My UWCSEA Learning Journey

Recently, the Grade 10 FIB Students went for our second trip to Bintan, Indonesia to carry out projects we have been planning alongside The Island Foundation over the past few weeks. Our objectives were to teach students concepts that would be relevant to their life within the community of Bintan and maybe give new methods of teach/ the TIF staff.

My group, for example, created a lesson plan that would allow for students to think about their environments and what they could do as individuals to help it in the future. We had created a set of activities and tasks that would help achieve this. In our lesson we had strengths, weaknesses and opportunities that we unpacked in this SWOT Analysis:

To what extent did you meet the needs of the TIF? What were the opportunities that were identified by the TIF after you completed your lessons?

To aid our lesson we made several resources for example, sets of pictures and words, but most importantly, we wrote a storybook for the children to learn the relevant threats to their environment in Bintan (overfishing, crude oil spills, pollution etc.)

In my opinion, the storybook resource that we created was the most applicable to their needs as a result of the variety of possibilities in which it could be used.  The main opportunities in the book were:

• We could make a video narration of the story for the students and to make them adept in listening to fluent English speaking which can help them have experience understanding to English speaking in the future.
• In Depth study: The book can teach a variety of topics for example – emotions, nature, animals, environmental- and help in developing particular topics vocabulary
• According to TIF staff, there is an opportunity to publish the book as a resource for English learners in general and the profits from the book can be used to aid TIF with funding.
• Out of classroom

Secondly, Our group came up with a small activities that was engaging for the children:

• WhiteBoard Reflection Activity: In this slightly competitive activity, a group of students line up behind each other and the first in line writes a concept they learnt from the lesson and passes it on to the next person – this goes on in rotation. This was an engaging way to mark their progress and what they have picked up through the lesson. The versatility of this can be applied to any unit or topic and is fun  and collaborative for the children.
• System-Mapping Based-Activities: Our initial activity to introduce the children into the topic of the environment was by giving them a series of pictures in which the have to decide why one image was good for the environment and one image was bad and asking the question ‘why?’ behind their reasoning. To further develop this activity by asking students to come up with connections between different impacts on the environment and will give them an opportunity to enhance their critical thinking.

2.The adaptations that TIF suggested during your final discussion with them on Thursday morning

In discussion with TIF, we came up with a few adaptations to our ideas to make them more suitable. This was mainly in applying our ideas into the unit of ‘Food’ that they are planning on teaching the children. We revisited the ‘whiteboard reflection activity’ and how that could fit in the unit of ‘Food’ and came up with a sequence of energiser activities based on the concept.

Additionally, suggestions were given to improve our storybook and develop it to be better suited to the children in a variety of mediums (video, different language) and add actions throughout the story to make it more active.

Looking at it from the perspective of our assessment criteria:

• The content that we were trying to teach was very relevant to the environmental context to Bintan [storybook addressed all relevant environmental hazards ]
• Developed the 21st Century Skills of Critical Thinking [categorising what is good and bad for the dugong and why] , Confidence [play] and Collaboration [group work throughout]
• We could have improved our activities to make them more engaging and make students be more active in class.
• We could have also enlisted better classroom management techniques (auditory cues instead if raising a hand) and better group techniques (counting 1,2,3 into groups).
• Overall, the level of English was a bit challenging and some words were effective but other vocabulary too advanced for the children’s level of English.

What has creating the lesson plan and presentation for The Island Foundation  taught you about the way children learn best?

Through creating the lesson plan and presentation for The Island Foundation I learnt several things about how children learn best. These are:

1. I learnt the importance of incorporating 21st Century Skills (Critical Thinking, Collaboration) to raise the quality of students and develop highly refined and practically applicable skills. These skills help children to have better thought processes and communication skills that help them in the future. The importance of starting to develop these skills early and provide a quality platform for students to learn is something we usually take for granted and not really understand how beneficial these are for our future.

2.  Contextually and Age Appropriate

When planning a lesson it is crucial to make sure the lesson is of the conceptual understanding level of the group of students that we are working with. The concepts should drawn upon knowledge they are familiar with and knowledge they can expand on related to the particular topic. In this case, we learnt how teaching knowledge that is relevant to the lives of students in the community would be highly beneficial and practical.

3. Time Management

While planning our lesson, we realised the difficulty of trying to fit all of the content we wanted to cover within a particular time limit. The main issue we learnt how to work around was leaving time to consolidate the information that will be given to them so that the lesson if effective and not open-ended. I realised that we need and equal amount of time to give new information as well as discuss and digest that information during class time.

4. Classroom Management

During the process we researched into classroom management techniques and I learnt a lot about effective methods of keeping the class attentive and engaged. I learnt that vocal or visual cues are better methods than verbal cues. Additionally, we learnt to modify our techniques to the age group of the students again which account for their attention span

What connections can you draw between Piaget’s theory of cognitive development and/or Vygotsky’s social learning theory and the way you have constructed your lesson? Consider what you have been learning in Integrated Humanities. 

In our lessons plan we aimed to build upon concepts should drawn upon knowledge they are familiar with and knowledge they can enhance their understanding on that particular topic and prompt them toward new refined ideas. This syncs up with the Vygotsky’s  ideologies of the ‘Zone of Proximal Development’ wherein teachers guides them through what they know and what they have to learn through discussion and debating. This then relates to the 21st Century Skill of collaboration as it evokes sociocultural learning and helps children catch ideas themselves rather than it being taught and not understood. The latter is a philosophy put forward by Piaget.

Why is this approach to learning important for meeting Indonesia’s development needs? Refer back to the Catalysing Productive Livelihood report from earlier in the unit. 

The main components lacking Indonesia’s educational development from reading the Catalysing Productive Livelihood report is the quality of teachers, the quality of education and the late enrolment in school. The approach of learning we want to incorporate gives students a higher quality of education as it develops more practical skills needed from the future using more holistic ways of teaching rather than rote-learning or teacher-centred learning. This method of education focuses on realistic levels of knowledge so that no conceptual understanding is lost in translation. It is a method that can be implemented at a young age and non-reliant on level of content so students can starts practicing beneficial skills that can counteract late the issue enrolment. Student-centred learning gives teachers new improved and efficient methods of teaching as well.

Recently, Grade 10 FIB’s visited communities in Bintan as a part of a global perspectives service trip.

Our group visited a village in Bintan called ‘Pengudang’, and we learnt more about the community through focusing on the different perspectives of – nature, economy, wellbeing and society.

What did you learn about “Living in Bintan” by interviewing different stakeholders using the different Compass perspectives? Why was it important to go through this process?

There are many aspects and areas at play inside a community, so learning about the community in a more holistic way, with several perspectives, gave us a broader understanding of what is happening within Pengudang and helped us make sure that we were not placing emphasis in only one area of the community. Additionally, it aided us in better understanding how all these aspects of the life within the community co-relate, overlap and come together as a whole.

Asking different stakeholders about these perspectives was beneficial as it gave us different opinions from people with different roles in the community. It gave us more information, ideas and references.

For instance, our group met with a kite-surfing instructor named ‘Aidil’, and from hearing his perspectives on the community, we got to understand and hear firsthand why there may be financial struggles,  lack of higher education and the aspirations of the youth population in the community. This helped us understand the goals of the community and accordingly adjust our lesson plans towards assisting this goal. In Aidil’s case, one of his struggles was that the lack of English communication skills prevented him from getting a job in the tourism industry, so we realised the importance of incorporating a way to develop English communication skills in our lesson plans.

Similarly, meeting with Ibu Mariani and Ibu Sakdiah also gave us important insights into community life as females. But interestingly, meeting the stakeholders helped break several misconceptions I had had about Pengudang. For example, that there is no prominent gender discrimination, more girls go to schools than boys do or that their culture is greatly important to them and will not be submissive to the rise in tourism. This allowed us to grasp the intricacies of the community and understand it better.

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The presentation below is the information Pranav Harish and I collected about the economy in Pengudang, Bintan

When presenting your Compass perspectives (Nature, Economy, Society and Well Being) What did you do well? What could you improve? 

When presenting this Compass perspective alongside Pranav, I feel we did quite well overall. I believe this is due to various factors during the process of preparation. Firstly, we had collected appropriate information on our compass perspectives that we effectively incorporated into the content of our presentation that helped specifically elaborate on the situation in Pengudang. For example, Bintan Resort Corp. Scholarships, Perspectives of stakeholders that justified the trends spotted about the economy like Pak Madun and Pak Iwan  about increasing entrepreneurship and economic diversification. This was presented in a good way due to the connection-making and cohesiveness we spotted between our trends which showed larger cultural movements and impacts within the other compass perspectives. For example, relating an increase in tourism to women in the industry and it’s effects on the larger society.

However, we could have shown a heightened level of refinement with out content through relating this to how we see trends in the economy relate to internationally or spotted more possible trends that could have shifted our views on the economy. Personally, I could have had more insightful things to add to the presentation.

When looking at my presentation skills individually, I feel like I spoke with a good amount of clarity and used hand gestures to help put across my points more effectively. However, I did fidget with my hands/hair/face and looked upward while speaking and in those aspects, I could have improved on the presentation. But mainly, I feel the good collaboration we had as a team benefited the clarity of the presentation as we had clear-cut sections for when to speak and we communicated with each other during the presentation and made sure it was connected and well-projected.