An effective way to motivate students is to entrust them with a task and help them succeed in carrying it out.  This was the approach we used in the Student-LED project, in which secondary school students took ownership of designing purposeful learning experiences and learned as a community, together with their teachers, along the ways.  Encouraged by last year’s positive results, we look forward to continuing this productive partnership with the Education Bureau and the Hong Kong Association of Heads of Secondary Schools. 

One of the latest views of learning sees learning should be fun; it should not be just an individual and boring activity. It should be an inquiry process that facilitates peer learning. The Student-LED project aims to create this kind of learning environment for students. In the project, student teams will select learning meaningful objectives/ goals that they are interested in, and design the learning experience to accomplish these goals. Through the process, students collect feedback from teachers and other students, and reflect critically themselves. We observed some significant improvement in terms of their leadership, communication skills, teamwork and problem solving. With the mission to benefit more students, we look forward to continuing this collaboration with the Education Bureau and the Hong Kong Association of Heads of Secondary Schools.

Nothing is more powerful to unleash the power of students’ learning than empowering our students to be true masters of their own learning experiences.  The Student-LED Project has clearly demonstrated the impact of this power. As one of the project developers representing the Hong Kong Association of Heads of Secondary Schools, I am happy to share the joy of students in their exploratory journey of leadership for learning and self-reflection, and I earnestly look forward to continuing our good work with more schools in continual collaboration with the HKUST and EDB.

Under the New Academic Structure, most secondary schools have arranged various types of Community Services, one of the components of Other Learning Experiences (OLE), to meet students’ needs and interests inside and outside school timetable. Most of the Community Service practices are designed and implemented by teachers while students take the role as participants. Recently, the Education Bureau (EDB) has worked with the Hong Kong Association of the Heads of Secondary Schools (HKAHSS) and Professor Edmond KO, Chairman of Curriculum Development Council, to jointly organise a pilot project, “Student as Learning Experience Designers (Student-LED)”. The aim of this project is to develop students’ reflective habits of learning and provide them with a chance to become designers of their own learning experiences rather than merely being participants. It is found that students had deeper learning.

The rationale of the project is never a “laissez-faire policy” to let our students run activities by themselves. Instead, we aim at creating a supportive environment so that students are empowered to learn independently. In this project, students are not only designer, but also, more importantly, reflective learner. They design activities for their schoolmates under the theme of Community Services and promote their schoolmates to reflect on their experiences. Teachers’ roles are no longer confined to being a project consultant. They reflect along with students and co-construct the learning experiences with students. A teacher was deeply moved by the project and mentioned, ‘As a teacher, we often overlook what students really need. From this project, students told me “what they want to learn” and “how they want to learn” ’.

The students enjoy the autonomy to learn under the conditions of non-prescription and beyond the assessment boundary. These conditions have fostered “a sense of agency in learning” among students. In other words, students originate the deep motives to make reflection for improvement. A school principal has shared his project experience with us, “This collaborative learning mode has not only accelerated students’ personal growth but also enabled us to learn to empower.”

Community Services under the New Senior Secondary Curriculum aims to nurture lifelong interest and habits in Community Service and future community leaders of in different sectors. To achieve this goal, a positive “sense of agency in learning” is indispensable!