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The first international school in Sihanoukville- the Idea

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When I hear, I forgetWhen I see, I rememberWhen I do, I understand

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• “Play is the answer to how anything new comes about.” - Jean Piaget

• The playful mind thrives on ambiguity, complexity, and improvisation—the very things needed to innovate and come up with creative solutions to the massive global challenges in economics, the environment, education, and more.

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• “Games have a positive educational influence that no one can appreciate who has not observed their effects. Children who are slow, dull, and lethargic; who observe but little of what goes on around them; who react slowly to external stimuli; who are, in short, slow to see, to hear, to observe, to think, and to do, may be completely transformed in these ways by the playing of games.”-Jessie H. Bancroft

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• Play is changing dramatically from a world invented by children to a world prescribed by parents and other adults. – “the resourcefulness of children’s culture has

eroded, as children have become less skilled at transforming everyday objects into playthings.” Howard Chudacoff

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• Many Montessori schools were begun by parents who were concerned that their own children have a solid educational experience.

• Recent research demonstrates that success in school depends on what happens before kindergarten. Simple activities like reading to a preschooler, singing nursery rhymes, and learning the alphabet can set a crucial foundation which is largely missing in Cambodia and set the stage for a lifetime of success.

• Parents today often do have the time or resources to engage in these important activities with their children. Some parents even wonder if they have the know-how to work with their children.

• The work of Piaget and his colleagues clearly shows that a child’s view of the world and reality is different from an adult’s. Children’s limited reasoning ability, coupled with their limited experience, often bring them to conclusions inconsistent with adult logic.

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• Aim is to create an initial pre- and early years school of 30 children aged 3-6.

• Then add more as the first cohort develops – the next stage will be 6-9 in year 2, and then 9-12, 12-15, 15-18 every two years as one age group develops.

• Bigger premises, more schools…Kep, Kampot• This proposition of ADC School is informed by

several developments…

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Developments in IT

Montessori

Developments in understanding

learning

Chinese junior MBA

Mind mapping

NLP

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• We define learning as a process where a living being experiences certain relationships between events and is able to recognize an association between events, and as a consequence, the subject's behaviour changes because of that experience – typically for its betterment

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Developments in IT

Montessori

Developments in understanding

learning

Chinese junior MBA

Mind mapping

NLP

Scientifically proven educational practices and environment that will help children:

1. Realize and develop language as a system, 2.Build confidence, 3.Develop skills in design creativity, problem

solving, system thinking, team working, critical thinking, commerce and project management

4.All from an early age – the foundation or formative years.

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• Nothing could be said about language because that meant you had to use language and try imagining a thought, an idea, without words.

• You can’t, does this make us prisoners of language? • Language isn’t a prison because it is so fabulously

powerful, it is varied and flexible, the Oxford English Dictionary contains full entries for 171,476 words in current use

• Why is English taught using strange, inappropriate and non-relevant concepts – like ‘snow’ in Cambodia?

• Why are American or European businesses used to illustrate business theory?

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• We are inside a bubble. It is a bubble into which we are placed at the moment of our birth.

• At first the bubble is open, but then it begins to close until it has entirely sealed us in.

• That bubble is our perception –of things, people and nature.

• We live inside that bubble all of our lives. And what we witness on its round walls is our own reflection… The thing reflected is our own view of the world.

• That view is first a description, which is given to us at the moment of our birth until all our attention is caught by it and the description becomes a view.

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Is “A” only for apple?

• Children viewed as open systems where a prepared environment consisting of materials and communications help them build internal associations, behaviors, and skills which will help them better versatility to integrate and intervene in a positive way within their communities, society and the world.

• The individual child, their class, thier family, their community, their province, their country, their world – both now and in the future...

• His letter “A’, his interests, the classes’ interests, his community’s interests etc.

• What do our children really need to invent for themselves in such a manufactured, overly structured world?

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• Every year science is pointing to the fact that the brain is a constantly evolving dynamic and reorganizing system which changes throughout one’s life.

• Neuroplasticity, promises to overthrow the centuries-old notion that the brain is fixed and unchanging - the brain is “like a living creature with an appetite.”

• What we feed it to some extent determines how it thrives. When we engage our brains it matters what we do with them.

• Our hands are one limb (play on words intended) of the great triumvirate (the other two being ours ears and eyes) that provides most of our knowledge about the things of the world.

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The human brain consists of about one billion neurons. Each neuron forms about 1,000 connections to other neurons, amounting to more than a trillion connections. If each neuron could only help store a single memory, running out of space would be a problem. You might have only a few gigabytes of storage space, similar to the space in an iPod or a USB flash drive. Yet neurons combine so that each one helps with many memories at a time, exponentially increasing the brain’s memory storage capacity to something closer to around 2.5 petabytes (or a million gigabytes). For comparison, if your brain worked like a digital video recorder in a television, 2.5 petabytes would be enough to hold three million hours of TV shows. You would have to leave the TV running continuously for more than 300 years to use up all that storage.The brain’s exact storage capacity for memories is difficult to calculate. First, we do not know how to measure the size of a memory. Second, certain memories involve more details and thus take up more space; other memories are forgotten and thus free up space. Additionally, some information is just not worth remembering in the first place - Paul Reber, professor of psychology at Northwestern University

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The child’s 5 senses

Neurological filters

Internal or cognitive

sounds and feelings

Linguistic capacities and filters

Linguistic map,

conscious mind,

description

Speech, actions , attitude,

perception

The social world of other people, physical world of objects and machines, and the natural world of plants and animals - all composed of sub-atomic particles

output

input

• Everyone experiences the world differently. We all have different experience of the same reality.

• Children learn best through hands-on activities that involve all five senses.

• Structured and unstructured periods in a learning environment so that children can move freely between activities at their own pace.

• Bateson’s information as "a difference which makes a difference."

• Some 35 percent of children are mastery-style learners, who grasp information step by step.

• Another 35 percent of children are understanding learners, meaning they work with ideas and logic.

• Around 18 percent are interpersonal learners, working better with concrete ideas;

• 12 percent are self-expressive learners, who work better through feelings and seeing pictures.

Moving towardsMoving away from

NecessityPossibility

DifferenceSimilarity

UniversalSpecific

ExternalInternal

SelfOthers

Culture-bound perception

3 – 7 years8 - 10 years

11 - 15 years

17 - 39 years

Age of acquisition of New Language

Lang

uage

Sco

reHigh

Low

Acquiring Learning

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• Children are just as apt at learning sign language as they are at learning "normal" language. – there is plasticity in their learning.

• Development of language precedes more advanced "topics" of thinking, usually involving degrees of abstraction – and different literacies – visual, economic, IT etc

• In the Reggio Emilia approach they have a coined expression: “A child has a hundred languages”. They try to unite and develop all these languages; innovation, construction, fantasy, art, music, dance, building, writing, talking, signing, science, body and soul… The multiple languages are used to help children build knowledge and understand the world around them.

• It also allows for stronger self-reflection.• Reading is a multifaceted process involving word recognition,

comprehension, fluency, and motivation.

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• I associate an aural word with an object or action; the written word adds to my reliable sorting of the MEANING of that word–with all of its associative extensions–in my mind.

• Producing (WRITING) it in cursive script adds again to the selectivity and reliability of my representation of the idea of that word. A pictograph of that word adds again.

• From the operations of my hand in cursive or in drawing, I CONSTRUCT that idea in its sound and visual parts. From ALL of these sources, I add to the richness of my associative elaboration of meaning associations.

• How is the brain is engaged when a person a) sees an image of a hand; or b) when a person thinks about their hand; or c) when a person sees a word that expresses a hand action?

• Intelligently combinative audio-visual-manual training strategies to create the right learning context

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New understandings of how we learn

• Relevant, meaningful activities engage students emotionally and connect with what they already know help build neural connections and long-term memory storage (not to mention compelling classrooms).

• Effective teaching helps students recognize patterns and relationships between things and put new information in context with the old - a crucial part of passing new working memories into the brain's long-term storage areas.

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• In our approach, as in others such as Reggio Emilia we don’t lock our view of children, the pedagogue or the learning process. The world and its people are always changing and that’s why we are against set programs and methods. We cannot copy the way they work in Italy because you have to consider the local people, the environment and culture.

• Coastal resources in Sihanoukville provide the foundation for socioeconomic and environmental activities. Benefits from fishing, tourism industry and port services, provide for local people's livelihood. They should feature strongly in the education.

• The mental processes that go into creating and appreciating art and that drive the social contracts underlying economic and political systems.

• One example is deep history— the study of the peopling of the earth, the diversification of languages and cultures, and the transition from foraging to farming and civilization.

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• Cognitive psychology has shown that the mind best understands facts when they are woven into a conceptual fabric, such as a narrative, mental map, or intuitive theory.

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• The prestigious magazine Science detailed a well-designed study that found some measurable advantages for the Montessori method.

• 59 Montessori students were contrasted with 53 kids who followed traditional methods.

• By the end of kindergarten, the Montessori students outscored the others on standardized tests of reading and math, treated each other better on the playground, and "showed more concern for fairness and justice.“

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• Larry Page and Sergey Brin, self-directed and self-starters Founders of Google.com, Jeff Bezos of amazon.com, some of the youngest and richest people on the planet, credit their Montessori Education for much of their success

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The uncluttered simplicity of the Google search engine page masks that there is an unimaginable amount of data, information and knowledge lying beyond it.

Anyone can access it – if they know the word or idea – they key in the word and get millions of links sorted relevant to their interest and their capacity to ask. They are only held back by their ability to ask, order and blend ideas.

Imagine a school and teaching system which did the same…. showed at the right pace, asked the right questions, the right amount, the right difficulty, the right thing at the right time

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The uncluttered simplicity of the Google search engine page masks that there is an unimaginable amount of data, information and knowledge lying beyond it.

Anyone can access it – if they know the word or idea – they key in the word and get millions of links sorted relevant to their interest and their capacity to ask. They are only held back by their ability to ask, order and blend ideas.

Imagine a school and teaching system which did the same…. showed at the right pace, asked the right questions, the right amount, the right difficulty, the right thing at the right time

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Values Equal Profits: today'sentrepreneurs found businesses that embrace their values with the intent of sharing and spreading those values

Boring is Death: we now can overlay real-time information, collaboration and gaming engines on everything and no one ever needs to be bored again

Think Locally Scale Globally: satisfy a single need for those who are right here, right now, and then quickly replicate that all over the world

The Future is Evenly Distributed: smartphones and the mobile web are enabling children and women everywhere to connect with global markets, changing the face of business and work forever

Virtual is Real: we are not porting ourselves into a virtual reality, but our porting the virtual into our reality, permanently altering what we each experience and perceive and care aboutChild Mogul: for the first time in the history of humanity, the very tools that adults use each day for work, connectivity, influence and wealth generation are in the hands of children. And they better understand, leverage, re-make and profit from these tools.

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New understandings of how we learn - systems

• Everything in the world we know is connected in systems.

• People are connect and act in social systems, goods and services and production move through manufacturing and distribution systems, language itself is a system of letters, words, sentences, paragraphs and stories and reports

• The economy is a system, nature is built from systems, molecules, cells, organisms, populations, ecosystems, planets and so on.

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New understandings of how we learn - systems

• To get his creation to the masses, Edison and his team of engineers in Menlo Park, N.J., spent years building the entire electric system, from light sockets and safety fuses to generating facilities and the wiring network. Only then did the electric light flare into the innovation that lit the world.

• Edison beat all his predecessors at one crucial task: managing the whole process of innovation, from light-bulb moment to final product.

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New understandings of how we learn - senses

• The child, especially from 2.5 - 5 years of age, develops senses of sight, sound, taste, touch, etc. through manipulation and experience with his surroundings.

• Sensorial development in a Montessori class aims at providing the child with a nourishing and rich environment with sensorial materials to help refine, develop and perfect the function of his/her senses.

• Children develop and internalize concepts of qualities, similarities and differences, classification and serialization with regard to length, width, temperature, color, shape, sound, etc. The Sensorial materials also enhance development of other skills, such as language, mathematics and music.

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• Marc Prensky argues that students today, digital natives as he calls them, having grown up in the Digital Age and learn differently from their predecessors, or digital immigrants as he terms them.

• As such, the pedagogical tools we use to educate the Natives are outdated.

• Our entire educational system—primary, secondary, and tertiary—must utilise pedagogies very different from those developed for the Industrial Age model of education, which in many ways is still used today.

• You have witnessed change, we can hardly imagine what it will be like in 15 years time when these kids are ready for university!

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the components

Equipment

Building

Teachers

IT

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• Teachers should be chosen who have a genuine interest in children and have the patience to deal with them.

• The teacher is trying to learn about each child, not just what is typical of 3- or 4-year-olds. The teacher is the researcher, the data gatherer, the learner, and the strategic contributor to the child's capacity to learn. The responsibility is on the community of teachers to provide the contexts for learning.

• The educators is to carefully listen, observe, and document children's work and the growth of community in their classroom and are to provoke, co-construct, and stimulate thinking, and children's collaboration with peers. Teachers are committed to reflection about their own teaching and learning.

• They should have sufficient English so that they can be adequately trained by native English speakers.

• Training should begin immediately• Salary will be based upon strict performance measures,

mostly how they cope and deal with children in the class.• They should exhibit leadership potential – they will

eventually become trainers and managers tomorrow.• Potentials for spin-offs supplying training and consultancy,

even teachers for other schools.

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• IT resources – hardware and software - will have to be costed and installed.

• Where possible touch screens will be used – i.e. Apple i-POD

• Access will be restricted to only those resources deemed relevant for the child

• Video monitoring of the classroom area should be available to parents online as should daily and weekly reports on their child

• Eventually software designer/engineers be hired - potentials for spin-offs supplying software for other schools

• Potential for sponsorship from internet providers

IT

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• A full range of Montessori equipment needs to be purchased or made – this includes child size furniture and brushes mops etc.

• Neilhaus in Australia make very high quality materials but expensive – first purchase from them with a view to replicating

• Hiring of a carpenter or outsourcing to a reputable carpentry firm to make child sized furniture and teaching aids

• Potentials for spin-offs supplying equipment for other schools

Equipment

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• The child has a dialogue with the materials which puts the child in control of the learning process.

• In time, he will be able to see it and will correct his own errors.

• First gain mastery over physical equipment and real social settings before IT

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• A block of wood, in which the child places cylinders of varying sizes in corresponding holes, is an example of control of error designed within the materials.

• If the cylinders are not matched in the correct holes, there will be one cylinder left over. Again, it is not the problem alone that interests the child and aids his progress.

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• First, the difficulty or the error that the child is to discover and understand must be isolated in a single piece of materials.

• This isolation simplifies the child’s task for him and enables him to perceive the problem more readily.

• A tower of blocks will present to the child only a variation in size from block to block – not a variation in size, color, designs, and noises, such as are often found in block towers in toy stores.

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• The materials progress from simple to more complex design and usage. A first set of numerical rods to teach seriation vary in length only.

• After discovering length first set of numerical rods to teach seriation vary in length only. After discovering length sensorially through these rods, a second set, colored red and blue, in one meter dimension, can be used to associate numbers and length and to understand simple problems of addition and subtraction……

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• The materials are designed to prepare the child indirectly for future learning. The development of writing is a good example of this indirect preparation.

• From the beginning, knobs on materials, by which the child lifts and manipulates them, have acted to coordinate his finger and thumb motor action. Through the making of designs that involves using metal insets to guide his movements, the child has developed the ability to use a pencil.

• By tracing sandpaper letters with his finger, he has developed a muscle memory of the patterns of forming letters. When the day arrives that the child is motivated to write, he can do so with a minimum of frustration and anxiety. …..aids the development of self confidence and initiative.

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• The materials begin as concrete expressions of an idea and gradually become more and more abstract representations. A solid wooden triangle is sensorially explored.

• Separate pieces of wood representing its base and sides are then presented, and the triangle’s dimensions discovered. Later, flat wooden triangles are fitted into wooden puzzle trays, then on solidly colored paper triangles, then on triangles outlined with a heavy colored line, and finally on the abstraction of thinly outlined triangles.

• At a certain stage in this progression, the child will have grasped the abstract essence of the concrete materials, and will no longer be dependent upon or show the same interest in them

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• "Control of error" is any kind of indicator which tells us whether we are going toward our goal, or away from it…. We must provide this as well as instruction and materials on which to work.

• The power to make progress comes in large measure from having freedom and an assured path along which to go; but to this must also be added some way of knowing if, and when, we have left the path.

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• Self-efficacy is a cognitive construct that represents individuals’ beliefs about their ability to act and successfully produce outcomes at a given level (Bandura, 1977). Self- efficacy theory provides explicit guidelines on how to enable people to exercise some influence over how they live their lives.

• A theory that can be readily used to enhance human efficacy has much greater social utility than theories that provides correlates of perceived control but have little to say about how to foster desired changes.

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The prepared environment

• In a report by Australia's Victorian Institute of Teaching, education experts note research indicating that all areas of the school building, including classrooms, entrances, public areas, play areas, libraries and cafeterias, affect student achievement and how well students learn.

• Environment is considered the "third teacher." • Building needs to support the ‘prepared environment’• 5m square per child.• Large open space.• Simplicity or elimination of clutter.• Open-ended nature ensures that the children

had endless opportunities to experiment, construct, explore and invent

• Needs to look and feel modern and high-tech• Needs to have defined areas:

Building

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Freedom

Structure and Order

Intellectual Environment

Beauty

Nature and Reality

Social Environment

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Freedom

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Freedom

Within the prepared environment, the child must experience freedom of movement, freedom of exploration, freedom to interact socially, and freedom from interference from others. This freedom ultimately leads to a greater freedom: freedom of choice.

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Structure and Order

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Structure and Order in the Montessori classroom accurately reflect the sense of structure and order in the universe. By using the Montessori classroom environment as a microcosm of the universe, the child begins to internalize the order surrounding him, thus making sense of the world in which he lives.

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Structure and Order

Intellectual Environment

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Five areas of the Montessori curriculum (Practical Life, Sensorial, Language, Mathematics, and Cultural subjects)

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Intellectual Environme

nt

Beauty

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Montessori environments should be beautiful. The environment should suggest a simple harmony. Uncluttered and well-maintained, the environment should reflect peace and tranquility. The environment should invite the learner to come in and work. If students do not feel comfortable in a classroom setting, they will not learn.

Beauty

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Nature and Reality

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Nature and

Reality

Montessori had a deep respect and reverence for nature. She believed that we should use nature to inspire children. She continually suggested that Montessori teachers take the children out into nature, rather than keeping them confined in the classroom. This is why natural materials are preferred in the prepared environment. Real wood, reeds, bamboo, metal, cotton, and glass are preferred to synthetics or plastics.

It is here where child-size real objects come into play. Furniture should be child-size so the child is not dependent on the adult for his movement. Rakes, hoes, pitchers, tongs, shovels should all fit children’s hands and height so that the work is made easier, thus ensuring proper use and completion of the work without frustration.

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Social Environment

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Where there is freedom to interact, children learn to encourage and develop a sense of compassion and empathy for others. As children develop, they become more socially aware, preparing to work and play in groups. This social interaction is supported throughout the environment and is encouraged with the nature of multi-age classroom settings.

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Social Environmen

t

• Place for children to store personal items, such as coats and indoor shoes

• Place for children to store projects, both in-progress and completed works

• Plenty of open space to move around easily and comfortably

• Adequate open space to sit together during circle time

• Low shelves which form a variety of activity areas without closing off space or visibility

• Neutral-colored walls• A few interesting, real-life pictures placed at

the children’s eye level• A hard floor surface that is easily cleaned• Large carpets for working on the floor• Child sized tables and chairs which can be

moved easily• A few beautiful objects that break easily• Variety in texture and color of furnishings• Living plants

Building

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All acting together in concert

Equipment

Building

Teachers

IT

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Social and interest groups

Teachers and

administrators

Outside agencies

Students

Parents

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• Students will be sons and daughters and grandchildren of ‘new money’.

• Their interest is to provide a world class education for their children without having to send them away - even to Phnom Pehn.

• The aim to prepare them for overseas study as they progress or to continually update and provide a world class education right up to university level as the school grows in size each year.

• Khmer, barangs and Russian• Scholarships could come from corporate

sponsors for children of lesser means – i.e. working with M'Lop Tapang and other NGOs

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• We need to thoroughly understand what these parents and grandparents expect from their children’s education. We may also have to inform them regarding the aims of the school in a series of invitation only wine and cheese evenings at an appropriate local venue. Senior government officials should be invited, as should prominent Oknia as should distinguished business representatives.

• We must highlight the existing problems in education emphasizing where we will do better

• We must show how our IT approach will give them 24/7 access to their children’s learning

• We must cultivate and project an appropriate high-class high-professionalism identity to the parents and grandparents. We can offer them free training in accessing the web-cams and reports online.

Parents

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• Outside agencies include overseas universities, businesses, government departments, overseas memberships to associations, Digital Divide Data and so forth.

Outside agencies

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• The teacher's role may be that of an initiator who plans and directs the curriculum.

• The child's role would then be that of a receiver who responds to the teacher's directions and information.

• In another model, these roles are reversed. The child is the initiator, picking up cues from the environment with the teacher responding, taking cues from the child.

• Another group of programs represents an interactive approach in which both the teacher and child share, to varying degrees, the initiator role.

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Teachers and administrators

• Rather than ‘teaching’ or ‘instructing’ - methods of observing facilitating and supporting the natural development of individual children.

• They use physical materials and teaching aids - harnessing the power of IT.

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Teachers and administrators

Social and interest groups

Teachers and

administrators

Outside agencie

s

Students

Parents

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Unity of Purpose–Parents, teachers, students, and administrators must agree on a common set of goals for the school. These goals become the focal point of everyone’s efforts, serving as a framework for all curricular, instructional, and organizational initiatives.

Social and interest groups

Teachers and

administrators

Outside agencie

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Students

Parents

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Empowerment/Responsibility–Members of the school community can make important educational decisions, take responsibility for implementing them, and take responsibility for the outcomes. This breaks the stalemate among administrators, teachers, parents, and students: It stops them from blaming each other and factors beyond their control for the students’ poor educational outcomes.

Social and interest groups

Teachers and

administrators

Outside agencie

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Students

Parents

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Building on Strengths–This program identifies and uses all the available learning resources in the school community, instead of exaggerating weaknesses and ignoring strengths. For example, parents can positively influence their children’s education at home and help teachers understand their children better. School administrators could make a concerted effort to creatively work with parents, staff, and students, rather than merely complying with them to keep them happy and keep paying. 

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• Use suspense and keep it fresh. Drop hints about a new learning unit before you reveal what it might be, leave gaping pauses in your speech, change seating arrangements, and put up new and relevant posters or displays; all this can activate emotional signals and keep student interest piqued. Datsuzoku (脱俗 ) Freedom from habit or formula. Escape from daily routine or the ordinary. Unworldly. Transcending the conventional. This principles describes the feeling of surprise and a bit of amazement when one realizes they can have freedom from the conventional.

• Make it student directed. Give students a choice of assignments on a particular topic, or ask them to design one of their own. "When students are involved in designing the lesson," write Immordino-Yang and Faeth, "they better understand the goal of the lesson and become more emotionally invested in and attached to the learning outcomes.“ Profundity or suggestion rather than revelation. Yugen (幽玄 )

• Connect it to their lives and what they already know. Taking the time to brainstorm about what students already know and would like to learn about a topic helps them to create goals -- and helps teachers see the best points of departure for new ideas. Making cross-curricular connections also helps solidify those neural loops.

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THANKS