Social Education Starfish Education Social Enterprise Co., Ltd. or Starfish Education is a project that aims to provide quality educational opportunities to all children equally. It provides learning that uses various creative innovations to bring out the unique learning potential of each child to the best of its ability.
Starfish Education Social Enterprise Co., Ltd. operates to solve social problems in education that never end. From small contributions today to solve educational problems in the country. The company aims to support quality education through innovative learning and focuses on preparing children with the skills and abilities necessary for quality daily life.
In this episode, the admin will take everyone to listen to a story about a boy and a school of stranded starfish. This social enterprise is now recognizing the educational problem, which can be called a big problem that no matter how much you solve it, it never goes away. Everyone will get to know the story of this company that started with collecting one, two, three, ten starfish, or maybe all of them on the beach one day from an interview with Dr. Narathaphorn Chanchaliao Seributra, or Dr. Prae, CEO of Starfish Education Social Enterprise Co., Ltd.
beginning
At first it was just the Starfish Country Home Foundation, which was established to run the Ban Pla Dao School. It is a medium-sized private school with students of various social status and ethnicities. Richard P. Haugland is the founder. Before he came to Thailand, he had a foundation in America. After he retired, he sold the company and used the money to open it.
What is the name of Starfish?
At one beach, when the tide recedes, many starfish wash up dead. A boy tries to throw the starfish back into the water to save them one by one. A man walks by and asks why he is throwing them back in, because more starfish will wash up dead anyway. The boy grabs the starfish and turns to the man and says,
“But at least it will make a difference to this starfish.”
“General education does not meet the needs of all students.”
When Dr. Prae joined Starfish, what she felt was that every child has a different learning style. Therefore, each child needs specific teaching. The same learning cannot make every child receive the same knowledge. This is the origin of Starfish creating many educational innovations to meet the diverse learning needs of each child.
“Providing scholarships alone does not create sustainable development.”
Since Starfish started out as a foundation, the assistance given was mostly in the form of scholarships to underprivileged children. Later, when it was realized that providing scholarships was not a sustainable form of assistance, once given, it would run out. This led to the idea of providing education to personnel, whether they were the children, teachers, or the children’s families, so that they could use the knowledge they gained to properly care for the children and extend the assistance they received in a sustainable way.
Striving for acceptance
At first, it was just a small school founded by a foreigner and the school director was Dr. Prae, who was very young at the time. The teaching methods and curriculum were clearly different from other schools. Therefore, it was not accepted and was seen as just an alternative school. But the company used its dedication and proved to everyone that it sincerely wanted to develop education. After working for a while, the children who were the products of the school were proof of success without the company having to make any announcements or advertisements.
Starfishlabz Developing personnel who do not necessarily have to be teachers
The initial goal was to create a platform for teachers to come and train, do workshops, and learn how to teach in the Starfish style. However, when the platform was widely shared, it was found that it was not only teachers who were interested in learning. Many parents were also interested in teaching and learning to use with their children at home. In addition, some topics had children contacting to ask to come and study. Therefore, the Starfish education model is a learning that has a variety of people coming in. Those who come to study can choose to study according to their own interests. We learn best when we are interested.
PBL learning
One of the interesting learning methods at Ban Pla Dao School is PBL, which stands for Project based Learning, learning from doing projects on things that children are interested in. This learning is taught in kindergarten. When they get to primary school, learning about things they like is elevated to Problem-based Learning, learning from using problems as a basis to learn how to solve problems by learning in small groups because each child has quite unique problems.
“Employees have the same goal of helping society as the organization.”
It is not only the children, teachers and parents who develop from learning with Starfish. All personnel who join Starfish, such as staff in various departments or employees in the company, develop for the better, find their own path and all have the desire to help develop society in the area of education in the same direction as the company.
Next goal
Starfish is a social enterprise in the form of not paying any dividends to shareholders, which means that all the money that comes in goes to help society. Therefore, the next step for Starfish is to expand the area of helping children in many groups, not just underprivileged children, but also children who can afford it or schools that have enough budget to pay, so that that money can be used to help society for children or schools that cannot afford it.
Conclusion
Innovation is something that must be developed continuously. We must do it and adjust it all the time because working as a social enterprise is working to meet the needs of society, not working to meet the needs of the organization. Work is changing rapidly. We cannot work in the same old way of working all the time. The ability to adapt is very important. Adapting quickly prevents us from being stuck in the past successes, which will allow us to continuously develop ourselves.
There are many problems in education right now, but if we look at all the problems and feel discouraged that our help is so small compared to the real problems, we will not be able to create any change. Today our help may be just a small point, but tomorrow it may expand to help create changes to many lives like the starfish on the beach.
Social Education with Starfish Education | The Practical Sustainability “Friend” Enterprise for Society
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Contact channels
Starfish Education Social Enterprise Co., Ltd. Website: https://www.starfishhub.com, Email: hub@starfishedu.org , Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/starfishlabz
Ban Pla Dao School , website : http://schsf.org/ , email: school-mt@schsf.org , phone: 053 857 457
Supported by the Office of Social Enterprise Promotion (OSEP)
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