Implementing collaborative lesson plans at St. George’s Grammar School
Posted: 03 December 2019
Schools involved
- St. George’s Grammar School
- Belgrano Day School,
- Mayo College
- Providence Day School
- Scotch Oakburn College
IDEALS
- Leadership
- Service
Discoveries
- Communication skills
- Inquisitiveness
- Appreciation for diversity
- Problem solving
- Sense of responsibility
- Tenacity
- Courage
- Self-awareness
- Teamwork
- Inventivness
- Compassion
Curriculum area
Pastoral care
Age range
Middle years
Overview
Last year St. George’s Grammar School took part in a collaborative project with a number of other Round Square Schools to develop a series of RSDF lesson plans around the International Day of Happiness.
As part of that collaborative project the lesson plans were generated swapped, piloted and refined among the group, and were designed to develop learners’ understanding of what makes them happy and how they can do acts in their local community and school to bring happiness to others.
As a school St. George’s Grammar wrote a three-part lesson plan entitled ‘Spread the smiles’, to enable students to explore what makes them and others happy by looking at ‘The Five Love Languages’, and to design a campaign for happiness to uplift the spirit of a community.
Planning
Following the first zoom meeting with the other Round Square schools involved in the collaboration where we discussed ideas for the theme of happiness, the lesson development and feedback process, the expected timelines for the collaboration initiative and the overall aims and outcomes for the project. Caron, Ale and I – as representatives of our school on this project, met and shared possible ideas around a happiness day that could link to things that had happened in the school or teaching ideas we had.
The template supplied was then very helpful in putting the lessons into a structure that any teacher could make use of either as is or tweaked as we did with some of the lessons. This helped us ensure we had all the necessary information, activities and resources.
Activity
Firstly, we looked at how we could use it as a whole school project. We looked at the different lessons and then tried to fit them to the different grades in terms of interest and in terms of other activities they were covering at the time.
Once we had assigned the lessons we looked at how best to split them over three half hours that we had available to us. The first lesson for each of the Grades was a brief overview of the discoveries so that they could relate to them in the lessons that followed as our school has not had overt exposure to the Discoveries.
They were then followed by the different lessons see the overall plan labelled “Overview of the Happiness plan for mentors”. We did it in our homeroom/tutor/mentor groups which have 13-15 pupils in them – this made discussions easier.
Each staff member was given the resources a week before the first lessons – the Discoveries, the lesson plans, the links etc. that they may need for the lesson so that they did not have to do any work but could nonetheless make it their own. Each week we had a feedback session in our staff meeting to better plan for future lessons. At the same time we did a quick run through of what they were expected to cover the next week.
I tried to make it as little extra work for staff as possible otherwise there was sure to be resistance as the teachers are quite loaded already.
Challenges
There weren’t any major obstacles as the lessons did not require a lot of added resources and the online videos etc were free.
The one obstacle was teacher buy-in but as the lessons were well structured, on the whole everyone got involved positively. The main challenge being that although this was seen as a way of introducing the Discoveries many staff felt that the first half hour was too loaded and they would have liked more time.
We also did the activity in the last three weeks before exams and the pupils felt that the timing for doing the ‘Random acts of kindness’ project was a bit too demanding close to examinations – they wanted more time as they had quite ambitious ideas. So we met with opposition but the staff showed them that small things could make a difference by getting them each a good luck chocolate with a small note. They gave them an extra hour in class and then they quickly got on board and the little things they did like messages of appreciation on teacher’s doors and assisting the ground staff cleaning really enhanced the sense of community in the school. Initially, also when we asked another group to record acts of kindness they found it difficult as they felt that you shouldn’t boast about acts of kindness. We explained since it was a competition it was okay and they could also use pseudonyms.
Impact
The staff and the pupils all had a brief introduction to the Discoveries and seemed to really enjoy the different discussions they had in their groups. The staff said that we needed to continue the discussions with the pupils about the Discovery framework and I think this led to a lot of interest in a RSDF professional learning workshop. I also had teachers referring me to videos and articles on happiness. So it made them focus on happiness, which is really positive.
The pupils discovered that there are many little ways you can be kind and make people happy without doing big things that cost a lot of money. It really is about “using what you have in your hands”. The groups that helped the service staff worked really well with them and have a new respect for the very physical work our ground staff do. I believe the ground staff also felt very supported. The discussions of the ‘Happiness index’ led to discussion on both the challenges and the positives we have as South African’s – a valuable discussion to enhance character education. Personally, in preparing the lessons and drawing from others lessons, I discovered new resources and my own learning and ideas for my teaching were enhanced.
Long term
We will definitely run future projects like this and also try to build the Discoveries into our day to day lessons and activities. It is good for the whole school to be working on a theme at the same time and for the teachers to share ideas of teaching. This is particularly valuable in a small school like ours where many staff are single person departments and so don’t always get to collaborate on their teaching ideas.
I think long term it would also be good to do other collaborative work with Round Square Schools as staff and at a time when the pupils can collaborate and learn from each other too. This would be one of the huge advantages of Round Square.
Advice
Facilitating a collaboration:
- Have one person to link the schools and organise times to set up “meeting”
- Give people tips on not being in a room that echoes, terminology like leaving the meeting – means log off and log on again etc.
- Set up templates so that all the lesson plans were similar
- Give a reasonable amount of time for feedback and make changes before actually teaching the lessons.
- Setting up collaboration opportunities by saying if people want to collaborate. Here you may want to add dates or times to be more specific as school holidays seemed to be a problem when we wanted our pupils to collaborate with those in other schools.
- Allow enough time for the schools to run the projects as schools have different challenges accommodating extra projects depending on the time of year and which hemisphere they are in.
- Feedback after the project – both verbal and written is very valuable as again we can learn from how each school runs the project.
- Using a very general theme was also very good as so many ideas came from it.
Running a project in a school:
- There must be a team involved in the project not just the Round Square Rep. This makes designing lessons and teaching them/trying them out more effective.
- If you are doing a whole school plan like we did it is important is does not add to the teaching load of staff and is easy to do.
- Draw up a clear plan for each group and ensure that you have enough time to cover everything effectively.
- Make sure the staff have all the resources they need.
- Support them if they are hitting resistance from the pupils.
- Get regular feedback so you can improve the project and then staff also feel like what they are doing matters and that they are adding to growing the project.
- Choose your time of year carefully
- Ensure that the pupils are not overwhelmed by the tasks but guide them to be realistic about what they can do without discouraging plausible big ideas.
- Look for new ways to do a similar project.
Author: Kerith Gibbs, High School Teacher, St. George’s Grammar School