UAA Tea Time No. 1 - The Exam Week

1 - What do you think about the feedback from students about the exam week? Do you think their complaints were reasonable?

Peter Coles: There weren't just complaints. There was positive feedback; there was constructive feedback. I spoke to Claw about the sample (of the questionnaire) because I love receiving data; I love to see opinions rather than “dedikodu”. It was really nice for us to see those real opinions. Of course, it is an incredibly complex task. No one was delighted to come back to school in this environment but it really helped just to plan for the future. I spoke to Sarp as well about having further surveys, to try and get a larger sample size, because of course the larger the response rate, the better it is for all of us. We really love receiving feedback, that’s why we are speaking today because it got us to know Sarp, to know UAA Claw, and to understand how positive this relationship can be.

Funda Cüceloğlu: As you know we always value the opinions and the feedback of our students, and accordingly, we adapt the system we have as much as we can. There are certain guidelines that we need to follow and sometimes students may not be fully aware of those guidelines. As Dr. Coles said, organizing a survey of that kind together might give us healthy feedback which we can utilize for the future exam weeks or any kind of organization that we are doing. Thank you very much for organizing that. Let’s work together for the next survey.

2 - Do you think the decision made by MEB regarding face-to-face exams was reasonable?

Peter Coles: I think it is easy to look at MEB and it is easy to forget that they are trying to run an entire country with millions and millions of students in village schools, and schools in places all over Turkey. So, we understand that the ministries’ job is incredibly complex, up into something like 16 million students in Turkey, tens of thousands of schools and teachers. We really believe the Minister Ziya Selçuk makes decisions that he believes are the best for the students and for all of Turkey’s schools, not just a very tiny number of private schools. We trust them to do the best and we don’t always make the right decisions, the ministry doesn't always make the right decisions, but those decisions are made based on trying to do what is best for everybody.

Funda Cüceloğlu: Additionally what I can say is, as you are very familiar with it, we have a very exam-oriented culture in Turkey. We have exams at different grade levels, they affect our university or even high school entrances, both nationally and internationally. So, the exam results and the GPAs generally motivate the students in a way, encouraging the students to study. Otherwise, unfortunately, students do not study, or that is the conception in Turkey actually by the parents, teachers, and the ministry of education, that if there are no exams students are not working or studying. Unfortunately, that’s the case, which we do not believe in. This is not the case for UAA students, because UAA students believe in self-development. They have high ambitions but still, we are in the same pot with all the other schools, all around Turkey, so in order not to disadvantage our students we have to implement exams and exam weeks, because these results will be used for your university applications, again, nationally and internationally, so we have to have them.

3 - What has been the most challenging thing for you in terms of the organization of the exam?

Peter Coles: I want you to kind of imagine Funda Hanım and I coming back to school. The school was closed on March 13 and 2020, and we came back to school - we actually came back to school secretly because we weren’t really allowed back. So, we start coming back to school in April, and when we came back everywhere is cold. The garden was overgrown. It was just so sad when we first came last year. Honestly, we’ve been back to school every week since then. We work most weekends, we communicate with each other. Then suddenly we brought a few prep students back, some grade 9 students back, and then they went home, then some grade 12. Virtually, the school was empty. Suddenly we need to bring back all of the students and staff to the school. Suddenly bringing all those people back was such an incredibly complex and stressful thing. Probably the most complex thing we’ve done in our careers. Thinking about the tiniest details like “how will the teacher collect the papers,” “how did they deliver the exam papers,” “how did we sit all children,” “how did the students know where to sit,” “how do we organize the service buses?” That’s why we arranged the three splits, so the students could come; service buses could go because we didn't have enough service buses to bring all the students at one time. It took months. We’ve been planning actually for a long time.

It took months of planning, and everyone thinks they have an idea that it can be done differently, but they don’t understand all of the effects. So some people might say why we wouldn’t bring all of the students, but they don’t understand the room we have, the size “yani how many students per metrekare” how many students can come this way, how many students are going to enter from here? So, if you are involved in discussions, you’ll understand it was so incredibly complex, and the most important thing is the wellbeing of the students, the safety of students and teachers. We were so paranoid, and rightly paranoid, to get that part right. We are very proud of what we achieved. We are very proud of our students and teachers because they were all well behaved. Without students and professional teachers, the system wouldn’t have worked. So we’re very lucky that everyone played that part.

Funda Cüceloğlu: Additionally what I can say, as Dr. Coles says, is that we have been very lucky that our community is very “bilinçli.” You are well aware of the health risks and of the precautions that we need to follow. There are lots of protocols as well. Published by the Minister of Education and the Minister of Health and they keep changing. Why are they changing? We need to change our plans accordingly. I don’t know how many plans we’ve made since the beginning of the academic year. The Minister of Education announced there will be exams, then the numbers increased, and then we canceled the exam week; then the protocols changed, twe updated all our plans according to the new protocol. Then, again, there was an announcement that another exam week is canceled. There have been so many changes then we have to adapt all our plans to, and, as Dr. Coles said, the health and safety of our students, teachers, and all our working staff is our priority. So we try to give the utmost attention to health and safety. Well, this is the first time we are organizing an exam week in a pandemic environment. Nobody has ever done it before. We’re trying to learn lots of things from other schools internationally as well. Just to learn from each other actually. This experience was really difficult for us.

Peter Coles: Even on Christmas Day, which is the most important day for our foreign teachers, we heard the news that the exam week was canceled and that there’s gonna be a new exam week in January. So, even when they were trying to relax on Christmas Day, there was still disturbing news on that day. Actually, as well, what I remembered when we first started bringing prep students, grade 9 and grade 12, before the exam week, we had students shivering with fear entering from the gates. We have some teachers who felt the same way. It was the first time we came back to school for over a year, and we were all frightened very much. I remember that I was in the taxi, wearing gloves, wearing a mask, and I didn’t touch anything. It was difficult because some people were totally fine with it, and some people were literally terrified. That sight is difficult as well: to try to deal with hundreds of people. Everyone is scared, some people just hide it better than others.

4 - What was the biggest challenge for you during the pandemic process?

Peter Coles: I read an article recently. It was by a headmaster from the UK. He’s quite famous, he’s been on TV and has written books, and he said the problem for school heads is that there’s not been an off switch. We haven’t been able to turn off once. We had a very limited vacation time. So, for our summer vacation, we only ended up with two weeks - and probably not even two weeks. We would constantly be receiving messages about what you will do when you return to school. So, I think there has not been an off switch for even myself or Funda Hanım in this whole period. That means no weekends where we didn’t get emails and where we didn’t have Whatsapp messages. That gets very tiring after a certain point. It’s also difficult because, personally, my daughter was Covid positive back in November, my sister in the UK, also. And my aunt died because of Covid in the UK. So, while we’re trying to motivate people and say “Don’t be frightened, don’t be scared,” for us, Funda Hanım herself has some similar stories as well, we’re dealing with this in our own families. To try to make a weekly video when my daughter’s sitting in the next room and smiling, being happy and positive; that’s not an easy thing. But I think you give us the strength of being in this position. When we know we can make people feel better and give them a positive message it gives us more energy as well. That’s our job, but I think, for all heads of schools around the world, this is more than we could be expected to do. Just to keep working constantly, to deal with all these changes every single day, and to have to say to people “We don’t know”… People keep on saying to us “When will the new vaccine come from the UK?”. We don’t know, so I said to Funda Hanım last week: “We’re not Google.” You know, people think we’re Google and that we know all the answers to everything. All we can do is have and maintain our vision and our vision is about learning and well-being. These two are very important to us. It has been very challenging, but Thank God, we have our UAA students and UAA teachers. Because the one thing we never ever have to worry about was students not studying, not working; we never have to worry about our teachers not doing their very best and try to continue. For our teachers, it’s incredibly difficult as well. We have teachers all around the world. Some of them haven’t been back to their families for two years. They keep going and they keep offering lessons.

We’re all bored, we’re all tired, it’s monotonous and it’s the same, but we’re so proud of our community. I think that will be one lesson for us that this is a wonderful school and a wonderful community.

Funda Cüceloğlu: Yes, and maybe I could add one more thing. As a school, we love planning. Our students love planning, the school faculty loves planning, the administration loves planning. We basically have a plan for the whole year when we start the academic year. We know which activities we’re doing on which week. The students, the teachers, and the staff are all well aware. We start organizing things early. The most frightening thing is that, although we have our plans, we have to constantly change them. This frustrated us a lot as the school administration. Obviously, this frustrated our students and even our parents - because when you are frustrated, your parents are too. We organize certain things, and then we have to either cancel them or postpone them. As Dr. Coles said, I think we developed that flexibility. That was one skill that we learned very well. Being flexible and being able to adapt. Adapt to the new situation, adapt when there’s a change, accept what we’re going through as the way it is. I think that was a great learning experience for UAA culture in general.

5 - How sensible do you think it is that all written grades of a semester are reduced to only one exam?

Funda Cüceloğlu: Again, unfortunately, Turkish education has a very exam-based culture. For the last couple of years, we have been working a lot on formative assessment (which means teachers giving feedback to the students without grades, or peer-assessment where basically your friend is giving feedback about how you can improve your learning, or the self-evaluation where the student evaluates herself or himself based on a certain criteria). So, we tried to make our priority or make an emphasis on more formative assessment, especially a lot more during this online learning period. We tried to provide lots of quizzes, projects and presentations. Actually, we have been assessing students without necessarily giving written exams since the beginning of the academic year. Your teachers are giving little projects, presentations, quizzes, oral responses, and such. Those are all different pieces of assessments. But if we have to give a written grade, yes, we have to come up with an exam week and give a written exam. But, you will be receiving more than one performance grade. So, our main concentration point was the performance grades because they are continuous. We did not know whether we’re going to have written exams or not. Therefore, its effects on the student body in general should be considered when evaluating whether it’s just or not.

6 - If you had a say over the decisions made by MEB, what changes would you propose (regarding the examinations, online education, etc.)?

Funda Cüceloğlu: As I have told you, if we tie this to assessments, we have been doing different kinds of assessments to support our students' learning. Is it necessary to have an exam week? Not necessarily for us because we would’ve given you other grades if it were necessary. But, we are in the same pot, as I have told you, with the other schools all around the country. We don't have much of a say because we are tied, we have a very central education. All I can say is that we have to go with what they say and with their rules. If I were the minister, would I give other procedures? I might have, but I might have given other decisions thinking about UAA. I don’t have much knowledge about other schools in Turkey.

Peter Coles: I agree with you entirely. You know, with our students and our teachers we can do anything. Anything is possible for us, but we have to understand the part of MEB and that’s something that we can't change. Some students say what would happen if we just don’t do the exams, and the exam week. What is the worst that could happen? Well, the worst thing that could happen is that you guys don’t get to have a MEB diploma. You are in the Turkish system, and you want the Turkish diploma. That’s why we have to be in line with what they do. We have to make the best of it and, honestly, some students prefer face-to-face exams as well. Some students want the chance to prove themselves in that environment, rather than in projects. We actually protected our students from having exams. If we didn’t have exams then it would be so hard to take them at the end of the year when we enter those grades.

7 - What do you think are the positives and negatives of online education compared to Face-to-Face education?

Funda Cüceloğlu: Well online education has its own positives and negatives. Obviously, we missed human connection, socialization; we missed having fun together. We cannot be on school campus and have fun together. However, from time to time online education has been efficient as well. We learned how to make our lessons in a limited environment without wasting our time. We used breakout rooms, different kinds of tools, etc. We learned new approaches to teaching and learning as well. They will stay from now on. We will go both face-to-face, and there will be things that we will do online. We learned new approaches to learning and teaching. We believe that this will make our on-campus lessons more efficient as well. We discovered new things through online education from both students and teachers. So, it has its advantages and disadvantages, but definitely, we missed being together, cooperating and communicating. We are tired of looking at our screens. Our eyes burn and itch because we need to look at our computers all the time. Our backs hurt. We lost track of time. You know, when you were in school, there was a dedicated time period for school. When you went home you had your family time and socialization time outside. Now everything is at home. So it has its difficulties as well. I am the school principal at home while also trying to be a mother, a wife, a cook, the cleaning lady at the same time. We are sort of confused about our roles as well.

Peter Coles: One thing I really believe that shocked us was this: I can only talk based on what my students tell me, but we always thought that Turkish and English will be hard online and math and science will be easier. What we’ve noticed is that students tend to prefer maths and science face-to-face because they want that human being in front of them. They want to see and almost “touch” the teacher. Whereas, other subjects like business for example I really miss being in class with my business management students. I used to love being with them but the class is much more efficient online, possibly 30 percent more efficient. There is no chit-chatting. The lesson starts, bang bang bang, there is the work, breakout rooms, do your work, do your homework and come back. So, on that side there is a really good benefit. Some students got to school in two hours, and went back to their houses in two hours. They saved four hours a day, which is a benefit for them. Some things have been very efficient. We’ve realized that when we return to school, we can mix face-to-face learning with online learning. Maybe we don’t need 40 minute lessons. If we can do 35 minute lessons face-to-face it would be very efficient for you guys, and we will get to do more fun things. It would be better because we need more social interaction, sports, art when you get back to school. No one would’ve guessed that maths and physics would need to be face-to-face. That’s what we’ve found out. I’ve been learning online since 2008, that’s when I started doing online courses. I used to recommend it to teachers and they used to tell me “I don’t like online learning”. So, I think this has proven the world that you can learn online. We were just avoiding it before. This means that maybe in summer we can have a half a week chat with my IB students to catch up, and make sure that they don’t forget the things we’ve learned. It could be like a revision lesson. There are no more snow holidays. The possibilities are endless. One thing we’ve learned today is that Google originally sent all their staff to work from home, and they announced today that they want to bring people back to the office. Microsoft announced the same. So all these companies that said “Work from home” realized that “You need to be face-to-face”. I am not saying it's not the same, but some things just can’t be explained online. For example, this would’ve been a more effective meeting if we were face-to-face because you would be able to see my body language, I would be able to see yours. So we know that this is great, but we need both (online and face to face). I think it would be a big failure if I and Funda Hanım come back and everything continues exactly the same before the coronavirus. That would be a big failure on behalf of the school. We are trying to do our best to keep the elements that we learned and we also try to have the best of the online education and the face-to-face education system.

Funda Cüceloğlu: There are lots of questions on our minds too: What can we do? How can we make things better? How can we benefit from what we have learned? There are new things to consider and new things to plan.

Peter Coles: And things like boys wearing earrings, boys having hair as long as girls, having colored hair, uniform… We really want to relax these things. In the exam week everyone wore a school top, which is necessary for identification of our students, but the bottom half was “serbest.” Our teachers didn’t wear ties, suits etc. So when we come back to school we want to knock down some of these traditions, and have a more relaxed environment. Because we’ve seen that we can trust our teachers and our students to work online, so why do we have to keep these traditions? We will be looking at those things.

Funda Cüceloğlu: New approaches, new questions, new answers, new plans…

8 - If it becomes certain that online education will continue for next year, what will happen to the current system? Will changes be made? And, accordingly, do you think the current system can continue as it is?

Peter Coles: Funda Hanım and I get really bored quickly. We are always looking forward to developing. For me especially, I have a really low concentration level and I like to change things up. When I see the same timetable for months, I'm always looking for new ways to change it. As the admin team, we are really lucky to be working with the student deans: we are always talking about how to change things. At the moment, based on student feedback - when we listen to students and we listen to parents - we are really happy with what we got. The breaks seem good. The length of the lessons seems good. I think if the Ministry of Education says we are %100 going back to face-to-face education in September, I think we will keep thinking about how we can bring students back to school even if it’s only briefly, even if it’s only one or two days a week. We will probably look for ways to get around the rules. I don’t think we can go another year without seeing students at all. Apart from exam week, grade 10, grade 11 students haven’t been to school at all. We really need to find creative ways to deal with that. I don’t think the learning will suffer because we are used to it now and we are proven from our exam results. However, the psychological impact of another year online would be difficult.

That’s the changes we look at for next year. None of us can look at the screen for another year, that’s the truth. After the summer, we need something different. For 9’th grades, your prep year was kind of destroyed. For 11’th grades, at least you guys had 2 and a half years on the campus. Prep students never had the opportunity. Even before the end of the year, if we have any chance, we would like to get them back even for a day just to experience because they lost that. It is so important to get you to adapt to the UAA way of thinking and culture. We have plans for all of our students, but for prep students, they probably don’t feel like UAA students yet. They don’t get to be in these beautiful buildings. One of the great things for prep students is learning from the older students and being in clubs and being in activities, seeing older grades, and saying “Wow, I like to be like them.”

Funda Cüceloğlu: Unfortunately, for preps, the pandemic collided with the year that they fully started to learn about the UAA culture. There are certain sets of expectations. They learn it from their teachers but also from grades 10, 11, and 12. They look at them as models. They join clubs and socialize with them. They learn a lot from the older grade levels. They missed this opportunity. They only came to school as a whole class once or twice. They don’t even know each other face-to-face. They only know each other through Zoom. They probably don’t know their faces. They missed that contact. We definitely believe that preps will need more support. All years will need that support. Poor grade 12’s, they missed their final year. You always look forward to your final year. The school has lots of organizations for 12’th graders and we missed them. We feel sad actually. Just an hour ago, we had a meeting with our teachers. Everybody was really enthusiastic and greeting each other. Teachers missed each other as well.

9 - Will this year's May Day take place? If so, what are your plans?

Peter Coles: Mayday became a really important thing for us because it is the 100th year. Even before Covid, we planned not just one Mayday, but a weekend of Mayday where we have different events. At the moment it is illegal to have anything because we are a red zone city. The rule states very clearly you can’t have more than 300 people more than one hour and that is in the normal zones. We won’t even say there is a chance. There is no chance. It is impossible. The police would come and they would arrest us. What we have to say is not even try to do something online, imagine this year didn’t happen. Then we will celebrate the 100th year, next year. It can be even two weekends of Mayday. It definitely won’t be one night. We might have a jazz night. We might have a classical music night. We might have a comedian because everyone will be ready for it. Mayday is so important. Think of me. This is my third year. I only experienced one Mayday. I brought my kids. I brought my wife. I brought my wife’s cousin. It is such a great event. We missed it but it is a kind of event that there is no point in trying to do it halfway or try and replace it. The only Mayday is with hundreds of people on our campus, music loud and the famous group singing. We hope very much by May 2022, we can organize a Mayday and that will be a real celebration. It will be the first big event that we will be able to have next year, so we are looking forward to it.

-Selin Beyazkoç, Nehir Elkin, Cemre Bahar Boz, Berat Deniz Eroğlu, Aslı Türkölmez