration, so that we could dedicate more time and effort on that later on after having accomplished other crucial tasks. This way, our goal setting appeared much more achievable and realistic, as well as consolidating our group’s sustainability long term.

Therefore, as the co chair of our group, it is important for me to remain on top of things and sustain my engagement and work towards this group. Whilst it has been challenging to uphold the role of a leader, I have learnt many things in the process and have consolidated my leadership skills. I look forward to being able to inspired the younger grade levels when we execute our class giving presentations in May.

#LO2 #LO3