Contributed by LUIS TIRTASANJAYA LIOE
Present situation:
In general, CCE lessons are designed by the CCE Committee for the Form Teachers to adapt according to their own class' needs. This flow in itself is already good as it gives the Form Teachers the clear objective of the lesson and the recommended flow, strategies and resources to support the lesson, which become the base for the form teachers to customise it further. While this model has empowered the teachers to take ownership of the CCE lessons, I feel there are opportunities for the teachers to tap on the empowerment of their students as eventually the character education is about the students. By playing active roles in co-designing CCE lessons with the teacher, the students would also develop themselves in characters and values at different levels of skills and maturity. They will facilitate them to "live" the values at the practical level.
Improvement:
I am teaching Sec 4 this year, so I have been working with the students since Sec 3. When forming new class committees in January 2020, I had a series of conversation with the previous class committee and the new class committee on the situation of the class and what the class needs. This is part of engaging them to think about their roles as student leaders in class on how they could contribute to the development of positive class culture and how they lead them to achieve the common goals. Through these conversations, I realised that there are potentials for CCE lessons to be co-designed with the students. In one of the lessons, on 20 Jan 2020, the theme was on Character Strengths and how to get the students to think of their strengths and apply them in real life scenarios. Instead of looking into suggested scenarios in the lesson plan, I actually shared the lesson objective with the Class Committee and got them to think about designing a lesson to meet this objective. The students came up with a game called "Character Wheels" where they designed a wheel consists of 24 character strengths and the game involved spinning it to get a student think about how to use the chosen strength to solve certain real life problems. For the real-life problems, they came up with their own scenarios crafted from their own experiences or the stories that they heard from their peers. They also came up with facilitation plan and roles. The session went very smoothly as the class members could relate to the games designed by their friends, and they also found the scenarios highly relevant as it came from the ground. Thus, although the session was conducted in light-hearted manner through fun games, the discussion went deep as they all took the scenarios seriously. I, as teacher, also had wider room to place myself as participants and positioned myself as a learner who tried to learn using certain character strength to respond to the situation. After that fruitful lesson, I asked the class committee if they were willing to share the resources that they have developed to the CCE team so that students from other classes/levels could benefit from it as the scenarios are also relevant to general student population. They agreed and generously agreed to have these resources shared and used by their peers in school. The CCE team was very grateful for the contribution and they started curating the materials and consider modifying them for future lesson plans. Furthermore, the CCE team also noted the design model (having form teachers co-design the lesson with students in class committee and have them facilitated the lesson) to be refreshing and something to be considered for other to emulate. In future, we might want to consider this model of working and having students' active contribution to the resources as one of the repertoire of strategies for CCE team and Form Teachers to develop and conduct CCE lessons.
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