This week in DFC Laos

More happenings at Sompanya school this week:

2 groups (Project 1 - Bathroom cleanliness and Project 2 - Inclusion) have been preparing for the imagine stage.

Project 1 - Students reflected more on the reasons why the bathrooms are dirty, and found that most of the problem is linked to behaviour, a lack of rules about how to use bathrooms correctly, lack of awareness of hygiene and distribution of students to bathrooms. They created a survey to observe the bathrooms during three different times of the day, to see who is using which bathrooms, what kind of behaviour is happening and when the bathrooms are dirtiest. They will observe and record results until Monday and then analyse the results to help them design solutions in the imagine stage to target the real, observed behaviour (rather than what they imagine is happening or blaming the wrong people for the problem).

Project 2 - Students have been led through a series of activities designed to help them gain empathy for people who are excluded, and to help them realise that their own behaviour and actions are part of the problem, therefore will need to be part of the solution. They brainstormed examples of positive/ inclusive and negative/exclusive behaviour towards people, role played both types of behaviour, and reflected on how it felt to be both included and friendly, and excluded in a group. They watched a clip of the bullying movie and noticed that the whole community was involved in stopping bullying in school - teachers, students, and parents. They also identified strengths and weaknesses in their own character and behaviour to realise that no-one is perfect, and they learned that while people may look different on the outside, inside we all have the same type of feelings. The students made a strength quilt, and each piece of the quilt contained a piece with the student’s name and strengths written by each other. The pieces were tied together to represent that the strength of the whole community increases when we work together and celebrate positives in each other, rather than trying to bring people down.

In addition, both groups summarised the week by coming back together and explaining to each other what they’d been up to - using the what, how, why framework:

What - what parts of DFC process have you done so far?

How - how have you participated in the process - what activities?

Why - why did you personally decide to join this project?

They also learned and sung the ‘I can’ song and started to make a progress chart of DFC at Sompanya to keep the whole school community up to date with what they’re doing.

This week in DFC Laos

More exciting progress at Sompanya School!

Most days started off as one group - practising the ‘I can’ song together and starting each session with a student-led warmer game. This was to keep morale up, as the process is quite long and the students are not used to project-based learning and the level of thinking and energy required to sustain the project long term. Students also put up their progress chart and updated the feel stage with photos and captions.

Then the students continued in the IMAGINE stage in their respective groups.

Project 1 - Students analysed the results from their observations of all the bathrooms on level 2 and 3, and started to imagine solutions targeting the root causes and real situation - key times of the day, groups of students, hygiene awareness and appropriate behaviour in a toilet.

Project 2 - Students started to imagine solutions for the inclusion problem. At first, they had trouble doing it in smaller groups, so we switched to brainstorming together. We needed to keep reminding students of what the problem and root causes were, and asking ‘how is that solving the problem?’ and ‘what do you want to achieve by doing that?’. They had a lot of ideas and voted on the ones they thought best fit the problem and they could implement in a week - a singing and drama activity, planting trees for friendship, and organising a football game for solidarity.