How To Work with Young Learners - A Volunteers' Guide

General Tips for Working with Young Learners

What do you do when the kids you're working with don't engage, or aren't paying attention, or fight? Our volunteers often raise questions about classroom management. 

Here's a list of tips on how to work more effectively with young students. We hope you find them useful. Feel free to add more hints, tips and stories in the comments section. 

#1 Rule: SHOW THAT YOU CARE.  

·        Show that you are a real human being who cares about your students as human beings.  You might be surprised just how much this means to them.

·        Get to know your students as more than grade-producing machines.  Talk to them about their lives and share what you are comfortable sharing about yourself.

2) LEARN THE STUDENTS’ NAMES. 

·        Make permanent nametags for the volunteers and students.  Make sure these nametags are available at the centre for every lesson.

3) WORK TOGETHER TO SET EXPECTATIONS. 

·        Involve students in setting clear guidelines, expectations, and rules for your sessions.

·        Make sure all volunteers and students are clear about the specific rules you all have for your program.  Discuss the rules amongst your volunteer team to make sure everyone understands what the rules are and why they exist.

·        Make a pledge and write it down in a public space in the centre.  Start each session by reciting the pledge together, and reference the pledge when praising good behaviour and correcting bad behaviour.  Examples of what can go on in the pledge: “I pledge to be punctual, to be kind, to be respectful, to have one conversation at a time…”

4) BE FIRM, FAIR, AND CONSISTENT.

·        Be firm, fair, and consistent in how you enforce #3. 

·        Treat all students respectfully when you do this, whether the student is the best student or the worst student.

5) HANDLE OR REDIRECT.

·        Resolve urgent situations (fighting or hitting) right away.  Ignore attention-seeking behaviour.

·        Separate students who are fighting and calm them down.  When the students are calm, bring them back together and ask them to explain to each other, quietly and respectfully, what ACTIONS the other student did and how it made them feel.  Focus on the action, not the person, and stop them and correct them if they make personal attacks or become too emotional.

·        If students seek attention, then redirect their energy with an acceptable activity, or ask them quietly to hold their idea until later when they can answer/participate/talk.

6) ALL EYES AND EARS ON ME.

·        Do not talk over students.  Wait until they are paying attention before you begin.

·        Create a standard signal, such as raising your hand and slowly counting down with your fingers, to get everyone refocused.

7) DIVIDE AND CONQUER.

·        Separate students into one-on-one situations or very small groups to promote engagement and good behaviour.

8) PRAISE THE RIGHT WAY. 

·        Praise hard work, not intelligence to show students that hard work and effort is the key to success. 

·        Be generous with your praise because many of our students do not get much positive reinforcement.

9) USE POSITIVE LANGUAGE.  

·        Always use positive language when you give feedback to students.

·        When you give feedback to a student, please phrase things positively instead of negatively.  Emphasize that the student can and should exhibit the correct behaviour as opposed to telling the student what NOT to do.  For example, “please have one conversation at a time” instead of “stop talking!” 

10) STUDENT-FOCUSED OBJECTIVES COME FIRST. 

·        When crafting lesson plans, follow these simple guidelines:

o   Craft a few clear objectives first.  Your objectives should clearly state what you want the students to learn or develop.

o   After you craft your objectives, then plan your activities.  Your activities should directly enable you to achieve your objectives.  If the activities do not lead to accomplishment of the objectives, then change the activities.

o   You should include some way to assess whether the objectives have been met.  This DOES NOT need to be a test, but rather some product or demonstration that enables students to learn and show what they have learned.

o   BIG POINT – remember that the activities are not the main goal of working with children, the objectives are!  Be flexible and focus on the objectives, the student learning, and the student enjoyment.  Finishing the lesson with no student learning is not nearly as important as students learning.

11) LEARN FROM EACH OTHER.

·        Your greatest resource is the team of volunteers around you. 

·        Make sure to observe volunteers who successfully work with difficult students. 

·        What strategies do they use?  How can you adopt some of these strategies? 

·        Be sure to regularly discuss issues and possible solutions with your volunteer team.

12) FAMILY INVOLVEMENT IS KEY.

·        Reach out to the families of your students to share good things and bad things.  Work with your Beyond Staff to decide the best platform and approach for this.

·        Ask your Beyond Staff to follow up with parents when students miss lessons.  Build student and family accountability.

·        Use ClassDojo (or a similar tech platform) to record observations about the individual student. That way, other volunteers who are also working with that student can build on your work. When doing so, focus on your observations and try to avoid judgement. Saying a students as "naughty" or "obedient isn't helpful. Instead, record what she or he did, his or her learning style, what worked or didn't work - and what we should work on the next time.

Most of all - HAVE FUN!

What’s Beyond Social Services?

Beyond Social Services is a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to helping children and youths from less privileged backgrounds break away from the poverty cycle. The organisation provides guidance, care and resources that enable families and communities to keep their young people in school and out of trouble.

What’s Beyond’s LIFE Programme?

LIFE stands for Learning is Fun and Exciting. It's a community-based education programme that aims to help primary school children who are facing multiple challenges to experience learning in a fun and exciting way so that they are able to attain their age appropriate literacy and numeracy which will give them a fighting chance to further their education.

LIFE aims to help these children acquire the skills and behaviour that will help them integrate and learn in mainstream education settings.

LIFE Saturday Programme:

What’s Our Goal?

Our programme focuses on three Cs:

·        Communication

·        Collaboration

·        Confidence

We want to give the kids a leg up in school – understanding that many of them don’t have the resources to have tuition or go to enrichment classes.

While we’re not a tuition programme, we do aim to help the kids build as strong a foundation as we can – whether it’s understanding key concepts in Maths or having a strong foundation in English or speaking confidently and politely.

We work to get to know the kids well so that we help identify their strengths and build on them. For instance, a student might not have very strong reading skills, but have a wide general knowledge from finding out about things she’s interested in on You Tube. Here, we’d look to see how we can help her show the rest of us what she knows.

We understand that education and academics are not the same thing – and that being book smart isn’t the same as having the skills to grow.

We recognise there are many, many, ways to learn: from taking photographs around the neighbourhood, to taking apart diapers to learn about absorption.

Here, we want volunteers and kids learn about learning – and in the process they learn more about themselves, their strengths, and how they can make a positive impact on people and places around them.

In short, we find out what the kids are interested in and what they’re good at. 

We use that as a starting point to build fun, engaging, learning programmes to help them grow in confidence, help them communicate effectively and work and play collaboratively.

What Happens at the Whampoa Saturday LIFE Programme?

We work with the kids for two hours every Saturday.

·        Hour one is usually spent helping the kids with homework. In doing so, we also focus on helping them build a good foundation in English – because if the kids don’t understand English, they won’t be able to learn Maths or Science. Nor would they be able to communicate with people around them.

·        In the second hour, we give English, Maths, Science a fun twist. This could be via Maths games, Science experiments, or doing presentations, making art, playing charades, or coming up with a puppet show.

Who Comes up with the Curriculum?

Our volunteers come from a range of backgrounds – from tertiary students to executives in multinationals to full-time parents.

Volunteers leverage their own strengths and interests, research curricula and work on lesson plans for the class.

What’s in the Pipeline:

The Beyond team is working on laying out the specific objectives and processes for the programme moving forward. Eg.

• ·      recording student results quarterly after their exams to see if their results are improving.
• ·        building volunteer relationships with parents through meet ups three to four times a year.

o   Through these meet ups volunteers can get feedback from parents whether the child is benefiting and the parents can share feedback from the kid’s school teachers so that volunteers can understand each child’s strengths and weaknesses better and know how to direct the focus better.

o   Volunteers can also share what parents can work on at home with the child.

• ·        Deploying NIE trained teachers to help with lesson plans.

The LIFE programme's been evolving, but our goal stay the same. To give kids a leg up to succeed.

The Apprentice - the K-12 Edition

The kids at Whampoa's learning programme have a business to run for the next few weeks: decide what to do with a newly donated set of clothes, work on a plan and execute the plan.

Kind of like The Apprentice, but no one gets fired.

Every Saturday from 10 30am to 1pm, my friends and I work with a bunch of 6 to 12-year-olds from the Whampoa neighborhood. The adults and teens running the programme are here on a volunteer basis, and so are the kids who attend the programme.

Our goal is to work with them to strengthen their life skills - in particular, building their confidence by bolstering their ability to communicate and collaborate.

On any given week, 10-12 kids come to class. (Half the number on the class register.)

On any given week, the volunteers go door-knocking, checking the attendance list to get the addresses of the kids who haven't shown up, going to their homes, sometimes waking up blurry-eyed kids hadn't gone to bed till 1am, and waiting for them to brush their teeth and get changed at 10 45am.

On any given week, I'm amazed and grateful that the kids and the volunteers come in faithfully to the void deck classroom at Block 75 Whampoa Drive.

What To Do With Donated Clothes?

Last weekend, the donated clothes arrived. The kids' got into groups with their volunteers to decide how best to make use of the clothes. The volunteers were the facilitators, the kids were the bosses.

"Sell the clothes and give the money to the less fortunate - like the people at Lee Ah Mooi old folks' home," said a 10-year-old.

"Sell the clothes and raise money for us - so that we can go to Universal Studio, buy games..." said a 12-year-old. Because most of the clothes were for teenage girls, he suggested we sell them in the markets in Geylang (high traffic area), get donations of make-up so that we have product bundles aimed at young women.

An 8-year-old said we should give the clothes to people who need them for free so that they could use whatever money they had to buy food instead.

The kids then presented their ideas to the class. They fell roughly into three camps: sell the clothes and funnel the money back into our learning programme; sell the clothes and donate the money to a non-profit that needs it more than we do; give the clothes away in the community.

How Now Brown Cow?

This week, the kids will think through their plans and agree on one option to work on as a class. And...they also need to think about where and how to store the clothes, which are currently sitting uncomfortably under a staffer's desk.

I've got no clue how today will go - but I'm sure it'll be as eye-opening for me this week as it was the previous class.

Footnote: Want to help? We need volunteers and we meet at 10am at Block 75 Whampoa Drive. We're part of Beyond Social Services. Volunteers' job description: Big brother, big sister, referee, good cop, bad cop, lesson planner, facilitator, clown, mentor, friend. Sometimes exasperating, often exhausting, always amazing. Two more classes in May, then we break for the June hols, and start again in July.

A New Year Reminder

It's the start of a new school year at the Saturday program where I volunteer. It's called LIFE: Learning is Fun and Exciting. With each semester comes a lot of planning, a lot of frustration, a lot of fun, and a lot of learning. Sometimes I wonder what progress we're making with the 6-12 year olds. 

We only see them once a week  - and that's when school's on. What impact could we possibly make? And when I waver, I think of lessons I've learned from a 9-year-old boy: a boy who taught me to connect, to seek to understand, and to persist. A boy who has become a reminder of why I continue to volunteer at Whampoa with Beyond Social Services.

The first time I met Hamid (not his real name), he was 9 and I had just started volunteerig.

When the other kids were sitting down and doing – whatever – reading, writing, making things. Hamid would suddenly jump out of his seat, run around, bang on tables, throw chairs. He would swear – in Malay. Loud and often.  He would call the other kids names. And he’d do that to the volunteers too, myself included. Then some of the other kids would follow. I’d come home from those sessions tired and disturbed.

“Why do you bother?” one of my friends said. “These kids from low income homes – they’ve got too many issues. You can’t change them – and you’ll just get upset.”

Why exactly? I don’t know. Probably because I was privileged enough to have had great teachers that made me love learning outside the classroom. Adults who exposed me to concerts, plays, books. And I wanted to pass that along.

At the weekend learning program, we make learning fun for primary school kids from low income homes - in a totally non-academic, weekend sort of way.  For instance - after a volcanic eruption in Indonesian a few years ago, we made a plasticine volcano, filled it with red food colouring and baking soda mixture so that when you add water, “lava” bubbles up. Then we have the kids read about and discuss volcanoes. Have them learn how to learn.

The kids were already rambunctious. And Hamid was often a disruptive influence. At first, I would work around them and be grateful if there wasn't trouble. A year into the program, I found him trying to write an English composition assignment for school. The topic: my favourite holiday.

He said he had no idea what to write.

"How about I interview and record you like I'm a reporter and you're on TV news?"

He said OK. Then I turned the iPhone recorder on. He smiled shyly, and he spoke. 

He aspired to be a football player. His favourite team was Man U. Of course.  He represented his school at sepak takraw. He’d been to Malacca to compete. They’d lost. But what mattered was that they’d showed teamwork. He liked mcdonalds. He wanted to be a policeman when he grew up. 

I played the video back to him and showed him that he had an outline for his essay. We talked. He wrote. 

More importantly, Hamid finally became more three-dimensional to me. Not a loud skinny kid who instigated other kids.

Working with him became slightly easier after that. He’d still blow up – but less often. And he’d also help keep the other kids in order. That’s when I learned lesson #1: to lead, you have to build trust. To build trust, you have to connect. To connect, you have to care.

What next?  Because Hamid was also part of other Beyond programs, I decided to exchange notes with a social worker who worked with him. She told me that Hamid had credibility with the other kids. But that he also had a tough home life. He was the oldest of 5 and was often left at home looking after the three boys and a girl while his mother was at work. A pretty heavy responsibility for anyone - let alone a pre-teen. I'd go crazy too.

Now that I had a bit more context, I could understand why he was so angry all the time. I realised he hated academics so I asked him what he wanted to to learn. He said he wanted to play chess. We got a volunteer to teach him. And I brought him to see grandmaster Gary Kasparov speak when Kasparov came to Singapore. He was rapt. Lesson #2: To be understood - seek to understand.

In the intervening months, and years,  Hamid seemed to mature. It wasn't just our program of course, there were the social workers, his school, his sports coach all working with him. There were still issues, but he was more respectful, more calm.

He passed his PSLE. Ended up in Normal Technical. He's now 15. I don’t see him much now as I work with the primary school kids. But I know he’s in the school football team and still part of Beyond. And  here’s my last Hamid story.

A couple years ago, he won an award: $400 voucher to buy a bike. He took the voucher home, gave it to his mother for groceries. The social workers asked him he didn’t get that bike he’d wanted to badly.

We need food and things for my family more than I need a bike, he said.

Hamid had started to grow up.

Lesson #3. Never, ever, give up.

I won't sugar coat it- it's tough working with those kids sometimes. I'm drained after each session. But I've gotten so much from them and I've learned so much. Especially from a skinny 9 year old who frustrated and annoyed me - but in the end taught me to care, to understand and to persist.

Brains and the Five Senses for breakfast

Today's class at Whampoa was all about the brain. Or at least the part of the brain that focuses on our sense of sight.

The science peeps worked on the lesson plan this week. And it was fun!

Wen Cong, our volunteer from Hwa Chong junior college, began with a starter of optical illusions. The kids were really into it. One lesson we learned was that something as simple as seating arrangements can make or break a fun session. Lesson - have more print outs next time and seat the kids closer by removing the table. We'll also use more print outs next time.

With the session on optical illusions Wen Cong also introduced the idea of rods and cones- and how we perceive colour. 

Then, Ching Hua led a session on the brain. She had spent two hours researching age-appropriate reading materials and kid friendly visuals. Paid off in spades.

The kids especially loved the 'ick' factor. You want to get their attention, try saying "this is what it would look like if you sliced my head into half sideways." while you turn your head and hold up a diagram of the brain. Ching Hua got lots of "ewwwww"s but the kids were so into it.

Working with such a wide range of ages, 6-12, is challenging, in the least. And pulling together material isn't always easy when all of us have full time jobs and no curriculum development training. Today's reading materials were geared towards several age groups and we were able to divide up the kids by reading ability.

Having enough volunteers to spend one-on-one time with them today was a real treat. I worked with a 10-year-old who has a reading level of a 7 or 8 year old. She's been fairly moody lately and through her community worker, we found out that one of her triggers is when she feels she's out of her depth and the other kids are "smarter."

So today, it was just Dyana and me. No comparisons, no distractions. We got through only two or three sentences about how our ears work. But hey, I was able to devote all my attention on her, and work with her to help her really read and understand.

More to come next week. Great to have such a fabulous group of volunteers. All in all it took 5 hours from Wen Cong and Ching Hua to put together today's 2-hour program for 8 kids. That's really labour intensive. Would love to have more kids join the program - and have more consistency in attendance among the kids who do come.

Today we also had a 14-year-old who came back to volunteers. She used to be part of our program. She got some of her secondary three year-end exam results back today. She got an A2 for her English final and a B3 English average for the year. Not bad considering she was barely passing last year.

She also got a B3 for her Chinese final. I told her I was really proud of her English grade, but I also said "work harder at your Chinese OK?" She comes from a Chinese speaking family and her Chinese is really really good. So I thought that would have been a A kinda subject.

To which she replied "But I got the highest in my class for Chinese!"

Ah...assumptions.

The Cello Fellow Visits

String and percussion ruled at Whampoa this morning.

We had a great time with Leslie Tan from the T'ang Quartet and his student David. We wanted to bring music into the Whampoa sessions and Leslie's been wanting to help out for a while so this morning, the kids rocked to classical - and some not so classical - music.

Our goals: to give the kids a window into types of music and instruments they're not familiar with, have them make their own "instruments" with rubber bands, ice cream sticks, plates, string (thanks Ching-Hua for the materials) and have them make music. More importantly, we wanted them to have fun while learning and doing new things.

We tried to figure out pop music David and Leslie could play and have the kids sing along to - so we thought - Justin Beiber? Adele? In the end, the kids spontaneously broke into National Day songs accompanied by David on the violin. Surprisingly fun. And they all seemed to know those songs.

Leslie and David started by telling them about the cello and the violin - and how classical musicians were the centuries ago pop stars - kinda sorta. The pair played a waltz, and told the kids that people centuries ago would dance to the music. "Like in a club?" asked Sameer.

They played some Bach, and asked the kids of the music sounded happy or sad. (Both, at various points). Then they played a duet and engaged the kids in a discussion about partnership and collaboration.

Then it was the kids' turn. They picked up their materials to make their own instruments. And wrote several sentences about their instruments - some with the help of volunteers. We found that having the kids write "scripts" before coming up to speak made some of them a lot less hesitant than they usually were and that the quality of what they presented was a lot better as well. So - something to keep.

We gave prizes for the most interesting instrument and best presentation. Some really interesting instruments including ones that looked like a submarine, a gun (don't ask), a UFO/ drum-set, and a string instrument in which one end of a string of rubber bands was anchored to the floor with an ice-cream stick and a kid's feet while the kid plucked the rubberband for sound.

Then David orchestrated them into doing Stand By Me with voice and percussion - using the kids' newly made instruments, along with hands, feet and chests.

At the end of the class, the kids asked if Leslie and David were coming back next weekend and could they please bring other instruments as well. So, here's to next weekend - when the kids will help compose a piece of music that Leslie and David will play - along with the kids.

Will this help the kids pass exams? No.
Will this make them future musicians? Unlikely.
But if this piqued their curiousity by opening a window to something new that they'll maybe enjoy - that's something.

Not quite El Sistema, but - hey, one day.

Yes We Can

What makes a good juggler? Practice.

When you let go, amazing things happen.

Last Saturday at Whampoa, a 10-year-old who had never spoken up or answered questions in class got up and not only led her group in a presentation – she did an entire demo. Brief, to the point, and effective, Anna (all kids' names have been changed)  and her three team-mates told us to stand on one foot, and then close our eyes and continue to stand on one foot. Then she explained why it’s a more difficult to balance when you close your eyes.

Then another group got up and read an entire story they’d written - out loud, in unison. It was about an alien with 24 arms and 5 legs discovering juggling and then practicing really hard to win an intergalactic talent competition. It had a well-organised, credible plot.  Well-illustrated too.

At first I thought the 10-year-old, in the group Andy, had written the story and the rest had just drawn and coloured. It turns out that it was Shah, one of the 8-year-olds, who came up with most of the plot - and Andy was mainly the scribe.

We wouldn’t have discovered what the kids were capable of if we hadn’t let go of the agenda and improvised a little.

At the beginning of the session, we had a guest: the amazing Mickael Bellemene, contact juggler. Link here He gave the kids a preview of his gravity defying act and talked about how much he loved his craft even as a kid (didn’t like school), how much he practiced (the whole day for days on end, at one time - until he got injured) and how important it was to do things well.

Then we asked the kids to get in groups of four, come up with questions of their own, research the answers, and present - to everyone.

As with the past two sessions, we modelled the hour after Sugata Mitra's Self Organised Learning Framework in which four kids choose their own teams, share one PC, research and discuss answers, and present. The adults stayed away unless asked to help. In our case, we discovered that when we did that, the kids tended to copy and paste facts off the web, and then present stuff they didn't really understand.

We've been working on how to get over this - and the solution turned out really differently between the two groups of kids. The volunteers on Anna’s team first helped the girls come up with a narrow enough question. From my end of the room I heard words like fulcrum, flexible, balance from Anna’s group. First-time volunteer, Beverly, engaged the normally shy Anna like no one had been able to before. She and another volunteer, Hui, helped the kids come up with progressively more biteable chunks of information they could work on. 

  

On the other end of the room, Andy's group wanted to find out how aliens juggle. They went online, found some "Roswell" / alien-sighting sites, but in the end, no one could agree if the web could tell them definitively whether aliens exist. Hence the tale of Intergalactic Creatures Have Talent. Worked out fine, in my view. 

If they two things the team took away were:

- Google doesn't know EVERYTHING - really!

- and "hey, I can write and tell a pretty darn good story!"

then we'd done some really nice work that day - both the adults and the kids.

 My lesson for the day: relax, look, listen, learn. Be amazed.