Checkmates- Final Year

Thoughts for my Final Year

Checkmates is a service where we use Chess as a tool to interact with kids from underprivileged backgrounds,  this will be the its fifth year as  service and my final year as it’s service leader. Going into my final year my main focuses were:

• Maintaining the everyday running of the service (obviously)
• Creating a team of individuals capable of running and growing the service once I leave
• Choosing a potential service leader for next year to head this team

I am right now very happy with the Checkmates team, made mostly out of ninth and tenth graders capable of continuing the service for another two years before leaving, all of them reliable and mostly diligent. I have already  chosen a student to act as co-service leader with me in my final year so that they can gain experience to do the work alone next year, or with another co-leader if that is helpful.

Business as Usual

The usual work of teaching students chess is ongoing, we currently work in set roles for different student skill levels. Certain teachers nearly always teach less experienced students whilst others focus on mid and more skilled students, this specialization helps us deal with a  group of students with varying amounts of time spent with us. Having a new students constantly coming and going makes a stable curriculum difficult to maintain and so we attempt a more adaptive style where we allow them to play and go through them finding weak points, gaps in knowledge to fill. Though we manage this varied group by using the more skilled students to teach the novices, this helps solidify more complex ideas for the more experienced students and they are at times better at explaining some concepts to the novices. Obviously it is also just a useful experience for the experienced students to practice explaining, for building their confidence and communication.