I’m back from an amazing trip at the 2010 Alberta Speak Out Conference.
Speak Out is an Alberta Government Education initiative to have the voices and opinions of youth in Alberta heard in the educational system. 200 kids at the high school and junior high school levels from around the province, in different communities, were brought together for this event.
The cool thing about the conference though was that it wasn’t just about voicing our opinions and views to the government though, but also about meeting new people, and having fun! I know I sure did!
We were also privileged to have Mr. Keith Hawkins speak for us. Keith is a motivational speaker with some good ideas and points about leadership. I’ve written another blog about the Rapport leadership camp that I went to, and I liked Keith’s approach much more then the way Rapport did things. Keith still had us challenge our boundaries, and try new things that we weren’t used to, but made it fun and brought it to a more personable level. So thank you, Keith, it was great hearing from you. I have to admit, at first when I was looking at the schedule I was pretty much like “Wow… We have to listen to the same guy talk for hours over this thing. He better be good”. Simply put – he was. He was a great guy with some great things to say.
The team that put the event together was also a great bunch of happy people who enjoy what they do. A few others and me from the Calgary Board of Education will be speaking with them over a video-conference to give them more feedback however, as I felt that the actual forum part of this trip, where we piled our ideas together and spoke with others about the Alberta Education system, was rather unorganized and somewhat lacking (update: we did speak with them via video-conference, and provided our feedback. Understandably, they weren’t totally receptive or understanding, but I thank them for taking the opportunity to take the Calgary Board of Education attendee’s feedback).
The forum was probably the only part about this trip that I had any problem with, and kudos to whoever put the rest together. The forum was nothing like the Calgary Board of Education’s “Mega End Symposium” in that it lacked a structure that was effective and gave us a diversity of things to comment on. The questions were rather restrictive in terms of the types of answers we gave, and I don’t really see anything practical that came out of the results – for example, one of the concerns was that relationships with students and teachers weren’t personable enough. Can Alberta Education really do anything to enforce that and make it better? Another was how teachers felt kids not showing up to class affected their work. Can Alberta Education really do anything in the short term about that either? There were some good points, but not enough emphasis or explanation was put on them. Those are just my thoughts. Like I mentioned before, I’ll be doing a video-conference with the team that put things together. So I’ll certainly bring those things up, and come back here later with the types of responses I receive from my feedback.
Back to the rest of the whole thing, apart from some amazing sessions with Keith Hawkins, we had a crazy dance! Tons of fun. I let loose and went crazy. I think people liked my moves. 
All in all, I had a great time – and I’d love to do it again next year. Hopefully, the actual forum can be better orchestrated and more like the CBE’s Mega End Symposium. We’ll see.
