Towards the end of the academic school year, teachers are very close to burnout and students are also very exhausted. Students often watch lots of videos in the final week of school, and many teachers are probably googling activities to engage their students in the very end of the semester. In my school, grade 8 to 10 students have final exams and teachers also need time to finish marking and entering grades for report cards in time. I start to think what we can do as a school to create experiences for students and meanwhile allocate time for teachers to finish grading.  

Students are pretty much treated as 'workers' or "doers" throughout the academic year. They start a unit, learn new things, participate in formative learning tasks, and complete their summative assessment at the end of the unit. The cycle repeats. Physical and emotional exhaustion has gradually built up as the school life unfolds. What are the things that we can do to help students relax and just enjoy life? In education, the notion of preparing students for the future work, or preparing them for universities or careers is highly promoted. I think it's paramount to pause and rethink wha holistic education means. MYP is a very ambitious framework and teachers and students are constantly challenged to learn and grow. Great emphasis is on cognitive and practical learning experiences to develop knowledge, understanding and skills of students and help them to apply and solve problems. What are teachers, parents, and the school doing to design emotional learning for our students? Social interactions can be fostered through classroom activities, and the question is can we build upon the existing system and zoom out to develop the 'bigger picture' of education? 

After many hours of brainstorming and dialoguing with teachers at my school, I came up with a prototype called IDEAS. ​

Initially, I was only thinking about what student well-being activities that we can offer to help students relax and learn how to develop lifelong habits to become physically, mentally and socially healthy individuals. Then after conversation with the service coordinator, we both felt that our students could be bette supported when organizing fundraising events. Students often lose money when they sell their product or service to fundraise as they often do not know how to price and project their profit. Additionally, we would like to start a 'KIS service bank' and raise money to help members in our immediate school community. Voilà! IDEAS project is born. It is an initiative to help our students to be creative and innovative in a simulated real-world interdisciplinary environment and also help them to explore their interests and identities. Throughout the project, students will practice and develop approaches to learning skills.  

Through the project, we aim to

• promote student innovation;
• guide students to follow the design thinking process when building an enterprise; 
• learn how to collaborate and negotiate ideas with their peers; 
• encourage students to participate in different activities to increase creativity and be balanced; 
• take a business-like approach to improve people's lives in our communities.   

Learning across the curriculum will be linked to the project. Students will work in mixed grade level groups to develop small businesses. They will investigate characteristics of entrepreneurs and to find out what makes a successful business. They will also be learning about how business works and about profit and loss. Additionally, we encourage students to consider social, cultural and environmental issues when creating their small business. 

Students will work with their group developing their business prototype in the morning and participate in student well-being activities in the afternoon. The culmination of the project IDEAS Fair when students set up their own business booths. Each group will start their business with no more than 500 baht contributed collectively by the group members and will try to use that to make a profit. All profit, after students pay for cost and expense, will be donated to the KIS Service Bank. Students will be reimbursed for their 500 baht funding capital against the receipts they will submit. 

In order to maximize student learning through the IDEAS Project, and to ensure that all the groups have an equal opportunity, we ask parents not to give any additional money or consumable items to their child's group. 

I worked with grade 10 students and asked them what MYP students would benefit from different activities to relax at the end of school year. Lots of great ideas were shared. I then asked them if they would like to offer breakout sessions to other MYP students. It was great to see grade 10 students working together and submitting their breakout session proposals. I also reached out to the whole school community and parents to invited everyone offer a breakout session. At the end, we have a great variety of activities for students to choose from. MYP students have enjoyed having choices and freedom to sing up their preferred well-being activities. Although it took a while to set up the sign up system, it was worth it. (I can write another long post sharing how to set up the sign up system!)

Since this is a new initiative, I will also like to help parents understand better. I met with our MYP parent representatives and explained to them what I would like to do. Of course, money is needed to cover the cost of some activities, such as baking, pizza making, cross stitch, jewelry making, etc. I would also like to offer book vouchers for enterprise groups for 'most profitable', 'best marking', and 'most innovative product/service' groups. Parents were very supportive as soon as they understand the purpose and goal of the IDEAS project. I received a great fund from parents to run this project.      

Whenever you want to start an initiative, there are also challenges and pushbacks. What works for me the best is to consolidate ideas and then make a model to explain to teachers, students, and parents. The diagram of IDEAS project allows me to sell my idea successfully and gain support. I am also very aware that this is an ambitious project. Students and schools often engage with an enterprise project for at least 6 months or a year. Our purpose is to begin to expose our students to this type of learning, but not dive in depth yet. The first time we implement the IDEAS project will be in a two-day bootcamp style. We will see how it goes and modify and improve our prototype.      

If you would like to obtain the slides to support teachers and students in running this project, you can donate to support our refugee students. You can decide to donate in any amount that you feel comfortable with. After the donation is received, the presentation will be shared with you. 

I have been enjoyed reading Jim Knight's books relating professional learning and instructional coaching. His books were well-structured and easy to follow. He often provides concrete examples and useful practical strategies to implement coaching conversations. This blog post records my visual notes and personal reflections from Jim Knight's work, Better Conversations, published in 2016.    

Dialogue is not going to occur without asking effective questions. The two habits go hand in hand. When reading books relating to cognitive coaching, the definitions of dialogue are often deeply explored. In this book, Better Conversations, the author explained that dialogue is a learning conversation, in which participants listen with empathy and they respect and encourage others' views. The most important idea for me is Paulo Freire's idea (1970) that "dialogue cannot exist without humility."

The reminds me of what's mentioned in The Adaptive School. "Dialogue honors the social-emotional brain, building a sense of connections, it connects us to our underlying motivations and mental models. This way of talking forms a foundation for coherent, sustained effort and community building. In a dialogue we hear phrases like: 

• An assumption I have is...
• I'd be curious to hear what other are thinking about this issue." (Garmston and Wellman, 2016) 

​
Simply put, in dialogue, interlocutors who hold equal status take time to listen to other voices and possibilities. It's an opportunity for us to invite collective intelligence, build relationships, and engage intentionally to achieve mutual understanding. It's a caring behaviour. Our assumptions, however, often prevent us from having dialogue. They reflect our worldview, emotions, moral perspectives, culture, and beliefs. Once our assumptions are challenged, we feel threatened and activate our fight-or-flight response. Therefore, dialogue is also a process for us to discover our unknown assumptions. 

The author explained that we can foster dialogue by balancing advocacy and inquiry. As stated in the book on page 78: 

• Advocacy means speaking what you think, speaking from a point of view. 
• Inquiry means looking into what you do not yet understanding, or seeking to discover what others see and understand that may be different from you point of view. 

"Balancing advocacy and inquiry means stating clearly and confidently what one thinks and why one thinks it, while at the same time being open to be wrong. It means encouraging others to challenge our views, and to explore what might stop them from doing so." 

This highlights the benefit of using protocols to encourage participants in sharing their voices and ask questions to clarify, probe, and reparaphrase. 

To build relationship though dialogue, we ask better questions. Through questions, we listen other ideas and opinions which is a way for us to understand other people's worldview, and discover our own assumptions. 

I made a close connections with Bréne Brown's Dare to Lead. In dialogue, we need to prepare to be wrong and embrace our fear, and have courage to ask better questions. She created a cheatsheet to show one can be brave and keep their mind open for productive conversations in her blog post, Let's Rumble. I personally found this cheatsheet very useful. ​

If we want our relationships to flourish, we need to reach out to connect by responding positively to the bids received (turning toward). By the same token, we also want to express our bides to others in order to make connections to the people we care. In this process, we pay attention to verbal (e.g.a question, an invitation, a response...) and nonverbal bids (e.g. a smile, a hug, a gesture, a physical touch...). To practice this habit, we can observe how people interact with these bids. As the book mentioned, this strategy is best practiced by sitting in the coffee shop for people watch. Have our eyes, hears and heart open and pay attentions to subtle verbal and nonverbal communication.  

We all like to feel motivated, encouraged, validated, and boosted when we hear positive comments about the word we do. I think being a witness to the good is one way for us to show our gratitude and respect to other people. When sharing positive information with others, we do have to be mindful of the language we use; otherwise, our comment will sound phony. Show our appreciation through detailing our experiences with them by using intentional language. In terms of sharing positive information with others, where do we start? We make an effort to find strength of others and keep a journal to record what positive behaviors observed. For example, at KIS, our staff participate in What Wonderful Work (W.W.W). Toward the end of each term, teachers write to nominate their thankfulness and appreciation to colleagues they have interaction with.    

To start a connection, we can also focusing on finding healthy common ground. I found the acronym ICARE (Interests, Convictions, Activities, Roles, and Experiences) is easy to remember and provides good entry points to find the common ground. I think this is also a way to show others that we want to get to know them and hear their interesting stories and experiences. Having identifying the common ground, it is easy for people to identify the similarities and differences. It's provide an opportunity for us to hear stories and worldviews of others. 

I enjoy tremendously in supporting students in completing their MYP personal projects. Through the process of completing a personal project, I feel the biggest growth that students develop is GRIT. The MYP personal project is essentially a design challenge that engages students in the process of ideation, prototyping and testing the viability of their ideas. This kind of experimental iteration allows students to exercise their agency, ownership, and entrepreneurship. It is an inspiring inquiry cycle that allows students to stretch their learning capacities and capabilities through the guidance of experienced adults. Throughout the process, not only their intellectual curiosity is satisfied, but they also become grittier. Students constantly encounter failures and they need to come up with solutions to fix their obstacles in order to make their project. Meanwhile, they also need to learn how to manage their time in completing their other assignments and duties. It can be a very stressful process for some students. I want to highlight the perseverance and resilience that students have developed through this trial and error process in making their personal project, and this is not something that can be measured quantitatively. We need to help them to recognize and celebrate their potential. It is paramount that that we guide them to understand how becoming grittier can help them succeed later in their life.     

After finishing making their projects, students showcase their project/outcome in the MYP personal project exhibition. It is an opportunity for them to share their learning process and tell their stories. It is a story that tells how they develop courage, embrace vulnerability, make connections and seek meaning. All supervisors knew it is far more than just completing a product or achieving an outcome. I want to scaffold students to explain the process they go through in details when they share their projects with the audience in the exhibition. When the audience walk away, they will appreciate students' perseverance and recognize their bravery in completing their project. 

2015-16
Three years ago, when I was the personal project coordinator, I asked my students "How are you going to tell your story in the exhibition?" They did not quite understand what I meant. In the previous years, students presented their project in the exhibition and often the focus was on the product rather than the process. Students introduced what they made but they did not always market their story and connect with the audience emotionally. 
 
At KIS, our vision is inspiring individuals. Our aim is to inspire individuals, while we hope that our students and other members of the community in return can go out into the world and inspire others. I feel the exhibition is a perfect opportunity for students to inform, educate and/or inspire the audience. To help students visualize how to share their story more effectively, I share Jake Andraka's TED talk with students (00:00-01:54).       

We focused on the first two-minute of his storytelling and examined how Jack shared with the audience his project. So, viola! Students in that year presented their story in TED talk style and everyone curated their story for a two-minute talk or less. Some students did not feel conformable talking on the stage, they made a video to share their project. The audience responded positively and students felt so proud of themselves. I reflected on the way I supported students. Students were more actively involved with the planning, but I knew there was not enough agency, choice, and voice. 

2016-17
The first year I did not really know what I was doing. I only knew that I would like to create an opportunity for students to inspire others and for the audience to have an insight of the personal project process. The second year, I asked the students again, "How are you going to tell your story?" Students who had attended the previous exhibition, and this cohort did not want to give a speech. So they organized themselves into different committees and created job descriptions to plan for their exhibition. I was truly amazed. Then I asked them how they were going to advertise the event. They created a promotional poster and 6-word memoir video to invite people to visit their exhibition. Next, we discussed how the exhibition should be organized and how the audience might interact with the presenters and the exhibition space. Students took one step further and they came up with an exhibition theme, accompanying with a floor plan and a brochure to introduce the presenters. They also selected MCs to host their own events and curated a music playlist for the exhibition. I reminded them that a good exhibition requires rehearsals. They wrote key ideas about what they wanted to share with the audience and they rehearsed with each other a couple of times before the exhibition. It was an excellent exhibition and students developed an ownership of this event. Working with this group of students, I experienced the power of providing students choice and voice, which are the two important ingredients to develop student agency and therefore develop inspiring individuals.  

Here are some exhibition planning artifacts of the 2016-17 class.  

2017-18
Having seeing the great exemplar, students followed similar process and forming their task force teams. The theme that students decided on was Metro. They used different subway lines to represent six different global contexts. There were several artists and designers in this chord, and they even decided the color scheme for their exhibition. The video students made was excellent and captured the essence of the personal project. The audience were so impressed and one of the parent who worked for Dior actually awarded internship opportunities to two students! 

2018-19
Students keep raising the bar. The theme students decided on was Monopoly. The reason that students had chose the Monopoly theme was because they felt the personal project itself is a game of wit and tack, and also filled with opportunities popping up left and right. Sometimes, it also felt like being in jail. The teams had worked together to plan and curate their exhibition by working out the following: 

• Music playlist 
• Monoproject logo 
• Floor plan 
• Group equipment & material request 
• MCs & scripts 
• Advertising poster 
• Exhibition brochures 
• QR codes for their products 
• Introduction video ​

Individually, students also create a poster to explain their project. We discuss what a good poster look like and how we can use the poster to engage with the audience. 

I feel compelled to documented this journey that I have gone through with my students, and look forward to continuing to work with the young adults to make their project and celebrate their achievement by involving them in planing and curating their exhibition. I treat them as designers and I am always amazed what they produced. I told my students that learning does not stop after they complete their personal project. They are encouraged to approach problems and projects by utilizing design thinking as a strategy for innovation. The process of creating a project is messy and starts with stories. Throughout the process, students create their narrative and share how they develop courage, embrace vulnerability, make connections and seek meaning. This type of learning can prepare them for life, but not just for work. I created this diagram to highlight the storytelling process and emphasize design thinking is like an infinity loop, not a straight line, as there is continuity and it is a mindset for life. 

To help our grade 5 parents understand how the PYP and MYP are connected, I have designed this infographic to explain the continuum of the two programmes. This is just a brief overview of how the two programmes are aligned with each other. Not all of our parents who speak fluent English. Taking this into consideration, I try to make the information easy and accessible to our parents. Four key aspects are identified: 

• curriculum approach; 
• curriculum content; 
• assessment; 
• approaches to learning skills.  

In the upcoming parent forum to help PYP parents understand the MYP, I hope to use this infographic as an entry point of discussion. The MYP is a very ambitious curriculum framework and it is important to prfioritize the information to share with parents and avoid overwhelming them. 

If you like this resource, please consider donating. Money received will be used to support refugee scholars who attend my school.

KIS International School, together with the KIS community, developed a 5 year strategic plan which runs from 2015-2020. One of our goals is to further develop the programmes to support and meet the needs of all students in preparation for them to be proud of themselves and their place in the world. We have identified two objectives in reaching this goal:

1. Further develop visible learning (Hattie, 2009);
2. Further enhance assessment tools and strategies to support and promote student progress and ensure student are assessment capable learners.

In order to develop self-regulated learners, we know we want to involve students in taking more responsibility for their own learning and become assessment capable. Professor Hattie’s research emphasizes the learners’ engagement with the feedback process and its role in developing assessment-capable learners who are able to regulate their own learning. Hattie notes that developing assessment capable students who know the learning intention for what is being taught can describe where they are in relation to the success criteria and can then use that information to determine the best learning strategies to improve their work and performance is the number one factor for improving student achievement (Hattie, 2009). 

These insights have lead me to reflect on our feedback process with our students as well as the reporting process. 

• Students do not see the value of formative tasks.
• Teachers spend many hours giving feedback and students are not always engaged with the feedback received to move forward for improvement. The workload of teachers often causes burnout and has an impact on their well-being. 
• KIS reports four times a year. In March and October, narrative reports are issued. The feedback on the narrative report cards has not always been useful to our students and parents because it is summative rather than formative. Students have not had an opportunity to construct meaning from the feedback to make subsequent improvement. 
• The language used for narrative reports is usually academic and based on the published MYP assessment criteria descriptors, which makes it difficult to decipher. The feedback is inaccessible to some students. 

With this mind, I invited a group of teachers to work with me and launch the formative feedback project in an effort to  foster self-regulation. We worked with only grade 10 students and teachers in our first year (2017-2018), and the result of the student improvement was significant. The participating subject was English language and literature and students were measured against MYP Year 5 criteria for grade 9 and 10. Students were taught by the same teacher in grade 9 and grade 10. I compared their grade 9 and grade 10 English achievement levels, and the result in the second semester in 2018, after one year of piloting, showed great improvement. In the same year, I also followed the same process to provide students feedback for their personal project reports, our students' average grade of their personal project reports compared to the IBMYP worldwide average grade was remarkable. 

The result gave us lots of confidence and we decided to invite more teachers in participating in this project in the academic year of 2018-19. We did not really know how it would actually work in our first year. We were lucky to have an excellent English language teacher, she worked effortlessly trying out different ways to provide feedback and making time to conference with students. After one year of piloting and observation, I came up with a model to support teachers in testing out the feedback practice and hope to conduct an action research to test the viability of our ideas. I am very grateful to work with a group of talent and passionate teachers who are risk takers and want to test a new feedback approach to make an impact on student learning.  

The aim of this action research project is to investigate how implementing a systematized formative assessment and feedback process model can engage students proactively with feedback and simultaneously promote teacher agency. It is a communication framework that promotes teachers and students being intentional, fostering craftsmanship, and developing collaborative partnerships. Intentionality, craftsmanship, and collaboration are the cornerstones of development. It is a process that involves learners with inquiry, action, and reflection. The diagram is presented below to visually illustrate the feedback model proposed.

The Theoretical Framework of Interactive Feedback Model  

Through this project, we hope to cultivate a coaching culture by providing actionable  feedback through frequent formative assessment and to foster positive and collaborative interactions between students, colleagues, and parents. The Feed up, Feed back and Feed forward system developed by Professor Hattie will also be implemented to develop student assessment literacy and encourage them to reflect critically for personal development. Questions are designed to engage students in thinking critically about their learning, monitoring development, interacting with feedback, identifying strategies and actionable steps in order to reach their desired learning goals.

In the interactive formative feedback model,

1. teachers collaborate and design summative assessment that allows students to demonstrate their conceptual understanding, knowledge and skills of the unit.
   
2. Next, teachers communicate and explain task-specific clarification to students. Exemplars of different achievement levels are provided to help students understand the task requirements and expectations. Teachers can also co-construct task-specific clarification with students.
   
3. Teachers consider the nature of the summative assessment and assessment objectives, and they design a series of formative assessment tasks that provide opportunities for students to practice knowledge, concepts and skills required for the summative assessment.
   
4. After teachers communicate the learning targets with students, they interpret the task, refer to task-specific clarification, and set desired learning goals.
   
5. Students perform the formative task and receive feedback from their teachers. Teachers provide feedback based on the student’s learning goal by using the GRIT framework. They point out positive attitudes and growth that students have demonstrated. They also note down any risk-taking behaviors observed. Moreover, they make their judgement of what students need to improve and then provide tactics (strategies and/or resources) to guide students to regulate their performance. Teacher feedback can be communicated through dialogue and other modalities.
   
6. Students construct meaning of the feedback received and clarify with teachers. Lastly, students use the feedback received to develop actionable steps that can help them to complete the summative assessment with success and confidence.

• Continue to reflect and revise the process 
• Our action research plan received the grant from EARCOS and we will formally conduct this action research in the year of 2019-2020. 

The resources included are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. In short, you can copy, distribute and transmit the work, but you must attribute the work to KIS International School. The work is not for commercial purposes.  

• A practice guide to action research for literacy educators 
• Developing engagement with feedback toolkit (16-19) ​

• Hattie, J. (2009). Visible Learning: A Synthesis of Over 800 Meta-Analysis Relating to Student Achievement. London, Routledge.
• Winstone, N.E., Nash, R. A., Parker, M., & rOWNTREE, j. (2016). Supporting learners’ agentic engagement with feedback: A systematic review and a taxonomy of recipience process. Educational Psychologist, doi: 10.1080/00461520.2016.1207538

If you like this resource, please consider donating. Money received will be used to support refugee scholars who attend my school.