Just wondering about when things just don’t go as planned, at all.
As we all know, life hardly every goes as planned. C’est la vie. This is particularly true when you live and work abroad. We accept it, we move on or we go back home.
When things don’t go as planned at school, it is even more frustrating because it involves students. Every year, at Academia Cotopaxi, we run a week without walls called Discover Ecuador. High School students and teachers went on the week of September 5th. The Senior class, however, does not go on Discover Ecuador but we organise a Class Retreat. The idea is to recognise that Seniors are busy and the year full of challenges including, but not limited to, IB requirements, university applications and general class work. I started these kinds of retreats back in Istanbul and here in Ecuador we added a service component. For 2016, planning started back in May and the actual retreat was at the beginning of September: we organised a three-day retreat in a nice country club and a two-day service trip with a well-established organisation that helps people in need build their house. We were going to work hard for three days and help building a house for two days.
The week before the retreat, however, the country club makes lots of complications for the payment and we had to cancel. I was worried about telling students, but I was happily surprised to see how they accepted the news. So did their parents. The next day, the organisation for the service trip tells us that we cannot go as originally planned. The people who we were going to help build a house made a fraudulent declaration and already had a house in Quito… At that point, a few days before the retreat, you start thinking that everything is getting very complicated. We managed to move the service trip, but that was going to be completely cancelled a few days later.
Our Senior Retreat did not go as planned this year, not at all, since we had to stay at school for a week. We had to come up with a new schedule, we had impromptu brainstorming sessions to solve arising issues due to all those cancelations, we kept writing to parents to keep them updated, we asked students suggestions for what to do next, we wanted to be flexible and at the same time we knew that students had a lot of work to do... And despite all that, we had a great week: students came to school every day, they worked hard, teachers were resourceful and they supported students along the way for their different tasks and assignments. For the last day, students even organised a fun afternoon on the field involving throwing balloons and lots of water … A great way to finish the week together.
That week reminded me of that sentence by Chris Kyriacou in his Essential Teaching Skills: « a teacher’s effectiveness in the classroom is very dependent on how well they can modify and adapt their actions in the light of how well the lesson is going. » Clearly, this is true for inside and outside the classroom. The 2016 Senior retreat ended up being a great bonding experience for students and teachers despite the fact that everything that we had carefully planned failed miserably. So I am just wondering how much planning I should consider for the next retreat…
For what it’s worth…
