The school that we sent to is a fifteen-minute drive near to Macleod station. Macleod College is a school, which does provide education from early years up to the end of secondary. The college is not the best nor is the worst in reputation but the college widely respected in the vast range of co-curricular activities and learning English as a secondary language from Primary to Secondary.
I will discuss mostly on the secondary section. The surprising thing from the school is that the classroom is an open class and the school had implemented the ‘breaking down the walls’ system. They also have teachers who have to teach from Primary to Secondary. It is a very unusual issue as most teachers usually take students by either level-wise or from the subject they are specializing in. It seems to me that the teacher also used the widening of space so that students will feel comfortable when they are in class. I also felt that the spacing of the learning space is a good thing as well as something new because it is impossible to see something like this back home and indeed, the teachers could merge the class; say for example, three classes in the same level could merge into one if the teacher co-operate on one particular material. This does shows the flexibility of the classes both from the teachers and from the students.
The surprising thing is that I do like the visibility of the classroom because the school provide every class and every staff room as visible as possible so that students and staffs could develop at a higher level. Teachers desks are also widen so that students could stand around the teachers’ desk. There are some drawbacks. With the breaking of the walls, classroom will become much noisier and there will be many children that will be looking around in every direction. That could mean that students' concentration could be be focused in every class. There is a possibility that teachers do not like the method of how the school operates with the breaking of the walls system implemented. Teachers are mostly part-time rather than full-time as teachers are going on shifts on a certain number of days. In order to satisfy that, timetable on lessons have to be carefully planned and this might dampen the students development with the teacher teaching only a number of days and a reserve teacher taking over. That could show the inconsistency.
To conclude, I think the school is very ambitious in many things in order to break the barrier between teachers and students but I believe that the school is looking on the long term basis rather than a short term results.
The connection of two classes into one big classroom
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