St Cyprian’s School student participation

Posted: 01 August 2018

student participation

Dave Carr from St Cyprian’s shares his school’s approach on selecting, preparing and evaluating student participation in Round Square exchanges, conferences, inter-school collaborations and international service projects.

Author and position: Dave Carr, Director of Co-curricular activities

School: St Cyprian’s School is a boarding and day school for girls located in Cape Town, South Africa, with enviable views of Table Mountain. The school is also a member of the G20 Schools Group.

Introduction

Round Square offers students many opportunities for experiential learning through its exchange programmes, international service projects, conferences and collaborative projects with other schools.

The exchange programme is perhaps the most demanding of these opportunities. At St Cyprian’s School, for example, we invite students to apply for a three-month exchange, providing a full immersion programme where students participate as fully functioning students of the host school.

The process for selection appeared to be rigorous, however, in some instances, students who we considered excellent candidates did not have the best experience possible or struggled to readjust on return from exchange. For this reason, we took a closer look at how we communicated exchange information, selected students and prepared them for this opportunity.

Prior to this review, Senior School students in Grade 8 were first introduced to the exchange programme during their orientation programme. In Grade 9, the application year, we presented a detailed explanation of the exchange criteria and process. Interested students and parents were then invited to a question and answer evening.

In selecting students for exchange, we evaluated students according to their academic performance, behaviour record, and general participation in Round Square. Keen students applied for selection through submitting a motivational essay that included details of their participation in school life as well as their verified mid-year academic results. This was supplemented by a report from academic staff commenting on the student’s suitability to be an exchange student. Using this information, we invited a short list of students to an interview with the school management, counsellor and staff in charge of the exchange programme.

Keen to improve the process, we looked at all areas of our exchange preparation, and recognised there were some areas where we could make improvements. For example, in assessing students’ academic abilities, we had focused on their marks but not accounted for their ability to catch-up on the school work they would miss whilst on exchange.

We also reflected on the way that the exchange programme was promoted to students by exchange ‘graduates’. When students participated in exchanges, they enthusiastically shared the many benefits they enjoyed but rarely touched on the difficulties they encountered and the skills needed to overcome these, such as how it feels to be put in a situation outside of your comfort zone. This resulted in a skewed perspective on the experience of exchange and meant that students entered the application process starry eyed with expectations but unclear on the more complex reality.

A further aspect of exchanges that we had not addressed with applicants was the likelihood that they would return as a ‘changed person’ – and how family and friends might respond to this change, when their lives had remained ‘as normal’.

Our interrogation of this process made us ask ourselves whether we really knew our students well enough, did the students know themselves well enough, and did the students and their parents understand the exchange experience?

As a consequence of these discussions, we developed our own Exchange Skills Development Programme (ESDP) to select and prepare students for the best exchange experience. The EDSP course is now mandatory for our Grade 9 students who wish to be considered for exchange.

Planning

The EDSP has been developed over the last five years based on feedback from a number of sources (primarily the exchange student doing both informal and formal reflections and reports) and conversations with parents, academic staff and exchange co-ordinators.

The EDSP is a three-day programme hosted at an off-campus adventure centre with activities to simulate, where possible, conditions that the students may encounter when they are out of their comfort zone on exchange. The activities explore areas such as students’ abilities to work independently and as part of a team, and their ability to face problems and ask for help and support.

Activity

The ESDP programme extends staffs’ understanding of students’ capabilities to help them formulate their own recommendations on which students to select for exchange. It provides our students with a carefully thought out series of activities testing their emotional, mental and physical capabilities thus providing greater self-awareness of their strengths and development areas.

The students benefit from:

The activities call upon students to work individually and in groups. The groups change constantly so that the students get to know each other and themselves in various situations.

In some of the group activities, a group must finish the task with all members at the same time. In other instances, task results are calculated as a combined total of individual scores and times.

A physical endurance exercise can have the rule that the group has to be together all the time, not less than a metre apart for the entire activity, yet, for the next rotation, this can change, and the result is calculated on the total of each person’s individual time.

These moderations affect the emotional dynamics of the group and the reactions of individuals.

Examples of our activities include:

Students take part in a variety of activities including: a cooking competition; running relay; canoeing and swimming; constructing models, containers, crossword puzzles and word searches; assembling structures while blindfolded; culture simulation games, such as the Alpha Beta game to explore different types of communities. The Alpha Beta game is a simulation of two very different experiences. One group has a very open and fun interaction while the other group is the opposite. Students are moved between the two experiences.

After each activity, students are asked to reflect on both their feelings and contribution to the activity. This reflection is important as it provides them with information that they can use to improve their self-awareness. Reflections are written and can be discussed individually or in groups.

One key activity used in the programme is the Johari window tool. Students use the Johari window tool to reflect on each of their activities identifying five of the Johari window adjectives that best describe their involvement. Johari presents a baseline measurement of the student’s development before, during and after the exchange programme is completed, in areas similar to the Discovery Framework: Communication Skills, Self Awareness and Teamwork.

In all their activities, students are observed by the exchange co-ordinator, the President’s Award co-ordinator and the school counsellor. Staff create their own reports based on their observance of students during the ESDP. The report includes a combination of data and analysis. Scores are recorded for a student’s participation in the endurance and problem-solving activities according to their abilities. The scoring system is rated from 5 to 1 with 5 being maximum involvement and 1 being minimum involvement. Students are scored on ability as well as attitude. A gifted athlete will not automatically score 5 if they have not shown compassion and self-awareness in regard to their group.

Staff also record observances on whether a student has demonstrated the attributes and personal characteristics that we feel are important for a successful exchange including independence, initiative, maturity, emotional stability, inquisitiveness, openness to new ideas, flexibility, adaptability and ability to communicate. When evaluating students for selection, we ensure we canvas a wide spectrum of input. Understanding of students can differ from those who coach sport, subject teachers and staff who have observed them during the programme.

Challenges

In seeking to convey the reality of the exchange experience, we tried to get students on exchange to do a daily diary-type reflection. We decided, however, that this would be too subjective and complicated. Each exchange experience is unique for many reasons such as the country, school, and duration of the exchange: one would need a considerable number of these reports to give a fair picture of what their experience might be like. It was also difficult to keep acutely personal and private reflections out of these reports, reflections that might be related more to the individual’s character and life experience rather than the exchange experience itself. In many cases, it also added more pressure to the exchanges themselves.

Impact

The students’ Johari window analysis reflections have provided us with a picture of the type of students who choose to go on exchange following the ESDP course, and tracks them against some of the Discovery Skills. Our analysis has shown that they are more likely to see themselves as independent, friendly, adaptable and brave giving us the confidence that the ‘right’ students are putting themselves forward for the opportunity. By continuing with the Johari window analysis through the exchange and after, we are also able to track the students’ development in these areas.

The students keep a journal of their involvement in the course as well as results of the specific activities they participated in. They are encouraged to identify areas that they are strong in, and areas that they want to improve in, so that they can work towards opportunities that they want to participate in, in the future.

The popularity of the programme has grown over the past four years.  In fact, we’ve accommodated students who did not really want to go on exchange but wanted to experience the programme.

In 2016, we expanded the ESDP to accommodate all students who intended to participate in any Round Square opportunity and the programme’s name changed to Round Square Skills Development Programme (RSSDP).

38 students – almost half of the Grade 9 students – voluntarily attended the recent three-day weekend programme. An extra activity included in the programme was a detailed explanation of each of the opportunities. On completion of the programme, we asked our students to indicate which Round Square opportunity they would possibly apply for in the future and to rank these in order of preference. Of the 38 students attending the programme, 16 indicated they wanted to take part in an exchange, 11 conferences, 7 RSIS and 3 The Eastern Cape Project.

In conclusion, the RSSDP is an important tool for students to assess themselves, to understand the requirements of the various programmes on offer and to see which programme or programmes will best suit them and give them the opportunity to grow and develop. The use of a formalised measuring tool such as the Johari Window allows the students to benchmark themselves and to be cognitive of other attributes that could add to their development and to which they can knowingly work towards.

The Future

The course will now be delivered in two phases in Grade 8 and 9 so that all students have the opportunity to participate. Elements are also combined into our existing ‘grade camps’.

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