Group 2 participants of the 21st Century Skills program met with Professor Izumitani, lecturer at Soka University. The theme of this week’s session was Psychological Well-being and improving teamwork. Over two sessions students learned about 3 core areas of successful team building which included - cross-border learning, character strengths and psychological well-being. Before the live session students were given a pre-program task to take the VIA character strengths survey . This survey is available for free online and helps to categorize your strengths from a list of 24 characteristics to better understand how your strengths can help you manage goals, work well with others and have more meaningful life experiences. Students were asked to bring their results to the lesson and some time was spent in breakout rooms introducing their strengths and sharing their results with team members.

 

 

 

 

Cross-border learning helped the students improve their teamwork by participating in small groups, looking at their work from other perspectives, utilizing outside resources and expanding their network. Session two began with a review of the previous lesson and a short reflection on the word “happiness.” Students were asked “What words do you associate with happiness? '' Some answers included: comfort, friendship, family, fun, inner peace and Bhutan (which was recorded as one of happiest places in the world). After the warm up students participated in a short lecture on learning organization and the 5 key principles: systems thinking, personal mastery, mental models, shared vision and team learning.  After that they broke off into their assigned teams to create a team canvas using the online whiteboard tool called Miro. Each team was given their own canvas online and they worked together to build out the different components of the canvas. 

 

These activities aim to strengthen each team as they learn to work together in building their final presentation.