Miss Wipawan Bamrungsin
Satit Pattana School
Bangkok, Thailand
Background and Problem:
Social skills are important fundamental skills which have to be formed and developed since early childhood. According to the nature of kindergarten students at this age, students tend to put themselves first as a center of everything and do not listen or respect other people’s opinions. These expressions seem to be an obstacle in socializing. Kindergarten teachers play such an important role on enhancing students’ social skills especially in terms of collaborating, sharing and helping others. Therefore, to prepare learning experiences that encourage children to do activities and work in groups with friends, help each other, listen and accept the opinions of others using the 5-step learning process may provide opportunities for students to develop their social skills.
Lesson Study activities create opportunities to learn collaboratively among teachers to develop more active learning lessons together. Furthermore, professional learning community at school help promote the sense of co-responsibility and boost up professional working competencies of each and every teachers in the school to work collaboratively and be more effective teachers.
The study objectives were:
- To analyze important aspects of the redesign of the lesson plans to support social skills development of kindergarten II students by using 5-step learning process and group activities.
- To analyze the changes in social skills of the Kindergarten ll students
- To analyze teachers’ professional learning and practice development through Lesson Study (LS) and Professional Learning Community (PLC)
Target Group:
25 kindergarten II students of Satit Pattana School (a large private school in a suburb of Bangkok, Thailand)
Study Instruments:
- social skills development assessment form
- 4 redesigned lesson plans
- a teacher log book
- a self-evaluation of planning form (using in the lesson study activities)
- a self-evaluation of lesson plan implementation form (using in the lesson study activities)
The findings were as follows:
- Each of the 4 redesigned lesson plans was structured by 5-step learning process (questioning, searching, constructing, communicating and servicing) with collaborative learning in a small group of 4 diversified ability students. The learning concepts were “social skills”, “collaboration”, “sharing” and “supporting one another”
- There were 18 students (72%), who gained scores on the social skills assessment. The other 7 students (28%) maintained their good level of social skills.
- Working and learning collaboratively with my buddy teacher and other members of school professional learning community supported me to deeper understanding the changes in social skills development of my students. Furthermore, they supported me to learn insightfully “how the design of the 5-steps learning process and small group activity affected the changes.”
