Case Study | Asmaa Preparatory School

In their own words

This case study is a summary of a conversation with the class teacher, Haneen

We run Topical Talk weekly, as an extracurricular club after school, with 30 students aged 13 to 14-years-old. Students are living in a difficult social context and some of the students taking part have lost their guardians. The club builds a bridge to the world outside.

Through using the Student Hub, students have moved from copying and pasting information from websites, to developing their own ideas. Students particularly enjoy topics with environmental links, such as the COP26 project, which prompted them to launch a campaign about how to make the school more green. Students have learnt about climate change – this was a bit new for them. Here, in Gaza, they don’t have time to think about these things because of all the difficulties going on. They started establishing new perspectives and learning about global warming.

Creating their own work on topics is really useful for the students to summarise everything they have learnt. Posting it on the website really helps their writing. This affects their performance in the classroom, too. On the Hub, students can easily get feedback from their classmates and people all around the world, as well as caring feedback from volunteers. A couple of them even had their questions answered by topic experts.

I have two girls who are really shy about speaking. I told them to take part in the Topical Talk project. As they took part, I could see how confident they’d become.

They were initiating discussions and felt celebrated. They were sharing ideas with their classmates and their language has changed. They now speak with confidence, which is what we want for our students. As a teacher, I’ve also learnt from the resources. They’ve given me new ways of guiding discussions. They show me how a topic can be introduced to students.

We have lots of scientific topics in our curriculum and I was finding it really challenging to introduce. Topical Talk has helped me think about ways to do this.