Summer Mission: Program Management with Summer-Pre Program Course 2022 [Part 1]
- Aoyumi Jung
- Jul 18, 2022
- 5 min read
Updated: Jul 18, 2022
Midnight 18 July 2022
*a program management experience reflection*
Started the work in June, planning everything in Vietnam and flew back to Thailand right before the kick-off day of the course (4th July) - so far it has been 1.5 months!
My job is to support Ajarn, the program manager, to plan and execute the summer pre-program course of my faculty. For any important decisions, I will consult to have his approval before implementation. Other than that, I mostly take accountability for the entire management process.
The course aims to support fresh year students at my bachelor program to smoothly transition from high school to universities. After the course, they are expected to be familiar with the interdisciplinary content and learning approach of the GSSE program, harvest self-mastery skills such as metacognition, goal-setting, leadership and communication, and be able to navigate resources at our institution. We hope this course will set momentum for students to build up friendship and mindset to direct the best university pathway.
We have been halfway on boarding. I am so glad and grateful for the joint hands of many people! Let me visualize some basics of my work.
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The headache part:
How to accommodate schedules of 30 + individuals to finalize the course calendar?
This timing negotiation is the most stressful one because this summer many Ajarns who have played a main role in SPPC for years are occupied with international conferences and travel. I must seek alternatives to make this thing happen in person.
I shifted around the dates many times based on the availability and responsiveness of the instructors. Luckily, I only updated the syllabus one time after the first publicity. It was not as messy as I thought! The feedback from the student is that this course syllabus should be shared earlier so they could prepare for it. Will note this down for next year’s planning.
Things I enjoyed the most:
I like designing the objectives, sequences of the sessions and writing assignment instructions. Basically, I like the curriculum design part, except for arranging the schedule back and forth part. I thought of some basic principles of curriculum design I learnt last year, so learning outcomes are important in order to achieve which, there should be flexible means. I wanted to put a field trip once every learning week to balance the classroom time and outside exploration. I wanted to mingle heavy topics together with lightheaded ones, considering teaching styles of different Ajarns, from my experience.
I wanted to have better organization of the formative assessment methods. I modified some of the formats used by some of my favorite professors such as project proposal, weekly journal, and self-peer appraisal. Each tool has its own strengths to facilitate the learning of students.
Weekly journal is the most powerful one that only asks students to send their article link but on a consistent basis. Students need to learn habitual reflection on learning to challenge their mind, examine the learning experience and discover takeaways for their real life.
Reading their blogs gives me lots of inspiration to keep this work going. I am glad to see how they experience the course differently and share a common purpose - come to learn and stand out as unique individuals.
Project proposal - a general structure for teams to plan out the essentials of a project and to present for investment. The template of course opens for creativity and flexibility that fits projects’ progress. For example, data or evidence related to the issues and project deliveries can be added to strengthen the viability of the proposal. To better manage the group development, I set up a series of deadlines for teams to submit: (1) notify team and project topic summary (2) project proposal (3) presentation slide. This helps students to avoid last-minute burnout, instead, they should break down the workload along the course duration. Also, these requirements prepare them to maximize the benefits of the project-based learning and mentorship sessions with our GSSE alumni.
Self-peer appraisal: The significance of SPPC is the diversity of content and instructors where students will have little attachment to any single instructor. Most of the time they learn with their peers and themselves it is students themselves who have the best understanding of the learning performance among themselves.
Other session-based assignments:
*Self-awareness assignment: question your self awareness including pride, trauma and struggle, inspiration and life philosophy. This is a new assignment born out of the self-awareness session. I invited new GSSE alumni this year to establish stronger relationships in our community. I was the facilitator for this session last year, and it was fascinating to see this done by others, and in an in-person context.
I like facilitating and attending some activities such as self-awareness, field trips that better help engage students together with the instructors. I need to intern in a secondary school, so I can’t fully be present in all sessions. Sometimes, my presence is not that necessary because the instructors are good at monitoring the entire class. So I feel I should come at the right time and support those who really need my assistance.
Will talk more about field trips in my next reflection.
Another interesting responsibility is to provide timely support to both students and instructors. For students, it is to make sure they are able to access learning and understand required tasks to perform. This entails informing important guidelines about assignments, class absence, safety in Covid situations, and other class-based announcements. For example, I need to check student attendance before every session. I need to understand the causes behind and respond to their needs.
For the instructors' side, I communicate the number of participating students on time for them to prepare their lectures. I check what assistance they need in inviting their contribution to the course. Teaching jobs require lots of preparation, so I try to handle logistics for them to manage the teaching. For example, make sure technical devices are ready, provide materials, equipment, information of locations and transportation, consider proper physical space for interactive activities.
All takes place as a flexible process of communication and decision-making. At the end of the day, I learn the skill sets of managing a program that is to pay attention to the big picture, the details and be the mediator of various stakeholders. Students should be centered, we set learning objectives, and the process - the means to transform the learning should be flexible to meet different individual needs. This cohort of GSSE students are beautiful human beings with diverse stories, and they are aware of their choice, their purpose. I am glad to work with them!
To be continued---
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