GAC031 Social Emotional Learning through Project Based Learning

GAC031 teaches social and emotional learning through a project that improves something about your own school. Five units run from the competencies themselves to a finished, shared piece of work.

Assessment is the project 项目 — planned, built, revised, presented — plus reflection 反思 on the strategies you used, and coursework.

• The reflection is not decoration. You are marked on analysing where you grew and where you still need practice, which requires naming a weakness honestly.
• ⚠ The project must actually be for someone. A project with no user is an essay with slides.

• Social and emotional learning (SEL) 社会情感学习 is the set of skills for managing yourself and working with others.
• The five competencies: self-awareness 自我认知, self-management 自我管理, social awareness 社会意识, relationship skills 人际技能, and responsible decision-making 负责任的决策.
• These are trainable, which is the module's premise. They are not personality.
• Each shows up in the other modules: self-management is the GAC003 planner, relationship skills are the GAC006 team.

• Project based learning (PBL) 项目式学习 starts from a driving question 驱动性问题 that cannot be answered by looking it up.
• The question must be answerable by making something: a guide, an event, a system, a redesign.
• Identify the user 用户 and ask them what they need before designing anything for them.
• Plan backwards from the sharing date, as in GAC003.

Worked example. Two driving questions for a school project.

Weak: "What is recycling?" — a search engine answers it, and there is nothing to build.

Strong: "How can our year group cut the waste left in the canteen at lunch?" — it needs observation, a design, and someone to use it.

The second is a driving question because the answer is a thing you make, and the making is what the module assesses.

• Build a prototype 原型 early and badly. A rough version you can show beats a perfect plan nobody has seen.
• Collaboration 协作 here is assessed by contribution, so record who did what as you go.
• Use self-management deliberately: the project runs across weeks, and the weeks are where it is lost.
• Expect the first version to be wrong in a way you could not have predicted. That is the point of building it.

• Feedback 反馈 from the actual user is the module's engine. Ask what did not work, not whether they liked it.
• Iteration 迭代 means changing one thing and testing again, so you learn which change helped.
• Perseverance 坚持 is shown by responding constructively when a trial reveals a problem. Keep evidence of the problem, revision and later test; use the current centre criteria rather than assuming that a failed trial or revision guarantees a particular mark.

• Present to the people the project was for, not only to the teacher.
• Reflect on the SEL strategies you used: which competency you leaned on, which you avoided, what you would do differently.
• ⚠ A reflection that reports only success reports nothing. Explain the evidence for growth and remaining difficulties, including why a strategy did not work and what you will change. No single reflection move guarantees a particular score.

Vocabulary card meanings

project: A piece of work with an aim and a finish point. Social and emotional learning (SEL): Learning to handle feelings, relate to others, and choose responsibly. awareness: Noticing how other people in a community live and feel. Project based learning (PBL): Learning by completing a long task that ends in a real product. Collaboration: Working with other people toward one task. Perseverance: Continuing with a hard task instead of stopping.