International Day preparation: group division

During the last CAS session we began discussing the upcoming International Day, which is to take place on October 18th; this is a very important celebration in our multinational school where we value the different backgrounds and cultures of every single student, which is why it is essential that careful consideration is put into planning this event. I, along with Cveta and Alissar, volunteered to help in sorting out different groups for the celebration.

This proved to be a rather difficult task as we required precisely ten groups of students, although the relatively small size of our year made it problematic to assign more than two people per activity, despite the fact that at least three students are needed to run one successfully. Another issue was that we had to group pupils according to their nationalities, which was at times impossible as some students in our class don't share the same origins with any others. Finally, we came up with the following rough draft of the teams:

Draft of group divisions 

Only after having drawn up an idea of the divisions were we informed on the fact that we had to create ten groups in order to fill up the timetable for the day; this led to some serious confusion as we were running out of students to place in the new groups that had to be created. I ended up doing a good deal of persuading since not always did people end up working with those they wanted to work with, and this allowed me to develop my communication skills. Ultimately, we managed to create a set list of groupings for the day in which we fulfilled all the required criteria:

Final groups decided upon

I believe that we managed this task decently as we had completed the groupings rather swiftly, which gave our fellow classmates more opportunities to come to us with any questions, and it also provided them with extended planning time for the future. Although if we were to do this again, we should make sure that we are well aware of all the possible implications (as for example the need to have ten teams) so that we wouldn't end up amending the list more times than is needed; also, we could consider grouping people with their friends, as it would let us be more caring when considering the plan that we create, hopefully making the time they dedicate to the activity more enjoyable. This would optimistically make these activities interesting for students to participate in.