“We need students who can learn how to learn, who can discover how to push themselves…”
-Seth Godin
“Thank goodness I never went to school. It would have rubbed off some of the originality”
-Beatrix Potter
These quotes greeted my business English students at the Trinco Jesuit Academy, and they kicked off a discussion about what factors lead to quality education.
Over the course of the following weeks my students watched TED talks, read news articles, and debated the merits of different approaches to education. They then crafted letters to the Ministry of Education, expressing their ideas on how to improve Sri Lanka’s education system.
As a final class project, each student had to choose a part of their letter to record on video, these were then put together into one cohesive video.
I’m grateful for the Jesuit Academy of Trincomalee for letting me come up with creative lesson plans. My students could have worked out of a textbook for the month we worked on this, but instead they were forced to develop their own ideas. This project worked on critical thinking, public speaking, and writing skills. It also forced my students to address problems in their community.