My first time to be a consultant and my first time to develop the government curriculum! At the start of the exploration we were told that we will design and improve the grade one government curriculum. After finish developing/improving the curriculum the school named Bambujaya will uses our developed curriculum to teach their students and also the teaching will be more engaging because a lot of hand on activities have been added to the curriculum. Not only Bambujaya can access to the books but if our book really works well the government will use it for Cambodia curriculum.
Our first question before we started to develop the curriculum is how can we make the grade one curriculum to be a great resources to study and also how can we make the book more engaging so students want to learn more from the book and feel excited for the next lesson. To reach our goal first we made some connections between what are some of the activities that we liked and why we liked it. We used that to see what can we improve in the curriculum. One thing that stand out and we want to improve through out the book is to add hands-on activities because there are very few examples that the curriculum connect to hands-activities. By implementing the hands-on activities the students we have more fun, simultaneously they collaborate and use critical thinking.
After setting a strong plan of what we want to change in the book, we started to edit and add-on into three grade one books (Social study/science, Khmer, and math). We went through the whole three books and we did a lot of deleting and adding idea into the books. Two of the problems in the books and the problem appear very rapidly is that the pictures is not good enough and gender inequality. After four weeks my group went through the whole three books but we didn’t really see any progress in term of changing the contents. We know that edited throughout the book but mostly only picture and gender equality and not the content itself. We kind of upset and stressful because almost every contents stayed the same. After having a stressful time we figure one idea that we should only focus on one or two lessons from every book so we can do a big change in the lesson. We followed the idea we edited in Khmer lesson, Math, and social and science. We finish about 6 lessons from 3 books and now the lessons have a lot of hand-on activities, good contents and we think that the kid will like the lessons.
We finish editing the 6 lessons but it time for the ideas to be distributed to our clients (Babujaya). It is very hard time for us because if they like our idea they will hire a curriculum developer to do all the edit for the whole three books and also they will work with us to do more editing for other grades but if they don’t like the lesson that we’re already changed they will stop work with us.
They love it! They think that the idea is credible and they want to work with us more. If this work, the curriculum that my team and I edited, this will be uses as the books to teach in ,$4000-$5000, official school in PP. Also the curriculum can also be implements to government curriculum all around Cambodia.