6 Tips for Student-Led Assemblies

Are you considering Student-Led Assemblies? Are you ready to give a leadership role and a voice to you students? It’s easier than you think! I’ve been diving into this uncharted territory for the last five years to bring you the best of the best! I have struggled and tweaked things several times. However, today, I am bringing you 6 Tips for Student-Led Assemblies!

#1 Prepare in advance

If you are planning on facilitating student-led assemblies next year. It is best to start preparing now. Once you have a good grasp on what you want to accomplish with your assemblies, it’s easier to make a plan and carry it out. I like to house everything in my planner for my notes and then have an assemblies binder full of student speaking parts and reminders.

#2 Create a Schedule & Agenda

Start with talking to your admin or assemblies team and decide on how many assemblies you would like to do within the year and what theme or content you want to cover. Once you have that figured out, you can start picking assembly dates and assigning content to each one. It’s really nice to have the dates be consistent for the school year… this helps everyone remember! For example, have them all be on the first Monday of the month or the last Friday of the month.

#3 Recruit Student leaders

Decide how you want to recruit the student leaders. Some of you may already do a Character Council or leadership team, which would work great. However, there may be tons of students wanting to be a student leader so you may choose to do an application process. This may sound like a lot of work, but it’s really not that bad and it gives you an idea of how many students are actually interested. 

Then you can decide if you want to rotate students each month, quarter or semester. I have found that it works best, for my building, to keep the same students year round. I also have a lot of student guest speakers and helpers. In each of our buildings we have a Character Council that works with the counselor. Combining my Character Council and Leadership Group helps to fit the needs of my building and assemblies.

So, my Character Council group is the one that organizes and leads our assemblies, however, every student that applied and tried out gets a part in the assemblies. Some may be flag holders or read the announcements, while others may be in charge of welcoming a guest or making posters. The fun thing about this is you can make it fit to your building and needs!

Just make sure your not singling out any certain student or group and allowing other students to get involved somehow too!

#4 Get Students on the Path to lead

Ask them what they want to do for assemblies. My students love doing pretend news broadcasts and having a bloopers real at the end… anything to be extra silly! The student audience also really likes to see skits and games. When my students come into my office for the first time to prepare for an assembly, I show them how to use graphic organizers to brainstorm as a team. This is a process that will take a little bit to get used to.

At first there’s a lot to facilitate, then after a few weeks they can take over. But ideally, you want them collaborating and coming up with a solution that works for everyone. Then, they can start working out the details to their assembly lesson. Always remind them, the goal is to teach the audience.

FREEBIE ALERT – Here’s one of the graphic organizers in the Student-Led Assemblies Course Workbook.

Ohh… did I say COURSE? You heard me right! I am in the process of bringing you a full course that will take you from start to finish facilitating your student leaders! Sign up at the bottom of this email to get more info and be the first to find out it’s launch date!

Freebie Graphic Organizer

#5 Facilitate Communication

There’s no doubt this will be a struggle at first. Students need you to help facilitate problem solving communication. Once they know the procedures and how to use the graphic organizers, it will get easier for them and they can start doing it all on their own. 

Imagine having 6-10 outgoing student leaders in your office! They all want a turn to talk and they all want to be heard. Also, they all have great ideas to share. But, how do we let them do it in a way that will be productive? Teach them procedures and expectations! From the moment they walk into your office, teach them! Then, keep reviewing it until they can successfully do it on their own.

I like to go over these procedures and expectations right from the start. How we come into the office, being an example to the entire building (showing good character), one person talking at a time and explaining our ideas while one student writes them down, how to decide on parts and how to draw names from a hat.

At first it looks like I’m sitting at the table doing all the work, but slowly throughout the year, I give my jobs away and let the students start taking over.

#6 Be flexible

Be empathetic and remember… they are kids! We are giving them a huge task and asking them to run with it. This was one of my biggest struggles at the beginning because when you have teacher-led assemblies, everything seems to go great and teachers know how to grab students attention and quiet a crowd. Students don’t know those things at first and all they can think to do is tell the crowd “SHHHHH”. Which totally makes me cringe at an assembly! 

So, I write it down, bring it up at our next meeting and the students come up with ways to quiet the crowd without saying “shhhh”! It’s that easy! Let them learn from their mistakes, ask them if it worked and let them decide on how to fix it. Your assemblies will mean so much more if you let them work through these life skills.

Believe me, they will surprise you! Help them get started, help them learn to lead and you will be amazed at what they can do!

Want to Learn More?

I am excited and thrilled to be launching a Student-Led Assemblies Course for educators wanting to let students take the lead.

This course is here to help you step-by-step. It’s packed full of videos, examples and templates for you to use and adjust to your school building. I hope you have as much fun going through this course as I am making it. I’m still in the creation process and should be wrapping it up in the next month!

If you want to download the “LITE” version of the workbook to see what it’s all about click here!

This version is a glimpse of what comes in the Full Version. The biggest difference between the two is all the examples and pages to work through the course. In the full version, I give you parent letters, a student application, audition rubric, graphic organizers + MUCH MORE!

If you want to be the first to be notified when this course is available or if you’re just interested in more info… sign up below!

I will keep you in the loop and make sure to let you know all the details asap!