I’ve just spent a week visiting AUPP Liger Leadership Academy in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Recommended originally by the late David Price OBE and later by Valerie Hannon, I knew this was going to be a special place, filled with intentionality and direction in their approach.
Liger’s focus is Project-Based Learning. Ever-curious about which educational approaches make learning:
- Meaningful
- Purposeful and;
- Joyful
for the children in our care; and which develop the Elements of Learning Power from the LPA (see below in case you’re not familiar with them), I was excited to see how Liger was empowering their students through PBL.
Why go beyond?
I love this quote from Michael Bungay Stanier – Because why not? Why not be ambitious for ourselves and for the world? And that’s exactly what purposeful PBL does – creates ambitious learners who know they can make a difference. To dive deeper, I created a “why” list about why we might want to create learning and learning experiences in schools that are ambitious, that “go beyond”. This is what I came up with. To:
- Discover what might be possible – For ourselves; for humanity
- Practise the “flex” of going beyond your comfort zone
- Step into love and expansion rather than shrinking into fear and maintaining the status quo
- Be a “what if …” person
- Leave the world in a better place than when you found it (This links perfectly with our currently Learning Pioneers book study of “Legacy” which talks about leaving the jersey in a better place than when you found it)
- Step into a world of infinite possibilities
- Be and think expansively
To riff on that last point a little bit, I would go as far as to say that if we’re not expanding, we’re going against the nature of the Universe – The Universe is expanding, perhaps we are here to expand with it …
Dom Sharpe, the Executive Advisor and Strategist at Liger said he says to his students,
“If you can positively affect one person you’ve made a difference.”
So, as part of Liger’s ethos – whether you’re putting your arm around the friend beside you or you’re creating a project that has the capacity to change 1000’s of lives, you are making a difference.
How often are we telling that to our students?
How often are we encouraging them to believe in their own agency?
Connecting Project-Based Learning (PBL) with the Learning Power Approach (LPA)
Every learning approach that fascinates me, from inquiry to play to STEAM learning to developing oracy, always stems back to the LPA. I wonder:
How, in the process of this learning approach, are we slowly, intentionally and consciously cultivating lifelong learning habits as we go?
PBL develops the LPA with bells on – from using mistakes as a launchpad for new learning, to normalising uncertainty as part of the learning process, to building collaboration skills, to planning and reflecting on a project, to incorporating feedback into the learning process, PBL “done well” has it all!
For those of you who know me, you know I love playing around with venn diagrams to inquire myself. Here’s what PBL and the LPA might look like together:
The wondering is: What’s in the middle?
Here are some answers I came up with:
- Agency
- Change-makers
- Depth
- Purpose
- Engagement
- Self-awareness
- Presence
- Curiosity
- Challenge
- Impact
- Drive/motivation
- Self and collective efficacy
- Relationships
- Magic
(“Magic” and “agency” always tend to find their way into the middle of my venn diagrams!)
Check out Liger’s Leadership Competencies for further links with the LPA – What are you seeing that links with the LPA Design Principles and Elements of Learning Power?
Curriculum that serves community
We were lucky enough to interview David Price at the beginning of our launch of Learning Pioneers. Those of you who knew him will know what an incredibly kind, brilliant and generous man he was. This snippet above creates a total shift in perspective in education. Often, I’ve taught in schools that think about involving their local community or using local community resources to drive and inspire learning. “Curriculum that serves community” goes beyond that thought – It involves us thinking about how learning in school can add value to the community beyond the school walls – both locally and globally.
And that’s what Liger was all about – creating curriculum that serves their students and their community. It was really quite moving to hear about their projects and really begin to understand the impact the students and school were having beyond their school building. Here’s an insight from their leadership team about how they build projects:
“At the end of every academic year at Liger, we sit down together as an education staff and generate ideas for the following year’s roster of Explorations. Explorations are the cornerstone of Liger’s project-based learning approach: 7-week modules that ask essential questions, push students to research and pose solutions to real-world problems, and often produce an end product. These products can range from a digital currency, solving the problem of student-run boarding school budget; a 400-page book on the geography of Cambodia, written in two languages; a series of videos in Khmer educating indigenous women about menstrual health; or a student-run, two-day event about climate change — the possibilities are endless.”
How meaningful is that?! How purposeful is that?! And, ultimately, how challenging and therefore full of flow is that?!
What I also loved was that their projects had no expiry date. In fact, the expiration date was “when the students stopped learning” – Which, it turns out, can take quite some time! Students spiralled back to projects, with projects being polished, added to, refined, reimagined as new students took them on.
Here are a few projects I learned about and witnessed during my visit:
Aiming to get the first Cambodian rocket into space
This was my favourite project! I don’t know many educators who would go ahead with a student project to get the first rocket into space for their country! I love it for exactly this reason – It seems like an impossible task. But that’s the entire point – Didn’t Nelson Mandala say,
“It always seems impossible until it is done”?
If we don’t give students a chance to try the seemingly impossible, aren’t we putting a cap on their learning and experiences?
When discussing this project, I asked Dom about what made their teachers support this project. This is when he said, “as long as they are learning, the project continues” (great rule for life, too, that!). Another project had been pulled because it turned out it wasn’t financially viable. Up until that moment, learning was happening so it continued. This got me wondering:
How often do we cap learning in schools before it’s even been given a chance to take off?
How much are we inadvertently putting a cap on children’s learning?
The Cambodian Cookbook Project
The thinking behind this project is that Cambodian food is delicious (it is!) yet isn’t on the global food map (also true. I’m a big foodie and had never tried Cambodian food until I arrived there – what a beautiful surprise that was!). What if students at Liger could find ways to share Cambodian cuisine beyond their country and put it on the map? This would create pride amongst their citizens and also open up the rest of the world to new culinary possibilities (I’m all for that one, for sure! Give me more food experiences and opportunities please!!).
This project first started in 2016, when students were driven to create a resource for students living on campus to use to cook familiar, nutritious recipes. Prior students had photographed, written and printed the cookbook, but the recipes didn’t have step-by-step instructions. Current students created those instructions and sent the cookbook to students in Australia to gain feedback on the accuracy of their instructions. They were also working on designing packaging to package up the spices needed for each recipe and market those along with the cookbook. I’m hoping it’s not too challenging to see the areas of a traditional curriculum that would be covered in this project. In terms of the LPA, the students were responding to constructive, specific feedback, collaborating in small teams, planning and building craftsmanship in their design – and more – Like I said before, a whole LPA workout!
The Chainsaw Project
How to distill this one into a short paragraph?! Keen to run a project on building awareness around deforestation and illegal logging in Cambodia, Dom and his team, when exploring the forest, chance upon a “Chainsaw graveyard” – A pile of old chainsaws dumped, along with adapted vehicles, including motorbikes to carry wood. In collaboration with students, they had the idea to build a “chainsaw tree” sculpture to build awareness around deforestation. One student, Meng Huoth, set to using his skill as a 3D designer to figure out how to build the tree (Designs below).
Students also contacted the Cambodian government to work in collaboration to deliver 75 chainsaws from the forest to their school. From the idea of building the tree, the project expanded into writing a book about the origins of the chainsaw tree. In collaboration with teachers, students brainstormed ways to build awareness about their campaign, including getting an original song about deforestation on the radio and writing an official press release.
Again, how meaningful and real-life are these experiences? How much agency are the students experiencing? How much real impact are they making on the world?
Wrapping up
As I walked into Liger on my final day, a thought bubbled up in my head:
“What if every school did this? What if every school created deep community and made a local and global impact Liger students are?”
That’s sat with me ever since.
What do you think?
If all students learned like this, learned they were truly the creators of their lives, learned and experienced agency, failing forwards, expanding their mindsets, where would each individual student be? Where would our world be?
P.S. If you’re curious about learning more about Liger, we will be gathering around the Campfire with Dom Sharpe, Executive Advisor and Strategist at Liger in the coming weeks, to explore how to commit to being a change-maker. You can join us by joining our vibrant community here.
P.P.S This is part of a series of blogposts, where I’m visiting impactful educators and schools across the world, documenting their practice so that you can take just one idea and put it into action.
Check out previous blogposts here:
- Using PYP Exhibition as an opportunity to build learning power at Silicon Valley International School.
- Building trust in Trevor MacKenzie‘s Secondary/High School inquiry classroom in Victoria, Vancouver Island
- Cultivating uncertainty and perseverance at De Voorde School in Drachten, The Netherlands.
Coming next … Visit to Green School, Bali – Focus TBA!
