GRIP, Internships Abroad Thinking Beyond

very50 - Tokyo, Japan

To be entirely honest, when I signed the contract with very50 in early May I had no idea what I would be doing this summer. I had a vague understanding of what the company was about from my interview and I knew that it sounded truly interesting, however it wasn’t exactly clear what my role would be. I didn’t know if there would be other interns, or how I would fit in, or what my hours would be. I just figured it was a good opportunity and signed on for the summer.

On my first day, I was a little thrown off when my boss asked me what “value” I thought I could contribute to the company. I had no idea how to answer that, as I had no idea what exactly they were expecting of me. I had come to an internship with no job description, and on the first day, I wasn’t not expecting to be asked that question. I thought I had already gone through the interview a month before! I honestly don’t remember what I said, but we ended up talking about what kind of problems the company was having and what my skills and experience could do for those issues. He ended up identifying an issue they were having with the students who participate in their MoG program. For context, very50 has an acceleration program for social impact startups in Southeast Asia known as their “Mission on the Ground” Program. There are different types of MoG (Mission on the Ground) projects, with the most popular being their High School MoG in which the consulting team consists of Japanese high school students. The students are trained for 2 to 3 months in MBA business strategies and consulting tactics and then go abroad with the very50 staff for around two weeks to work with the social impact startups first-hand.

One of the issues my boss brought to my attention, was that the students hadn’t been engaging with the social entrepreneurs they were working with. They were doing their work but weren’t thinking deeply enough about their experience and were avoiding asking questions. They were on site in these countries, experiencing and seeing things they never had before, but the very50 staff felt like the students weren’t getting as much out of it as they could be. My boss wanted me to develop a workshop to train the students in some skill that would help them think more deeply about what they were observing and be comfortable with the unfamiliar territory.

I brainstormed for about a week on what “skill” I could teach students that would help them think more deeply. I researched and asked my coworkers a lot of questions about the Japanese education system and how the students learn. It took a while for it to take shape, but I realized that “critical thinking” could be the main focus of the workshop. After talking with my coworkers more I learned that there is not really a concept of “critical thinking” in Japanese schools the way there is in America. Students just learn facts and figures in class without questioning or thinking deeply about it. What to us is something that is taught from a somewhat young age, is something that is only really learned as an MBA business skill. All of this isn’t to say that Japanese people don’t think deeply, it's just not something that is taught in school.

So, for the first month of my internship, I worked relentlessly on this workshop on critical thinking which came to be known as “Thinking Beyond.” At first, it was hard to conceptualize what exactly critical thinking was. I struggled to make what to me was an abstract, conceptual thought process that I vaguely was aware of in my own mind, into a concrete, teachable subject. How could I put into words and explain something that came second nature to me?

After googling “what is critical thinking,” and “how to teach students to think critically” and reading a ton of articles, (some helpful, some not) I boiled the basics of critical thinking down to asking questions. If students don’t ask questions in the first place, they can’t think deeply because they only have the information they are given. The three questions,” How”, “Why” and “If” became the axis of the workshop. The main goal was to get the students comfortable with asking these questions and using the information they receive in their answers to think more critically and deeply and come up with their own conclusions and further questioning. I found an activity online for teaching kids to ask questions and adapted it for our slightly older audience. I still wanted to make it more fun and interactive rather than just a lecture.

“The Question Game” involves having students read a text they are somewhat familiar with in pairs, and rolling a die with the questions “How,” “Why,” and “If” at predetermined intervals. One student is supposed to ask their partner an open-ended question about that section of the reading using the question word indicated. If the students rolled a “why” they would have to ask a “why” question and their partner would have to think of an answer. I picked a popular Japanese folktale after polling my coworkers on what type of text the students would all be familiar with.

I continued working on the workshop and eventually developed both a Japanese and English version, which my coworkers helped translate. My boss and I discussed the workshop over and over again throughout the month and I ended up having about 3 different versions before we got to the final. My boss really liked “The Question Game” activity, so we ended up ordering custom dice that I designed for the students to use in the activity.

I traveled with my boss to Sendai (5 hours north of Tokyo) to teach the workshop to the group of students that was going to Cambodia this summer. Their teacher wanted me to teach in English, but we soon realized that they understood maybe 50% of what I was saying, so my boss translated for me as I was teaching. The students really loved the Question Game part and it was really rewarding to work with them. There were actually two other parts to the workshop, one on diversity and one on communication, but we actually ran out of time for the communication section. The diversity section was a little much for the students right after the Critical Thinking section and the content was a little on the heavy side, so I ended up editing a lot of that in the final revision.

The workshop definitely wasn’t perfect in its first run, and I ended up editing it again and breaking it up into two workshops after talking with my boss. I sent him the final revision in August when I was already back in the US because I didn’t finish in time! I had never created a workshop before so having a concept and my own ideas come to shape to where I was teaching student was an extremely rewarding experience for me. I also don’t think I have ever worked so diligently in my entire life! Going from not knowing what I was going to be doing, to having produced such a project in one month is something crazy to me. My company loved the concept of “Thinking Beyond” and added my workshop as well as a few other products they derived from it to their main body of material. As of July, they ordered over 200 dice and have plans to continue ordering more as more students join the program. The fact that they’re going to keep teaching my workshop even after I have left means a lot to me, and I’m extremely proud that my work did so much for the company. I did a few other projects over the summer, but this one was the most important and fulfilling.