The Goal: To host the second changemaker conference for international schools in Europe. To support students in roles as diverse as food supplies, website creation, hotel bookings, workshop organisation and leading.
What skills and understandings might they need and what does support look like?
How could we harness the Compass Education mission? To be educators and change agents who believe that a flourishing, sustainable world begins with our students and schools.
Munich International School (MIS) was handed the reins to host the second Changemaker Conference by Frankfurt International School (FIS) and we were so fortunate to have their student leaders on board to pass on valuable advice and learning, student to student. This allowed everyone to have the belief that a student-led conference really was possible.
An academic year of meetings ensued, with a small but growing band of student changemakers from Grade 4 through to Grade 11. And an almost constant stream of prompting and questioning from all sides of the team, teachers, staff and students.
We wanted to create a toolkit for students and for our faculty: to give the students and teachers who had worked so hard something useful and usable to take away from the summit. We hosted (I was able to shadow facilitate) an Introduction to Compass Tools (ICT) workshop just before the conference started. The original ICT needed a little tweaking to suit our Grade 3 to adult audience, but not as much as we thought. The requirement for students was to take their learning out into the wider Solutionary Summit community by choosing a Compass tool to share at one of the workshops that would take place over the three days.
What was wonderful was being able to see multi-generational groups work together, supporting each other to understand the tools and thinking about how they would share and use them.
Multiple workshops took place with student facilitators sharing to a diverse audience of MIS teaching staff, delegates and MIS students.
The Compass Workshop was a huge success with the tools being shared many times over. In hindsight, it would have been useful if we had given the students these tools at the beginning of the year. However, looking at the Solutionary Summit as the beginning of our sustainability journey and thinking ahead to next year. We now have student facilitators who are well equipped to support learners and teachers to implement systems thinking across the whole of the school, from our youngest junior school students through middle school to high school plus teaching staff too. A solid foundation to build upon.
Next steps: We are looking at ways to use PD opportunities to use our student facilitators to present the Compass tools to more staff and students and we are considering the next steps on our solutionary journey next academic year.
Here are some of the student reflections from the solutionary summit:
“Age is no longer a barrier: if you work hard and work together you´ve got the power to achieve anything.”
“Always remember you can try to change the world alone. Everybody counts. But it is easier if we do it together.”
“We want to continue to pass on our knowledge, we would like more opportunities to teach teachers about Compass tools.”
“The Compass tools really help you think more out of the box.”
“It’s a balance between learning about complex concepts and the necessity and goodness of learning about Compass tools earlier in school.”
Author
Geraldine (Ged) Thomason
As an expat child, Ged grew up in Zambia and Liberia. Her experiences there allowed her to consider different perspectives and sparked her love of the natural world. She always had a random collection of stones, sticks, feathers and seeds in her pockets and still do to this day. She loves to travel and became a travel agent so that she could continue to get to know the world. Later, when her son was born and had some additional learning needs, she discovered the inequalities in the education system. Disheartened by some teachers and encouraged by others, she decided to become an educator. She wanted to become someone who could provide a safe, loving, equitable and inspiring space for any learner. As an international educator who has worked in the UK, China, Brunei, Singapore, France and now Germany, she continues to work on this goal every day of the week. Her master's in education for sustainability was provoked by her first experience with Compass Education and she is excited to be able to share her enthusiasm for these tools with other educators to help us develop passionate and thoughtful citizens.
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