Taking students beyond their zone

LONDON: My name is Gill Sangster, Learning Resource Manager of North Shore Academy, Stockton UK. I was fortunate to be given the role of International Coordinator in 2002 when we first began working with The British Council.

The projects on which my colleagues within the academy and I have worked include three Comenius projects (two of which I coordinated) working with schools within Europe and two Connecting Classrooms projects partnering schools in Kenya and now, United Arab Emirates; again coordinating both from UK perspective.

I am not a teacher and therefore, feel I can offer more time to my role as Coordinator. The greatest difficulty attached to the role, however, is asking staff to find the time to complete agreed project tasks on schedule. As everyone who works within a school environment appreciates, there is never enough time. It is difficult to adhere to timescales due to the workload.

A solution to this is to run Connecting Classrooms as an extracurricular club. I have found that this works extremely well as students meet regularly with the sole agenda to work on Connecting Classroom projects.

The most important part of being a coordinator of a Connecting Classrooms project is planning and organisation. It is imperative that the plan is achievable and the organising of staff and students to achieve the plan is strategic.

The process of partnership.

Our current partnership with schools in UAE and in particular Al Ghazali School in Abu Dhabi, I feel works extremely well. In our UK partnership of four schools, we believe that not only do we have working partners in UAE, but over the term of our project, have developed friendships. The structure of a CC partnership is indeed, just that. A partnership. This entails, agreed ideas which develop through discussion during our visits to each country. These ideas become joint decisions, respecting culture and differences in lifestyle and teaching curriculum. I believe as a working partnership, we achieve this which equates to our successful work together.

As a partnership, we decide on topics which, to a certain extent, we are already working on in our schools. These are then developed; for example, this term we are creating a joint poetry book including stories and pictures created by students. The poems and short stories may already be part of the curriculum plan within our partnership schools, but pictures and translations can be added and then collated to make an International Book of Poetry and Short Stories. This will be distributed between our countries, shared with students, staff and families.

Most of our resources are uploaded and shared on British Council’s website, Schools Online. Although, there is nothing more wonderful than opening a package addressed to school containing work prepared by students in another country. The excitement and anticipation on students’ faces as the package is opened is wonderful. They then can actually touch and handle the resources sent and have a more tangible aspect of the partnership than accessing a website.

This year, we have decided to create resources that are shared and created jointly e.g. our poetry book. Although these will be collated in UK and then sent via the website, they can be printed off to form a physical book which can then be given as gifts to visitors of the school or shared with parents and friends.

Annually, our academy holds an International event where students can take part and interact in activities linked to other cultures. Our International partnerships play a large role in this event; displays of work undertaken, photographs, artifacts exchanged from partner schools are all used to enhance these activities.

Assemblies are delivered with powerpoints and presentations of visits made to our partner schools. This year, they will be based on our visit to UAE and the wonderful discoveries we experienced there..

Students and their learning curve.

Our students were thrilled to be able to write to students in UAE. They chose to write letters either by hand or using ICT including pictures and design. They were keen to inform their ‘friends’ about themselves their family, hobbies, school and friends asking questions of their fellow students in UAE.

The greatest activity was opening the envelope from Al Ghazali School and seeing the brightly coloured postcards full of images of UAE.

Another activity we undertook was regarding the use of water within our countries. UK Students worked together in groups to produce a powerpoint explaining about water as a resource. Images and facts were included about our largest reservoir, our general use of water and how to preserve it. These were then uploaded onto the British Council Schools Online website.

Students enjoyed accessing the website to explore water issues in UAE and the project work undertaken there. This was completed during tutor-time.

Our UK partners truly believe in the benefits gained from a project such as this. It enables students to realize that the world is not such a vast thing. That, actually, children are exactly the same in thoughts, ideas, likes, dislikes and behaviour even if their mother tongue and skin colour is different.

I would like to think that student friendships are built during International projects; however, I am not sure that these will be sustainable once the project ends. However, I believe staff friendships created during the three years may well develop and continue; and, I can speak from experience as I have a very good friend in Italy whom I met during a Comenius partnership eight years ago. We often visit each other on a personal level and work together on a professional one.

Connecting Classrooms does indeed connect classrooms, but it does much more than that. It connects people. It enables culture and lifestyle to be explored, yes, but it bridges those gaps not investigated in text books.