LO3: Initiative – Planning & Initiating activities
LO5: Collaboration – Working together to achieve an outcome
I have been actively involved in the TIF projects last year as FIBs, as well as the chair of the GC. Last year, we mainly worked on organizing various activities and promoting Kura Kura on the school events, such as Family Festival and Universal Children’s Day, to raise the awareness of Panglong Village, as well as to gather funds for them. To reflect back on last year’s performance of our GC, we definitely did a great job organizing those events, as well as helping the NGO with the projects. Everyone is the GC was also actively engaged in helping out at those events. Our GC is also very democratic and we welcome all the new, innovative ideas and voices; all the decisions are made through voting.
As the chair of the GC, one of my responsibilities is to plan and lead the weekly meeting. This year, there are eleven new students joining our GC! Some students are new to the school, so I thought it would be nice if I planned the first meeting as the introduction/warm up session. I planned to begin the meeting with ice-breaker activities. (LO3) First, I let everyone introduce themselves and talk about why they joined the GC. This would be a good opportunity for everyone to have a brief impression on each other and get an idea of their common facts. Then, we played a quick game on knowing each other’s names. Everyone was really engaged in the activity and enjoyed a lot while learning the names. In addition, through the activity, I felt like we got connected together as a collaborative group. After that, I introduced the NGO that we are working with and the projects TIF and FIBs are carrying out to the rest of the GC, so everyone could have an understanding on our service partner, allowing them to realize what are the needs that the NGO and local community are looking to satisfy. Luckily, we have representatives (previous FIBs) from all project groups in the GC. I thought it would be great if they could talk about their project groups specifically since they were personally involved in the projects last year and this way would engage more people in the conservation. In all, the whole meeting went successfully and well-achieved my initiatives for the different activities.
To carry on with our democracy, I would like to hear more voices from the members of our GC. As a result, for the next few sessions, I planned to focus on collaborating about everyone’s expectation, what we would like to achieve, what are our goals and how we could improve and achieve the goals. Through discussion, we found out several areas that we should work on this year (LO5). First, we are supposed to do more actual works and reduce the time spent on planning. Last year, we came up with an idea of Trashion: a competition that candidates use recyclable material to create fashionable outfits. We spent quite a few meetings purely on discussing about this event, but later, we found that this event was quite difficult to carry on and stopped working on it since it was hard to find sponsorship for the event and everyone in high school was quite busy with his/her own works and had little time to work on making the outfits. This year, we should use the time more efficiently on doing the actual projects. Second, since we are working with the same NGO as FIB students and half of the members in our GC were in FIB last year, we could have a closer connection with this year’s FIB students to carry on those five projects with them. Third, it might be more efficient if we divide the GC into smaller groups and each group work on a specific task or project. In order to achieve all these, we also thought it would be great if we met with the staffs at the NGO; so we could hear the voices from them about what they would like to see from our GC.
During the collaboration, everyone was extremely respectful to each other’s opinions and ideas. The only challenge for me as a leader in the collaboration was that it was a bit hard to engage everyone. Some students were quite shy and did not feel free to speak out in front of the whole group. Hence, I came up with a solution, which was to split up the group. I let them discuss in small groups with about four people each. During the discussion in small groups, I randomly joined several groups to collaborate with them and hear the voices from each individual. I found that students in the GC was really passionate about what they are doing and they have lots of novel and bright ideas; in addition, students who do not speak out in the large group feel more comfortable in smaller groups and contribute a lot more. After the discussion, one person from each group talked about what they came up with and we later, discussed those ideas proposed as a whole group. This way was definitely more efficient to carry out the collaboration.
I’m really looking forward to another awesome year working with everyone in the GC!
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