Canggu Community School

CAMPUS DEVELOPMENT Canggu Community School

By Ben Voborsky, Primary Principal

Canggu Community School (CCS) welcomes the new 2020-2021 year by increasing their footprint with a new Primary campus, providing students with more space and enhanced sports facilities. The campus was designed to support CCS core values: Learning, Respect, Engagement, and Balance.

The Primary campus has transitioned from a 700 m2 plot to a 1500 m2 facility just across the river from the previous Primary school. The new Primary campus and sports facilities are connected by two bridges to the Secondary Campus. The substantial difference in added space has provided a great opportunity to make use of the landscape by adding outdoor facilities including a half Olympic sized swimming pool, sports field, numerous outside seating areas which are shaded by the incredible flora surrounding the campus and allow for all classrooms to extend into outside learning spaces. This will help in navigating COVID-19 physical distancing requirements while providing hands-on learning opportunities, fresh air and the numerous benefits associated with having access to nature.

Joglo structures have been used throughout the CCS campus as a homage to Indonesia’s unique traditional architecture, while also being aesthetically respectful to the island. Joglo is the architectural vernacular for Javanese structure, originally built for aristocrats where the height and type of roof reflected the social and economic status. Nowadays, Joglos have been used throughout Indonesia as modular homes for their natural aesthetics and resilience in lasting through tropical weather and earthquakes. The teak wooden columns are strong and reliable material that mix well with modern construction. The most impressive structure lies in the heart of the campus. The canteen sits perched on a hill as a circular-plan joglo that offers a panoramic view of the surrounding landscape. Traditionally, the canteen can be compared to a Pendopo building where social gatherings typically take place in the open pavilion of a Javanese home.

The campus is surrounded by flora and fauna that is native to Indonesia. Each unique plant on the primary grounds is labelled with an informative tag for students to learn and identify the nature surrounding them. The majestic Beringin tree is situated between the two entrances as a protective guardian of the campus. The aromatic tropical herb plant, Pandan grows wildly outside the Early Years classrooms, distinguished by its long, slender and spiky bright green leaves. The sacred Pule tree stands tall next to the football pitch, traditionally used as the wood carved into Barong Masks. Jepun trees line the pathways offering their fragrant frangipani flowers which are commonly used in Balinese ceremonies. The newest addition is the vegetable garden where students will take part in the complete journey from planting to fruition.

Globally, we have arrived at a stage where becoming more efficient with our resources has become absolutely necessary in order to strive towards sustainable economic growth. The ethos of Zero Waste is already practiced in several cities, households, events and numerous companies. Rethink, Reuse, Reduce and Recycle are the 4 R’s that embody this concept and have been applied to the construction process at CCS.

By using Joglo architecture, heavy and dense structures made out of concrete have been reduced drastically and have the benefit and option of being reassembled and reused. An additional effort considered in the design phase to reduce CCS’s carbon footprint is by reducing the need for cooling spaces with air- conditioning. In order to maintain the natural airflow throughout the campus and minimise invasive construction, the campus was designed to fit the original land shape.

The Primary and Early Years buildings have been designed with large floor-to-ceiling sliding doors and numerous windows to be able to open up the classroom and take in the natural light and breeze. A contributing factor to maintaining cooling air temperatures is the use of wood for its high insulation properties and can even help to regulate humidity levels. Reuse and recycle has been addressed in the reuse of materials from the old campus such as the wooden door and window frames, metal structures, window glass and playground set. Additionally, instead of throwing away the wooden scaffolding, it was recycled into building the canteen tables.

To be proactive and considerate of Bali’s monsoon season, biopore infiltration holes have been strategically placed throughout the campus to prevent flooding and increase groundwater reserves. The term ‘biopore’ refers to small tunnels that are formed in the soil by the activity of underground organisms such as worms, movement of roots, termites and other soil fauna. An added benefit of replicating this concept is that it reduces the forming of puddles during the rainy season, ultimately reducing the risk of mosquito breeding.

After two years of planning and development, the Primary Campus is ready for the Melaspas ceremony and opening its doors to students. The ritual of a Melaspas ceremony in the Balinese Hindu religion is to cleanse and purify new objects, to bless the space with peace for new occupants.

VIRTUAL ASSESSMENT Remote Final Assessments adopted by 8 Shanghai International Schools During COVID-19 Outbreak

By Kawai Liu, MS Math Teacher and Grade 8 Team Leader Shanghai SMIC Private School – International

Background During COVID-19 outbreak, schools worldwide were suspended at various stages in 2020. In Shanghai, schools were closed since February until June. Teachers were urged to fit themselves into the positions to deliver their classes online. Because of the “rapid spread of COVID-19 across the world”, foreign nationals were blocked out of China until now. This blocked a portion of international school students from going back to campus. Towards the middle of June, we faced another challenge. How to arrange the final exams so some students could be assessed at home? How to ensure fairness? How to eliminate technical issues?

Literature Reviews Guidelines from different associations about the remote assessments were available since March. Scholars also provided ideas on how to hold a remote exam (Crosby, 2020; Liberman, 2020; Zayapragassarazan, 2020). Their approaches could be summarized as followed: 1. Postpone the exams. 2. Convert the final exams into project-based assessments. 3. Hold the final exam online, either proctored or non-proctored. 4. Cancel the exam and determine the final grades by other assessments.

However, we have no prior experience in delivering remote assessments. We concern mostly about academic integrity fairness, system stability and also securities. Scholars found that “students scored significantly lower on proctored (online) exams”. They suggested that cheating could be a reason. (Daffin & Jones, 2018) This article reports the approaches adopted by the Shanghai international schools for their final exams in June 2020. The scope of this article is only the 16 listed international schools in Shanghai.

Methods Information from the 16 schools was gathered firstly by official emails, followed by personal relations to my previous students and colleagues. Survey requests were also sent out by Facebook and Instagram at last. Until July, I successfully gathered information from 8 schools.

Findings Two schools converted their exams into project-based assessments. “Many of them were not exams. For example, our math exam was a trigonometry project,” introduced by Andy, “for English, it was a literary analysis and an argumentative essay.” Jeff elaborated, “The majority of teachers, like myself, allowed open book during the exam. They were not considered “final exams” but were more of assessments.”

Five schools held their exams as normal, with the option of taking the exams at home. 3 of these schools held non-proctored remote exams. These schools tried to enhance fairness by limiting the time allowed. “The time limit was the same as the on-campus students. Also, some of the questions were changed for online students,” Hera introduced. Also, “in our school, the exams had a period of around two days to complete for the students in different time zones.” Chelsey further explained. 2 schools held proctored exams for students at home. Shannon introduced that during the exams the proctors monitored the exam progresses by Zoom meeting. Students showed the entire desk and their hands by their web-cams. Because of the inexperience of holding remote exams, some minor technical issues were reported like system instability and submission problems. Nevertheless, these issues were foreseeable that teachers had alternate plans for these students in most of the cases.

One school cancelled the final exams and used other assessments throughout the school year to determine students’ yearly grades. This could be understood as adopting Zayapragassarazan’s (2020) viewpoint that “the validity and reliability of such unsupervised online exams can be improved by increasing the number of tests instead of conducting one single exam for evaluation.”

No schools were reported to adopt commercial remote proctoring services like ProctorU and Software Secure. This may due to the budget issue. Also, no schools were reported to use a code-of-conduct or honor statement for the exam, which adds nearly no cost but is proven to be helpful regarding reducing misconduct behaviors in exams (Daffin & Jones, 2018).

Conclusions The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the academic agenda of teachers and students. We have made great efforts on confronting the pandemic and maintained students learning to the greatest extent. In Shanghai, the pandemic is nearly under controlled and the normal school days are expected after the summer in 2020. Temporarily adopted approaches for the learning and assessment progress are hopefully not needed any more. Nevertheless, it is always beneficial to summarize the actions we have taken for future reference. Through literature review, I read a few articles recording the stories during the school suspension in the 2009 Swine-Flu (H1N1) outbreak. I found that many approaches have been outdated since the rapid technology development. I am thinking how thankful it would be if the readers find my article completely outdated when they look for information to cope with an emergency because that means these disruptions are not happening in the next 10 or 20 years.

References Crosby, L. M. S. W., Shantel, D., Penny, B., & Thomas, M. A. T. (2020). Teaching through Collective Trauma in the Era of COVID-19: Trauma-informed Practices for Middle Level Learners. Middle Grades Review, 6(2), 5.

Daffin Jr, L. W., & Jones, A. A. (2018). Comparing Student Performance on Proctored and Non-Proctored Exams in Online Psychology Courses. Online Learning, 22(1), 131-145.

Liberman, J., Levin, V., Luna-Bazaldua, D., & Harnisch, M. (2020). Highstakes school exams during COVID-19 (Coronavirus): What is the best approach?. Blogs del Banco Mundial.