Our SWOT Analysis:

Guiding Question: To what extent did you meet the needs of the TIF?

According to my observations from the lesson we gave to the Bintan children and the feedback from TIF staffs, some of our ideas are very useful for the TIF staffs to develop the kids’ 21st century skills (confidence, collaboration and critical thinking) in the future, and we also discussed some improvements of our ideas and developed them further into a complete lesson on Thursday with the TIF staffs. They really appreciated our first activity, which is to let the students answer the questions about dugongs, and the ones who get them wrong will need to escape from our catching. During our lesson, we could see many children were already being very excited and passionate even before this game started. This kind of physical activities allow the kids to be very active and engaging in class, bringing up their energy, which could be a very good warm-up of the lesson. The TIFs were really impressed by our activity and how the kids reacted. They told us that their next unit will be focusing on “physical wellbeing” and “sports”, and they decided to use the idea of our activity to start the lesson, so we changed the questions based on their context and made some suggestions about how they should do. In the end, we came up with a completed new lesson plan for their next unit based on our previous lesson, but we changed the context and stories accordingly to make them more relevant. Based on our experience from the previous lesson, we knew the things that we could still improve on, so our new lesson plan was more well-prepared and thoughtful. We were very proud about this and they said that it was very helpful for them. Overall, from this trip, I can see a hopeful future trend on developing Bintan students’ 21st century skills. It will just take more time because the TIFs need to deliver the lessons to them and then they can learn from it. Learning is a gradual and continuous process, but we believe that these ideas can somehow influence the ways they think and improve their abilities for the future. 🙂