Over the last few weeks we’ve been planning the exciting opportunity of Project Week. Project week is a student experience in which a group of 5-6 are able to travel to a destination of choice on a budget, the goal of the trip is to gain valuable life experience, planning, collaboration, and to complete our CAS requirements. It’s an amazing opportunity for us to get used to the real world challenges that we will come to face in life. My group consists of 6 people, 4 boys and 2 girls. For me personally I think the project week picking was a challenge as I find it diffucult to say no to people and there were a lot of people to say no to, but what had to be done was done. After the initial group picking stage, the difficult choice of where to go was. After a little bit of debate we finally chose Chiang Mai, the reason for this was there was Service and also places to do activity and creativity. Our decision was heavily swayed by Service as many of our group including myself are very passionate about our service mission. After that we basically just filled out the required forms, this was not to difficult as our group worked collaboratively with each other to make decision and assign roles. Occasionally we would disagree with some plans, such as transportation or timing, but it was all worked out through a logical conversation.
Choosing a role in the group was very easy as we all had preferences and I think we all got what we wanted. I got media coordinator which means that I work with the Podcast and also the video (which I’m making separately myself), this role fits me well as I already have experience with camera and audio and stuff like that, so it made sense. Our group really has one person who makes most of the decisions as she is very logical and sane, and we all follow, this helps the team dynamic as we are able to quickly assign things with little to no conflict. Of course if we did have any questions/concerns/problems we were definitely able to raise our voice and be heard. We chose our supervisor, Diana Yacou, because she’s the head of grade 9 and she’s very responsible and is a voice of reason. She’s also done this before.
We had originally planned for our service to be at Children Shelter Foundation (CSF) and our activity to be hiking. But, as the deadline approaches, the assignments are building up along with the pressure from Agi Toth. While before we were ahead, we’ve run into a few challenges; these include things such as, weather in Chiang Mai that affects our hiking, CSF having too few children, our hotel being a little bit far away, among other things. As we work through this crucial stage in our planning, it is important to stay calm and be as detailed as possible while also being flexible about changes to the original plan.
Learning outcomes and reflection questions topics included:
- Big picture (Goals, Action and Learning)
- LO 1 AWARENESS (Increased awareness of strengths and areas for growth)
- LO 2 CHALLENGE (Undertaken new challenges)/NEW SKILLS (Developing new skills)
- LO3 INITIATIVE (Planning and initiated activities)
- LO 4 COMMITMENT (Showing perseverance, resilience and commitment in activities)
- LO 5 COLLABORATION (Working together to achieve an outcome)
- LO 6 GLOBAL VALUE (Engaging with issues of global importance)
- LO 7 ETHICS (Considering the ethical implications of actions)
