IRI Round-Table Discussion: Student Leadership and Followers

Competition Off-Season Events
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This year’s IRI Round-table discussion will be Saturday morning, following Opening Ceremonies! We encourage all interested mentors and students to attend! Feel free to come and go throughout the discussion (we know robot-matches are priority!)

Renee Becker and I will facilitate this discussion with the following prompts in mind. We are posting this ahead of time so that people can start thinking about what they will contribute as well as what questions they have to make this discussion valuable for all. For those of you unable to attend this IRI discussion, please feel free to respond with your questions and insights here. We’ll gather some of the responses from CD to supplement the discussion.

Our inspiration for this topic comes partly from Al’s CD post on the thread, “The Stereotyping of Successful Teams.”

One of the great things about FRC is that each team is organized uniquely. This organization spans from completely student managed (down to handling the budget) to complete mentor designed robots where students help with assembly. All of these organization styles are good as long as they inspire the students on the teams.

Teams need to be well-balanced, and leaders need followers. FRC teams particularly need highly motivated student followers. This round table discussion is going to focus on the following questions:

How can we inspire better student leadership?

  • What does “student leadership” mean to you?
  • What kind of student leadership does your team have?
  • What problems do you have with student leadership?
  • Can the type of student leadership a team implements switch from year to year? (Student Captains, Student Boards/Committees, Student-Mentor partnerships, Others?)

How do we inspire motivated student followers?

  • FRC is sometimes a place for students who have nowhere else to go; how do we make these students feel comfortable?

  • FRC sometimes is used as a “resume builder” for students; how do we inspire these students to step-up, commit, and contribute more than they may have planned?

  • How do mentors work with unmotivated students?

  • How can student leaders better inspire unmotivated students?

  • What place do student followers have on a FRC team?

  • How do we transition students from followers to leaders at the proper times? Sometimes this happens naturally, but other times no clear leader surfaces. All teams tend to go through phases where they graduate a high percentage of students and bring in many rookies the next year.

  • How do students help this transition?

  • How do mentors help this transition?

  • How does a team structure its transition periods so that student leaders are given support?

  • How does a team help transition a student from a leadership role when the time is right?

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Very excited to see this. This is my team’s first year going and this sounds like a really cool thing- getting to participate in a discussion with some of the best of the best sounds awesome.

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I just have a general question here: Where in the venue will this discussion be held?

I will most likely attend, at least in part. I will also highly encourage our team’s current president to participate as well.

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Will this be happening during matches?

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Yes, it will be during matches, Saturday morning following Opening Ceremonies. If there is a match that you want to see, you are welcome to leave the discussion quietly and go watch, and then come back after! Feel free to come in a little bit late too, if your match is the first or second of the day. This is common practice at discussions like that.

In the past, we’ve held NEMO (Non Engineering Mentor Meetings), but Renee and I like to include students in these discussions, because often students have an interesting fresh perspective, so this year it’s a basic Round Table Discussion format with a set topic.

If you have other Non-Engineering Mentor questions, please feel free to check out http://www.firstnemo.org/.

The IRI crew usually has a classroom right outside the gym for us to use for our discussion. If it is too crowded, then we’ll split up if needed, but usually we have a turnout of about 25-30 people.

There has been some interest expressed to me through PMs to record our conversation in some way. I’m going to look into that, but at the least we’ll try to take detailed notes and post them after.

Thanks for your interest! The IRI Crowd always has great insight at discussions like this.