Steps for Syria and the TIS Clothes Drive.

Smiles for miles this week. Saturday saw the TIS Community band together to take part in the student led project Steps for Syria, a peace walk through the city raising money to send to Refugees currently displaced as a result of the Syrian Civil War. Students managed to raise over 100,000 JPY for this cause which will be donated directly to the Save the Children Syrian Child Refugee charity.

This in addition to the TIS Clothes Drive rounds out a phenonmenal start to the year in terms of students taking action as Global Citizens.

Take a look at the projects in a short video below! It is hard not to be inspired by young minds with the enthusiasm and will to make a difference!  To me this is teaching is all about, encouraging young people to realize their potential to have a positive influence on their world.

2015 Global Responsibility Day – Student empowerment and action

Last Friday was Tokyo International School’s Global Responsibility Day. Our school celebrates global responsibility and what it means to us not only on this day but in our day to day school life. Encouraging students to recognize their position as global citizens and utilize their ability to enact meaningful lasting positive change is paramount in my approach to education. With this clearly in mind I was inspired again by my student’s choices to take action as a response to the current Syrian Refugee Crisis and link it with our Global Responsibility Day.

Student’s from my Grade 7 Individuals and Society class were spurred into action for this day as a result of their current inquiry into the concept of Global Migration in class. The class led our school-wide assembly, including creating the digital content, promotions in our school magazine, and presenting student devised performances onstage. Two student groups also shared their independently created action plans to contribute ease the struggle of those who are currently facing the unfathomable in their escape from their war-torn homelands.

The action our students’ are undertaking include a charity walk called “Steps for Syria” in which a Grade 7 student will lead a community walk symbolic of the journey that Syrians are making across the European continent. For every step that a walker makes money will be donated to a charity focused on supporting Syrian Refugees.

Our second group has initiated a school-wide clothes drive to donate useful items to those without in Syria. The students are gaining sponsorship for the shipping of the goods and will be sending the donated items to a UK charity Syria Relief.

Finally, our drama class presented their creative response to the Syrian Conflict using tableaus that they have been  working on in class.

Seeing so many students empowered to take action through arts and civic engagement filled me with a great sense of pride. What was even more impressive with the student action was the level of authentic collaboration and creativity that the class used to throughout the process. Of course the real work is now ahead of the group to ensure that the action is fulfilled and the impact is both positive and meaningful.

I love Padlet

Padlet is one of my favourite tech tools for learning. I love it when students are empowered to share honestly and in real time.

This is a padlet from my day one of drama class from this year. It has taken me a while to publish it here, but the lesson still resonates with me today.

The learning intention was for the students to share what they believe drama is, and after sharing to read a peer’s statement and break it down to one key word.

Here are the results.

Visible Learning Reflections

I got away with a one this weekend.  While my colleagues attended their mandatory IB workshops I had a chance to attend the foundation day for John Hattie’s upcoming Visible Learning conference in March next year.

I approached the conference with a very vague understanding of Visible Learning (so vague that I thought I was going to be in for a grab bag of visible thinking strategies).  The day was a bit of an onslaught of data at times, yet by the end of the day I had a real sense of clarity about the research based findings being presented. Jayne-Ann Young was an engaging presenter and in between her rugby jokes she caused me to stop and really reflect about my practice in the classroom. Throughout the day I found myself considering what effects student learning and particularly my impact on student learning, thinking about how my students will remember me, talking about learning not about teaching, discussing the differences between effective feedback and blind praise (perhaps a real issue in my practice). Perhaps my most crucial take aways were the affirmation of clear learning intentions and success criteria for students and the links between the characteristics of visible learners and what I consider to be 21st century learners: Collaborative, Creative, Critical, Communicators (and they Care).

This was a great introduction to visible learning and it has really whet my appetite for John Hattie’s arrival in Japan next year. Luckily I have some pre-reading to tide me over until then as I won a copy of his latest book on Visible Thinking for “Tweeter of the Workshop”. I had a great time tweeting throughout the conference with a select few of the other participants who were also active during the conference. In a auditorium lecture situation twitter was the only real way that I could engage with my peers around the room. I managed to find loads of great teachers to follow (@nainisingh,  @Nosidoog1878, @illywhacker1, @ICT_Seisen, @cmiddleton79 to name a few) and a bunch of new ideas and perspectives. I think it is official, I have become an edutwitter convert this year.

Check out my thoughts during the day below in my first attempt at a Storify

Taking Educational action abroad – Reflections on TIS Cambodia

 

 

Over the Spring Break just gone I was lucky enough to travel to Cambodia. At first glance that sentence doesn’t seem to outof the ordinary. Australian male in his 20s travels to South East Asia for Holiday… It verges on cliched. There is a little bit more to this trip to Cambodia than just a vacation, the purpose of my travels was not only to enjoy the multitude of natural beauty that adorns the country, but to travel to a remote village and teach at a middle school for a few days.

I was lucky enough to receive funding from our PSA to join another teacher at our school for this trip that took two middle school students along with a parent to Thmei Village a few hours out of Cambodia’scapital Phnom Penh. In the village we spent our time teaching at the Tokyo Inspired School in Cambodia, a school that my school has been supporting for close to a decade. Over the past few years the amount of support has steadily dried up and to an extent it had moved to the back of our minds here at T.I.S.  This year was our chance to really get a bit of forward momentum happening with the school and push it back into our consciousness.

We traveled to TIS Cambodia with the purpose of building exposure and taking authentic action to instill change in not only the village school but also in the mind-set of our students.  I believe that we certainly achieved these goals. It was a great experience to allow our two students to develop learning experiences that would give the Cambodian students a chance to experience our culture and develop their English abilities. Our students created lessons focused on art, family, board games, origami, sports, movie making. While I taught a series of drama based lessons as our other teacher dealt with the school’s principal, teachers and NGO to try to move forward on the various political issues that surround supporting our school such as building a well for the school supply clean drinking water, donating more books, computers and stationery and the contract of the current English Teacher we employ at the school.

The three days at the school were truly amazing. It was essentially the polar opposite from the teaching environment of International School classrooms, yet at the core the goals were exactly the same and the desire of the students was just as strong, if not stronger. The work at the school certainly provided me with a sense of perspective about privilege in education. I was glad to note that this perspective was not lost on the two middle schoolers that we took. Reflecting on the trip they put it far more eloquently than I could have when I was 12.

“It was the trip of a lifetime. The students were so happy and willing to learn. Even though they didn’t have new books, or even lights in their room it didn’t stop them from learning.”  – Miko

“It really showed me that you don’t need to have tons of material possessions to be happy. It made me reflect on how lucky I am and put things into perspective about what it means to be happy.” – Brandon

The only issue I had with the trip was the amount of time, three days felt too short. It wasn’t tokenistic by any means but after the third day we were all brimming with ideas on community building lessons and what we could do to really make an impact at the school… Just as we were leaving. This is something that we will reflect and learn from for next year, already we are discussing extending the time at the school.

 

 

 

The country itself was a magical experience too! Cambodia has such a deep history from the golden age of the Khmer Empire to create the Ancient city of Angkor to the atrocities of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge led genocide of almost an entire generation less than forty years ago. Walking through the holding cells and seeing the beds in which victims were strapped to and tortured in the S21 prison was truly one of the most heart breaking mornings of my life. This was completely contrasted to the uplifting amazement of looking into the eyes of the Buddha statues at the Bayon Temple in Angkor Thom with the sun setting in the background. I look forward to returning to Cambodia for this trip next year, and to continuing to build it into our curriculum at TIS as I move into the middle school next year. I know for sure that I have found a country that resonants with me and will for years to come.

The first blog – EARCOS Beyond Blogging.

After signing up in October I was not as peachy keen when Saturday morning rolled around and I had to jump on the train down to Yokohama to get to YIS for my first ever Tech focused PD. Now that the weekend is coming to a close I am really glad that I did sacrifice my weekend to attend!

I have taken away a lot of tangible apps, websites and programs that I will put into my practice immediately. I have connected with several likeminded educators/learners. Most importantly I have been given the time and freedom to actually focus on something that will be beneficial to me – creating this my first attempt at a professional blog/portfolio.

Key takeaway – The Online Ocean – Jump in headfirst. You can probably swim and even if you can’t there are enough people around willing and able to resuscitate you.