I worked collaboratively with our MYP teachers and initiated IDEAS Project and Fair last academic school year at KIS International School (Bangkok, Thailand). IDEAS represents for Innovation, Design, Entrepreneurship, Activity, Service. The concept is also a continuum extending to the Creative, Activity, Service (CAS) component in the Diploma Programme. 

• Innovation: Start by asking questions and create something new and better;   
• Design thinking: Focus on people and use an iterative process to identify problems and find creative solutions; 
• Entrepreneurship: Develop skills to start a social enterprise and expand creativity in an interdisciplinary environment; 
• Activity: Participate in leisure activities to develop lifelong habits related to physical, mental, and social well-being and increase creativity; 
• Service: Take action and drive change; be an active citizen by taking a business-like approach to improve people's lives in our communities. 

This initiative was designed to develop KIS quality learning behaviors of our students.  

• Strive for understanding; 
• Take action ethically; 
• Nurture passion in self and others. 

Students worked in teams and created their companies for fundraising. We raised 52,000 Baht (about 1696 US dollars) last year. The money was deposited into our KIS service bank to support the ones in need in our community. 

Teachers have started to share ideas about how to end the school year on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram. Lots of interesting and creative ideas have been shared to help students celebrate their learning virtually. I have contemplated and felt unsure if we can or should continue with our IDEAS project. Then I think of our school mission and the quality learning behaviors we want our students to develop. As always, what we do with students should reflect our mission statement and philosophy. If we want to develop self-regulation and autonomy of students, we need to give them a choice and voice. How can we shift student engagement to student empowerment as John Spencer has challenged us to think in order to develop student agency?  

There are many communities in Thailand who are impacted either financially and/or psychologically because of COVID-19. Will we miss our opportunity if we don't guide our students to take action ethically and strive for understanding? How can we support them to advocate a social issue and nurture passion in self and others? I reviewed the IDEAS project and wanted to find out if there is a work-around for us to launch the IDEAS project virtually. After brainstorming and exchanging ideas with my colleagues, we came up with five choices for our students to be involved with social learning. One of the key element is that they need to work with either a partner or a team. In the real world, we always need to work with someone else and this is also an opportunity to build sustainable connection through their project making. 

Wonder Day Project 
Sometimes students might not have a clear idea of what they want to do to help people yet. Therefore, they can work with a partner or a team to identify any topic or interest of their choice for research. They also get to decide the format of their final product to share their learning. The requirements are outlined below: 

• They must collaborate with a partner or team. 
• They need to share your final product with the KIS community.   

Our students have participated in Wonder Day project previously. 

Students will work collaboratively virtually in the morning on the last few days of school and showcase/auction their work two days before the school year ends. In the afternoon, our student council will lead synchronous activities to build our school spirit and reconnect participating members. Some possible activities we are currently exploring include: 

• Teacher baby photo quiz; 
• Quarantine song playlist competition;
• Kahoot competition; 
• Lip syncing battles by our House captains and vice captains;  
• Scavenger hunt; 
• Virtual field trips (Since so many museums are open for virtual visit, why not take this advantage to visit them!) 
• Instagram photo challenge (#VirtualLearning Portraits)
• TikTok before and after trend challenge (I do have some reservation about the TikTok video regarding internet child safety.) 

The most important element is to get students involved in planning. I got in touch with our student council. We have been discussing the logistics and refining ideas together. When you view them as a think tank, they act like one. Members of our student council divided responsibilities and worked to meet deadlines. This is where student leadership is fostered and developed. 

Putting an event like this is challenging in a real school setting. When planning virtually, more difficulties are added, for example, how to host the lip syncing battle; how to organize the online art auction, and so on. I don't have all the clear workflows mapped out yet and I also don't know how many students will have energy left to take on one more project. IDEAS project is optional for students to sing up. I do, however, believe this is the right thing to do and a way to show we respect students' intellect and creativity. Celebration is not limited to singing and dancing. Celebration of learning is also to provide an opportunity for students to apply their knowledge and skills to solve a real world problem or to make a difference. Whether it will be successful or not, I think it's important to do the right thing. Although it's ambitious, we should not be intimidated and give up our IDEAS! 

Have you been in the situation that you would like to show a film to enhance students' understanding of specific content or a topic, but there is not enough time to do that at school? Are you sometimes looking for a film to show students in the last few days before the school semester ends? Do you feel that your children might have watched too much TV at home and those TV shows are not always of good quality? 

During the school closure due to COVID-19, what if we can recommend some good films to students and their families? When watching a film together, we often build emotions together and share ideas and opinions afterwards. It is also through films that we can get inspired, feel motivated, and expand our worldview. If we think ahead, teachers can select specific films that link to the curriculum for students to watch during the time of the school closure and then build upon their knowledge after we return to school. 

Instead of suggesting a bunch of activities for students to do, I think I am going to think inside the box a bit and make some movie recommendations to our students. The purpose is for students and their families to get inspired, expand their worldview and have a conversation through film watching together. I have been enjoying doing this with my own children and it had been wonderful to share laughters and emotions together. So far, we have watched The Gods Must Be Crazy, Hugo, The Call of the Wild, and The Boy Harnessed the Wind. My favorite movie is The Gods Must Be Crazy so far and it was amazing to see how my children were discovering another part of the world with a complete different culture. What's been illustrated in the film is still so true in our modern society. There is lots of food for thought in this film.      

I am grateful for we have access to these movies via good internet and it was also a blessing that we can enjoy the time together as a family. In case these movie recommendations can benefit you, here is the movie list. Lastly, thank you for the wonderful educators who shared the movies that they used in classrooms with me.     

➡️ https://bit.ly/3bx520J 

As we move along the online teaching and learning continuum, we have begun to revise our approaches to meet the needs of students. Based on the student survey, some students expressed that they do miss their friends and teachers and would like to meet with them virtually. I helped to arrange a meeting between grade 10 students and their teachers via Zoom. I quickly noticed that students were excited to see the familiar faces and simultaneously, they also felt awkward to see their teachers and classmates after a week and a half. Students were giggling and really did not know how to interact with each other in this virtual space. Almost all grade 10 teachers attended this meeting as they cared about students and they wanted to check in and say hi. There was no specified agenda for this meeting.

Before we started our two-week Songkran (Thai New Year) break on Friday, April 3, I organized another meeting. It was a synchronous videoconferencing for participants to meet our grade 10 students and shared their journeys of completing their personal projects. Prior to the meeting, grade 10 students brainstormed questions that different target audiences might ask and they prepare for their responses accordingly. I requested KIS community members to indicate their participation via a Google form and they also had an opportunity to ask questions in advance on the sign-up form. I consolidated all questions before the Zoom meeting and also shared with grade 10 students in advance. The videoconferencing was conducted very intentionally and anchored in a meaningful purpose. Grade 10 students signed up for the meeting voluntarily. They were coached on how to be a panelist and how to interact with the audience in the virtual environment. I set up the logistics for the meeting and acted as the panel discussion moderator. Wow! It was a very productive gathering and everyone felt energized after the meeting.    

I reflected on both experiences and made an attempt to identify factors that contribute to productive and sustainable connections. Seth Godin's blog post, The Conversation was inspirational to me. To make the conversation better, he suggested some ideas. 

• The most important: Only have a real-time meeting if it deserves to be a meeting.
• People come to the meeting ready to have a conversation. 
• Part of being engaged means being prepared. 
• Organize a conversation. 

I also recalled Priya Parker emphasized the importance of anchoring the gathering in a meaningful purpose in her book, The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters. When there was no clear reason for why people come together, then we are creating gathering for nothing.  ​

I begin to wonder how we can intentionally build sustainable connections in the virtual environment. This is an important thing to do when the school closure is extended. Imagine how weird and awkward that might be when teachers and students see each other again after the long separation. We don't use synchronous meetings for content delivery. We continue to investigate how we can organize videoconferencing to build our community and enhance relationships.  

As readers might have noticed that I like to use acronyms to organize my thoughts. I decided to use PAUSE to re-think about synchronous meetings and identify factors to build sustainable connections that can engage and energize everyone. PAUSE is also to emphasize the importance that we allocate time to reconnect with each other. We are separated because physical distancing is good and healthy for everyone. However, there are different ways that we can connect emotionally and creatively in the virtual environment.  

Prepare students on how to interact in the virtual environment    ​
It requires a different skill set for students to interact online and we need to explicitly teach them how to participate in a synchronous meeting. Seth's Godin suggested a simple 9 point checklist. We also created Zoom Videoconferencing Student's Guide to support our students for online interaction. To ensure a productive and effective conversation, we need to do some prepping. It is not going to work if we simply organize students to meet online in a chat room. On a different note, I know more and more governments and schools are banning Zoom due to security and privacy issues. However, I do think Zoom is a convenient tool and if teachers learn how to use it correctly and responsibly, we can continue to ensure students' internet safety and privacy.      

Anchor the gathering in a meaningful purpose 
​Priya Parker justified the importance of deciding a specific and meaningful purpose for a gathering extensively in her book. Instead of saying we are meeting to check in student's progress, we can dig deeper and specify the purpose for students to share what has worked and what hasn't work in their home learning environment. Students who are interested in this topic can attend the meeting. 

Use a warm-up question to connect and listen attentively without judgements 
We are humans but not robots. Rather than jumping right into the business, it is beneficial to do a grounding activity to warm up everyone's "conversation muscle". The inclusion activity will also allow us to get to know each other better. Unlike being at the school, it is harder for students to share what's on their mind. Students are not easily to share their favorite book or video game that they currently enjoy during their breaks now. This is also an opportunity for teachers to gain an insight of students' lives and it is important to listen attentively to expand perspectives without making judgements. The idea of using warm-up questions is inspired by Elizabeth Weingarten's article,20 questions to ask instead of "How are you doing right now?"    

Structure the time for an effective conversation and allocate a wrap-up session
I personally have very little tolerance when the meeting is not structured, and some people talk too much and some people do not talk at all. We finally get everyone's attention and permission to be together and I think it is paramount we respect each other's time and ensure the gathering experience is productive and energized for everyone. We will also want to avoid the meeting finishing without a conclusion. When facilitating a meeting, it is always a good idea to monitor the time and always allocate a wrap-up session. Participants can identify actions that they need to take or reflect on today's meeting and share their biggest take-away in the wrap-up section. If the meeting is finished in a rush and participants do not have a chance to say a proper goodbye, I feel the meeting is less effective and it feels incomplete. 

Engage everyone and ask "How can I help?" to signal you care and can offer support 
Not everyone gets a chance to speak in the class or in a meeting. Isn't it an opportunity that we can connect all participants via the videoconferencing tool? We can leverage the breakout room function and use protocols to facilitate conversations. Lastly, as James Ryan wrote in his book, Wait, What?, one important question to form the base of all good relationships is "How can I help?' This question signal we care and are willing to offer support.      

You can click the image below to download the PDF file. ​

Planning the MYP Personal Project Exhibition is one of my favorite things to do with students. It gives students choice and voice in showcasing their achievement with the school community and enable them to  exercise agency and leadership.  I wrote about this experience in my blog post titled, Designing thinking in MYP personal Project.

Before the school closure due to covid-19, our grade 10 students (CO'22) have already decided on the 'video game theme' for their exhibition this year. In their reflection, they had worked hard through various stages in different levels of complexities. They enjoyed it at first and then when the game started to get difficult, it was sometimes challenging for them to stay motivated and meet due dates. It required repetition and practice before they can reach the finishing line. 

A couple of weeks later, we needed to adjust to online teaching and learning. The thought of not having the personal project exhibition did come to my mind. Everyone was exhausted at this point (March madness), including myself, and it would be a lot of work to get the virtual exhibition to happen. However, at the end, I thought it will be selfish to cancel this. I met with the student planning committee via Zoom chats and we started to brainstormed how we can make the exhibition happen in the virtual space creatively. My students use Instagram frequently (potentially daily, hourly!) and therefore, we settled on using Instagram as the exhibition platform. I don't really use Instagram and it took me some time to figure out how it might work. When students talked about "Highlight" and "Caption" used in Instagram, I was unsure what they were talking about. I made sure I listened carefully to their ideas and asked clarifying questions. Students created logos for their own projects which represented for the video game 'stages'. Each global context represents a game level. We did not have project related to the global context, fairness and development, and therefore, there were only five game levels. The map of this video game is displayed as highlights in our Personal Project Exhibition IG account. I have made a video to show you how the highlights look like below.   

Then we discussed the curation of the content to be exhibited online and came up with the list detailed below. Each student has one photo album as their exhibition space and the maximum number of photos for each album is 10. We also discussed about how we can monitor the quality of submission and students set up a google form for their classmates to submit their work. I worked with a couple of students to upload the work. 

Here is the introduction video that my students made to give audience a quick guide how to interact with our personal project exhibition on Instagram. 

We encourage the audience use the T.A.G protocol to provide feedback in the comment section. Our community members are reminded of being respectful and appreciative when visiting the personal project exhibition.  

Using Instagram to organize a virtual exhibition is very cool and it is an easy access for the audience to visit and interact. I think it is easier than creating a website and it creates higher level of user visits. What's difficult is to ensure all the photos meet the instagram dimension. Students do not necessarily understand this process and the teacher needs to be somewhat tech savvy. It's not super difficult but it takes time. Another challenging part is that users can only upload a combination of multiple photos and videos via the phone. I am sure there are hacks or apps that allow users to do multimedia and multiple photos upload, but I don't have any energy to invest in this process at the moment. Students uploaded most of the work and I helped a bit. What I did to make this process easy was to create a Keynote instagram template; put everything in the template; export the file as images; send the pictures to my phone; finally upload the work from my phone. This is certainly not the most time saving process, but it works for now.   

Students originally wanted to organize livestreams via IG, but at the end, it was slightly challenging to do so. We decided to host Zoom meetings and invite our school community members to interact with our grade 10 'creators'. 

"So how do you manage your time and be available for students without feeling like you are permanently 'on'?" asked by Jennifer Tickle (@Jenntickle) on Twitter.  

I did not think I was in any better position to answer this question. We were in our second week of online teaching and it does feel exhausting. Synchronous communication is desperately demanded and everyone wants an answer right away. I have become very responsive as everyone is seeking attention and requests immediate answers. I hit my keyboards so ferociously and two keys came out of my laptop keyboard. Not sure if I should blame Apply's butterfly keyboard design or my own intense behavior. I began to think about Jennifer's question over the past few days. One or two synchronous chats are doable, bu when you have multiple synchronous communication going on, plus emailing back and back, it consumes my energy and creates frustrations that I can't respond in time. It is draining and stressful. Is online teaching going to cause me to burnout? I begin to wonder how teachers might develop emotional competence to build resilience and boost productivity in this long journey of online teaching and learning? Eric Hudson's (@ejhudson) response, "communication routines and boundaries help: this is when modules are published, this is when our synchronous class are, this is how much time I need to respond to messages, etc." really resonates with me. In my opinion, to build our resilience and to be productive, we can benefit from building a system to manage online teaching and makes a deliberate effort to keep a good work-life balance. Creating a system can help us streamline our vision and provide us with clarify and a structure. 

I reflect thoughtfully on what 'system' means in this online teaching situation and what actions I can take to keep my sanity while continuing to enjoy what I do as an educator. Therefore, I have created a SYSTEM for myself for teaching online! 

S: Sensemaking 
Sensemaking is a term introduced by Karl Weick, refers to how we structure the unknown so as be able to act in it. (Ancona, 2012) Assess the situation and identify the direction of where we are going makes sense to me. A plethora of web tools and resources are shared widely to support online learning. But we must be mindful of how these tools are used to enhance learning. It's important to remember that Maslow first, then learning, and finally technology. Instead of trying out different websites and tools, it is paramount for us to first think about intentional instruction design principles and then explore how technology can support learning. Thinking holistically, we need to:        

• ​Develop an understanding of online child protection and safeguarding policies 
• Ensure student data privacy and digital equity 
• Remember learning first, technology second 
• Create a structure and routine to communicate with students and parents
• Ensure lesson activities align with assessment objectives 
• Be aware of dos and don’ts of online teaching

Y: You first 
Jennifer Abrams mentioned in her book, Swimming in the Deep End, on airplanes, flight attendants say, "put on your own mask first before helping others'", but in schools, we don't apply this concept of taking care of ourselves so that we're able to care for others as often as we need to. To avoid teacher burnout, I think it is really important we take good care of ourselves and spend time with our love ones. Additionally, when dealing with any crisis, it's important to reflect on our core values and think about what our core values mean to us and how they influence our decision making. I would also like to advocate the importance of engaging ourselves in physical exercises as it is a way to build our mental and physical strength. Here are some of my actions: 

• Being busy doesn't’ equate to being productive
• Reflect on your core values and align them with your current actions
• Choose one thing that matters to you or brings you joy and make time to get it done 
• Build time to connect with your loved ones
• Exercise regularly to build your mental and physical strength     

​
S: Scheduling 
We encourage students to create a daily schedule and monitor their progress. I think teachers also need to do the same and create a system to track their productivity.  

• Use a calendar to create a realistic schedule 
• ​Use time blocking to plan your day 
• Set up systems to track your daily progress and to stay motivated and productive 
• Consider the use of the Eisenhower Matrix to separate the urgent from he important task 

T: Think optimistically 
We are living in a very stressful period of time at the moment. I am grateful that I have a comfortable living condition and my family members are all healthy. It is important to be that "glass half full" person and be appreciative for what I have. 

• Presume positive presuppositions to build growth mindset and avoid assumptions 
• Write down 2-3 things you feel grateful for daily 
• Practice positive talk 
• Check in with teams regularly and develop your PLN, knowing you are not alone in this situation 
• Perceive challenges as opportunities

E: Empower students 
What a great opportunity that our students can design their own learning schedules and complete tasks at their own pace within the due dates! Instead of focusing on using different technical tools, We can leverage our pedagogy and increase student autonomy by design deep learning and engage students to think, collaborate and create through meaningful and purposeful technology integration. If we are solely thinking about the tools and websites, then we are missing the point of learning.

• Be careful of high tech tools that yields to  lower level learning 
• Integrate technology to foster deep learning as it’s about learning not technology
• Create an intentional learning experience to promote creative and critical thinking, creation, and collaboration 
• Foster student agency by giving students choice and voice in their learning 

M: Measure effectiveness  
Many teachers are doing their first time online teaching. In a way, many of us are prototyping our online teaching model. In the process of prototyping, teachers, as designers, need to be empathetic of the user experiences, seek feedback for improvement and continue to revise their prototype and test the viability of their ideas.   

• Seek feedback from students and find out what works and what doesn’t work 
• Design formative assessment and check student understanding 
• Continue to experiment and revise your online teaching​ prototype and test the viability of your ideas

You can click the image below to download the PDF file. 

German by Joachim Dieterich

• ​​Abrams, Jennifer. Swimming in the Deep End: Four Foundational Skills for Leading Successful School Initiatives. Solution Tree Press, 2019.
  
• ​Deborah, Ancona. Sensemaking : Framing and Acting in the Unknown. SAGE Publications, 2012, www.sagepub.com/sites/default/files/upm-binaries/42924_1.pdf.