My goal as
acting head of department of student development is to find a meaningful way to
contribute to the student development department’s overall improvement and
positive influence on staff and student behaviors. My first few months has
become a rich and challenging journey of discovery, working hard with my team
at the department during our biweekly meet up sessions and teachers in school
and also to learn from other school(s) in terms of student development.
It began in
earnest the last ten days when I had the opportunity to attend and learn about
purposeful whole-school planning and implementation of programs during the Character
and Citizenship Education (CCE) Mentor Training with another middle manager colleague.
This training is my first formal introduction to CCE. During the training, we got
a better understanding about our roles as CCE mentor in effecting and
influencing the whole school implementation of CCE. We started off with a
self-reflection to describe the school’s levels of implementation of CCE and found
ourselves at level 1 out of the 4 levels where our school is just starting to
look into planning and implementing of CCE. Moving forward towards level 2, we
hope to made attempts to put in place some processes and structures for CCE in
our school. There were two others schools out of the 11 schools attending the
training who also rated themselves at level 1. We also found ourselves scoring
low in the various key competencies categorized according to the 4 levels of
implementation. This self-reflection exercise has helped us better understand
our strengths and areas for development in CCE. We were then introduced to a
model that I will adopt to strengthen whole-school planning and implementation
of CCE. We then applied the principles of lesson design and drafted work plans.
We also learnt about the pedagogical approaches and assessment for learning
strategies in CCE in order to guide and support our fellow teachers to become
effective in the teaching and learning of CCE. Finally, we ended with the
support for the teaching and learning of CCE by coming out a draft of values
into action plan and communication plan.
After these
training experiences, I believe that my significant contribution is to
emphasize on clarity regarding the direction of the student development
department as a whole is trying to go so that there is better alignment among
the units of the departments. My reflection
two weeks ago on teacher-learner relationship is one area which I felt must be
strengthened in my school. At the same time, efforts must be made to develop in
our students the “soft” skills and values integral to meeting the challenges in
life. My first commitment is to focus on putting in systems and processes to
achieve excellence and R3ICH values – R3ICHE, both personally as well as
professionally in school. For too long (5 years ago since the student
development department was first created), the general consensus from subject
heads was that the student development department has impacted little on the
students in the school – though I have no doubt that much time and effort was
put into the endeavor. While I believe that we had come up this year with a
clearer overview for a holistic student development education, I am not so sure
if all teachers or even subject heads in the school are prepared to embrace the
caliber of change required of them to implement so as to make a significant
impact on our students. I see some teachers had lost their passion and groups
within department still working in isolation. I can describe the current
situation of the student development department as resembling scattered mass of
arrows that are pointing in as many directions as well as degrees. So how do I
intend to go about aligning these arrows? To be continued…
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