That’s the challenge we are facing at CIST since the 15th of October 2007, date at which the new year 2009 promotion of 86 students with 23 girls arrived.

In a country which is recovering slowly from the Khmer Rouge period and where there are a lot of actions to undertake, this is a challenging bet.

Based on the idea that self confidence and self esteem are required to work well together, the 86 students, 4 teachers and I, decided to learn how to know each other and to visit an orphanage on the 16th of October. There, for 48 hours the new promotion got to know each other through team building: games, sport, manual labour (the earth is very hard when drying), songs (some of them proved to be gifted!). Thereafter, 86 students from different backgrounds merged into 4 classes in which everybody knew each other very well.

The second step that was very important was to name 2 “student representatives” for each class: some personalities had been noticed during the beginning of term. Very quickly, I required from student representative to lead the class, to be open minded to other students, to take care of them, to be in charge of organizing team work, to make sure that students sitting at the first and last row in class changed on a regular basis. I planned student representative meetings every two weeks in order to discuss with the life of students in class. 

From the academic standpoint I told them to be proactive in their training, for example if one lesson was not understood they were responsible for asking questions to the teacher to better understand the lesson. That was a real change because students are used to listen to teachers without asking questions. Six students participated in class councils and represented the students with whom they had discussed key issues before and provided them advice given by teachers. That exercise of reviewing the quarter was not easy especially with their own classmates.

So, any results? From the academic standpoint, students are a lot more autonomous and focused on their lessons. There are less first year students to be punished than second year students, revealing important values such as honesty.

Next term, the current first year students will welcome with us the new promotion because there is no better spokesmen than the students themselves. And very surprising thing here, second year students won’t be supervised during exams!

That is a first step that will lead hopefully to other major progress. 

Gérard Aublet, Dean of Studies at CIST