School Clubs

School clubs is a popular concept in the Occident and it encourages students to explore subjects which are sometimes not offered in school. A little about clubs and its benefits are included in the presentation:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ZM2cVCG63sTrTomk_GE4b6WeP00PFnE-_mPf1QecjM0/edit#slide=id.g1f9a507e4c_0_18

We (a classmate and I) introduced this concept at our school. We got the idea approved by our school authorities and to begin with this process we had to plan out how exactly would the clubs run e.g: when will the meetings be held, how to accommodate the students, how to make sure the decorum is maintained, what will the school require to do, etc. After going through this process, we gathered our grade’s students who might be  willing to and be a good fit for sunning these clubs. We held meetings to shortlist the prospective clubs and then decided who the presidents will be for the clubs. We again had to get the clubs approved by our school as there were few options which weren’t viable.

After we had the clubs sorted out, we distributed the responsibilities to the presidents of the club, worked out a plan as to how will the decorum be maintained, who will be responsible to get the permissions from the transport department for early-ins , etc.

After almost a 2 months process, we were ready to introduce this idea to the students of Middle school. All of us took to going to classes and talking about our clubs, putting up posters and after the whole MYP knew about the clubs, we sent out google forms to collect data as to who would prefer which club and their priorities so we could channelize overloads.

The Learning Outcomes covered for this activity were L2, L3, L4, L5,  and L6.

L2- Demonstrate that challenges have been undertaken, developing new skills in the process:

The idea of school cubs is something new especially for it to fit into the Indian mindset. I can say this because the idea of school club was implemented by our school once and then another set of students, our seniors, had tried it too. However, seeing no measurable success, when we approached our school with this idea, they were quite skeptical about it. We didn’t give up there because we knew we had put it a lot of efforts in planning and we had thought it through. We had strategies to make the clubs work. And our efforts proved to be worthwhile as we convinced out school to let us go ahead with the idea and we did succeed in keeping the clubs running. Through this experience, I developed a skill of marketing, organizing, and constantly changing the strategies to see an idea grow into a fruitful episode of my life.

L3-Demonstrate how to initiate and plan a CAS experience & L4-Show commitment to and perseverance in CAS experiences

To start the clubs at school, we first had to introduce the idea to the students and also impart the benefits of taking part in it. So the two of us who had taken up the responsibility for bringing this concept to life, we came to school early to work on presentations, to plan out the process, and to do the background work of getting permissions. It was a pain to get up early and come to school before our classmates came and we had to sacrifice our lunch breaks when we catch up with our friends and eat in order to work on schedule but we didn’t mind because we were keen to achieve our goal. And as discussed earlier, we planned a lot of meetings, we maintained sheets and docs to organize our work and invested extra time in sending reminders to Club’s heads to update the planning sheets, take permission, send reminder emails to participants, etc.

L5-Demonstrate the skills and recognize the benefits of working collaboratively:

My classmate and I made a good team I think. We were proactive and did the tasks which were pending if the other one was occupied with other tasks or assignments. I don’t think we could have pulled it up without one another.

L6- Demonstrate engagement with issues of global significance

Being a president of Environment Club, I think I brought ends together. India is believed to be lacking the motivation to work for environment and I thought by imparting the knowledge of the consequences of our actions to the student sat a very young age, I would be able to contribute to the society in a positive way. However, to my surprise, when we sat together to decide which issues we wanted to focus on, the students had so many ideas and so many instances they could relate to. The most surprising thing was that they were able to identify which actions of the people in our society were causing harm to the environment.  We made a list of the things we could work on and then started off with a project of conserving house sparrows whose population is dwindling. We listed down causes of the problem then decided what can we, as students, do about it and came up with innovative ideas. We made nest boxes for them and placed them at relevant places in our school building and we also installed such nest boxes at our homes to promote this idea in our neighborhoods. I feel very happy about this as I think such baby steps will lead to a big change.

Planning evidences:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1yqdAdcDDv9EkQ5giJ0Anf5nyzeofkTQ4ggvkYExgnrU/edit#gid=1177919634

https://docs.google.com/document/d/15MoMNJmhIpXBvndK0ZENmyHgJzCKwd5DHDuv0zneWkY/edit

 

 

 

 

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