CAS Project Reflection

I’ve finally finished my CAS project and have learned much from it on the process of teaching, organizing and teamwork. My CAS project is assisting in the organization of my schools UN day activities, I discuss what exactly this entails and how we prepared in my preparation post. This post will cover what went well, what did not go well and what I learned from the experience.

Overall I believe the day went well as when I asked the different student groups many seemed interested in the topics discussed and had interesting points and questions with regards to gender and economics, and the UN goals. However, as I was supervising half a dozen different groups (alongside one other supervisor) and helping, it was expected that some were not as fluid as others. Problems faced include but are not limited to technical issues, some group members not being engaged, and some people not staying to the schedule.

Technical issues with the projector and other technical tools used resulted in significant delays, however with support each of the groups were able to adapt and persevere through the challenge. The groups I could not help I made sure to find support for from the tech support, and where there were problems we found other ways to communicate the information without letting the problem waste more time than it had to. Though I admit to making the fatal mistake of not first testing the projectors and quiz software in all the different rooms individually before the day.

The problem of some group presenters not being fully engaged was a more serious problem but we managed to mediate it by making sure to have at least one effective communicator who was knowledgeable on the presentation in every group. I made sure to go to all the different rooms to support presenters and encourage less active presenters, this process of identifying and adapting group mate of varying levels of interest was a useful exercise in developing my ability to collaborate with others.

Another significant issue we faced was general issues with time management, some groups finishing too early and some too late and thus missing information towards the end. We had already taken precautions for people finishing too early and so had extended content, mainly quizzes and fun videos, and the problem of people finishing too late generally wasn’t too harsh as  it would usually be concluding sections lost, in these cases I had people rush to the question period to fill in holes rather than just the formal conclusion. The root of this problem was insufficient presentation practice, but this was not a lesson in communication, rather it was a further lesson in collaboration as the reason for their being insufficient practice was low engagement by a number of the presenters. There is no easy problem for the solution as many presenters were not free for the important practice sessions, in future to mediate this problem I will attempt sessions and a different times to fit different schedules. To improve upon this problem I will begin using sub leaders for each presentation group, while I cannot easily manage such a large groups of kids it should be possible with several intermediaries. Overall this was an extremely valuable learning experience.