In June 2024, the Japan Hub for Innovative Global Education (JIGE) launched its Atelier Multilateral COIL Project (A-MCP), themed "Global Leadership in Society 5.0." This innovative project brought together students from different countries over four weeks, fostering a global mindset essential for today's interconnected world.
Emphasizing Learner Participation and Personalization
Traditional transmissive approaches do little to prepare learners for current and future dynamic change.
The focus in Future Oriented Pedagogies is “learners” - their growth and ability to thrive in changing circumstances.
The Singapore government’s Institute of Adult Learning have done much research on Future-Oriented Pedagogies that align with the goals of this project. They consist of a “dance” between the following 3 pedagogical approaches :
Educator-led : Reproducing Knowledge (RK)
- Primary speaker in lessons: Educators
- Educators make sense of the content and present it to passive learners
- Standard problem: There is often an SOP
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Mixed : Distributed Knowing (DK)
- Primary speaker in lessons: Educators and Learners
- Educators make some sense of the content, but so do learners
- Non-standard problems: There is no SOP, but solution(s) are known
Learner-led : Dynamically Generated Knowing (DGK)
- Primary speaker in lessons: Learners
- Learners actively do the work of learning
- Highly Complex problems: Students identify, name the problems and develop solutions
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What past lectures may look like (mostly pushing curriculum)
Traditionally, education has been predominantly educator-led, and focused on Reproducing Knowledge in a transmissive approach.
- Educators seek an accurate response from learners
- Then positively reinforce learner’s response with a phrase of simple feedback like “Good” or “Correct”, known as the Initiation-Response-Feedback (IRF) sequence.
- This reinforces the educator as the primary speaker.
- As learners do not dynamically identify and solve problems, they are inadequately prepared for collaborative and fast-moving work environments.
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Easily transform your course to “Future-Oriented Pedagogy”
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In contrast, the A-MCP project, led by Dr. Keiko Ikeda, emphasised Distributed Knowing and Dynamically Generated Knowing, allowing learners to engage deeply with the material and collaboratively define problems and develop solutions.
How the lesson plan of “Future Oriented Pedagogy” looks like
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To deliver efficient and effective Future Oriented COIL experiences, JIGE collaborated with ClassDo. The platform enables educators to solely focus on engaging learners through participation and personalization, without the burden of technical busywork.
How does “Future-Oriented pedagogy” look like in real life?
Here, we highlight the pedagogical techniques used across the four sessions of the A-MCP project, showcasing how they fostered an engaging and collaborative learning environment.
Week 1 : Icebreakers and Topic introduction (Lesson Plans #1 → #4)
Lesson Plan #1 / 15: Icebreaking
Facilitators: Dr. Don Bysouth, Dr. Aisyah Astari, Dr. Kinnosuke Manabe
Engagement method: Asking each learner to add a sticky note on ClassDo’s sketchpad about themselves, giving learners an initial taste of “group participation”.
Verbal introductions are ineffective and inefficient. If there are 30 participants, and each takes 1 minute to speak, it would require 30 mins, and no one would remember who said what.
Instead, the Kansai University professors had students add their introduction stickies to a shared screen. This is done in just 5 minutes, with everyone participating at once. This is how it looks like :
Lesson Plan #2 / 15: Exploring Global Citizenship
Facilitators: Dr. William York
Engagement method: Upload PDFs on ClassDo, telling learners that everything is retained after the lessons, so they don’t have to take screenshots or write notes. Freed from these tasks, learners can focus on engaging with the educator.
Lesson Plan #3 out of 15: Bringing learners through Case Studies
Facilitator: Dr. William York
Engagement method: Upload a case study PDF onto ClassDo, asking students to collectively highlight portions that they found important.
Dr. York, guided learners through a New York Times article on leadership, walking learners through real-life examples of challenges that teams faced. This anchored his taught concepts on global citizenship and leadership.
As Dr. York navigated through the PDF, learners followed exactly his highlights and annotations, ensuring clarity and engagement. This way, Dr. York faced fewer virtual barriers with students.
Lesson Plan #4 out of 15: Personalizing the Presentation to the Audience with Quizzes
Facilitator: Dr. William York
Engagement method: Share a Google Form on ClassDo to poll learners. With the poll results, compare it to a PDF of what other industry leaders think.
Dr. York used polls to gauge the audiences’ perspectives on leadership traits. Instead of asking his students to react with emoticons, he saved an accurate representation of data using the form, which he could then use to provide a personalized and interactive learning lesson.
With these poll results on a sketchpad, Dr. York drew live comparisons between the audiences’ thoughts and industry expectations. He could then prompt discussions on these contrasts. This clean and efficient form of presentation in one page allowed learners to feel connected and engaged to the lesson content.
Week 2: Leadership in Asia and Europe, More Team Discussions (Lesson plans #5 → #8)
Lesson Plan #5 to #6 / 15: Annotating on slides to poll to show how leadership varies in different social contexts
Facilitators: Ms. Freya Chow-Paul and Ms. Linnéa Regnell
Engagement method: Annotating on PDF, Sticky Notes, Chat
A team from the Asia—Europe Foundation, Ms. Freya Chow-Paul and Ms. Linnéa Regnell, presented about leadership in these regions. Using clear and repeating icons on the slides, they rallied learners to interact whenever they conducted activities. This facilitated smooth lesson transitions and encouraged participation.
Ms. Chow-Paul and Ms. Regnell initially discussed the key findings from their ASEF Youth Reports, highlighting the most pressing issues that young people want to address in society.
Then, when Ms. Chow-Paul and Ms. Regnell wanted to sense the floor’s opinions on leadership, they asked their learners to annotate directly on the slides. Learners could actively participate without needing additional software.
Lesson Plan #7 to 8 / 15 : Facilitating Group Discussions about Solving Global Challenges, with Templates
Facilitator: Dr. Don Bysouth, Dr. Aisyah Astari, Dr. Kinnosuke Manabe
Engagement method: Templates in Breakout Rooms. Participants are already pre-assigned to different teams
After having their opinions fired up from Ms. Chow-Paul and Ms. Regnell’s engagement, the learners were given a period of time to discuss the similarities and differences in societal challenges globally.
During any discussion phase, Dr. Astari, Dr. Bysouth and Dr. Manabe sent a copy of a discussion template into each team room. This way, each team could immediately jump into collaborating on the guiding questions previously mentioned in the main room, reducing the facilitation busywork for trainers and enhancing learner-led discussions in the breakout rooms.
Week 3: Demystifying Multicultural Situations and Leadership (Lesson plans #9 → #12)
Lesson Plans #9 to #12 / 15: Concepts, then activities
Facilitators; Dr. Don Bysouth, Dr. Aisyah Astari, Dr. Kinnosuke Manabe
Engagement method: Reflecting with annotations, quizzes, sticky notes
Both Dr. Astari and Dr. Bysouth combined conceptual teaching with reflection activities. Dr. Astari introduced learners to a quadrant of diverse communication styles across various cultures, while Dr. Bysouth introduced 3 different leadership styles (Autocratic, Democratic and Transformational) through videos.
Afterwards, both professors asked students to analyze their own communication and their leadership style with quizzes and post-its. Learners reflected these concepts to their personal experiences and anecdotes, and shared them with other learners through post-its.
This learner-led discussion allowed learners from different backgrounds to truly internalize, from their own perspective, the differences in communication and leadership across cultures.
Week 4: Bringing everything together through group presentations (Lesson Plans #13 → #15)
Lesson Plans #13 / 15 : Brainstorming solutions for global problems in teams
Facilitators: Dr. Don Bysouth, Dr. Aisyah Astari, Dr. Kinnosuke Manabe
Engagement method: Sticky Notes
Dr. Manabe facilitated discussions between non-native English speakers by encouraging the use of sticky notes to summarize and clarify ideas. This method minimized misunderstandings and enhanced communication.
Lesson Plan #14 / 15: Discussing Takeaways and Conflicting Opinions in Presentations
Facilitators: Dr. Don Bysouth, Dr. Aisyah Astari, Dr. Kinnosuke Manabe
Engagement method: Group projects, conversations and questions
In the final session, learners presented their projects in large groups after weeks of discussions and conceptual inputs from facilitators. By performing their own research and discussions, facilitators encouraged students to develop their own inquiry and cross-cultural teamwork skills, while analyzing a truly diverse range of topics.
Lesson Plan #15 / 15: Collective Closing on Everything Learnt
Facilitation: Dr. Don Bysouth, Dr. Aisyah Astari, Dr. Kinnosuke Manabe
Engagement method used: Group discussions
The facilitators recapped on the ideas shared across the sessions and groups. As the group had became used to each other, spontaneous and light-hearted sharings of cultural experiences made the learning process enjoyable for all participants. The learners exchanged contacts with each other before closing.
Conclusion
The JIGE A-MCP project demonstrated the power of innovative pedagogical techniques in creating highly engaging and collaborative learning experiences.
ClassDo simplifies the creative learning process, by bringing together (i) stakeholders, (ii) training lifecycle, (iii) learning tools, and (iv) pedagogy in one integrated environment while maintaining simplicity and ease of use.
For educators, by solely focusing on learner participation and personalization and not needing to worry about the tech busywork, they have facilitated meaningful interactions and skill development among learners from diverse countries and ethnic backgrounds.
We hope these insights inspire you to easily incorporate similar pedagogical techniques in your future lessons.
Big thanks to Dr. Keiko Ikeda and the participating educators Dr. Don Bysouth, Dr. Aisyah Astari, Dr. Kinnosuke Manabe, Dr. William York, Ms. Freya Chow-Paul and Ms. Linnéa Regnell for agreeing to share their teaching pedagogies.
Let’s keep inspiring each other on how to simplify our COIL delivery methods, and achieve better learning outcomes with Learner-led Future-Oriented Pegagogies.