Every school a good school - Our goal in education is to provide an opportunity to develop each child holistically to maximise his potential. At Shuqun Secondary School, we continuously explored various means to actively engage our students by addressing the learning gaps backed by a keen understanding of the learning profile of learners and their learning needs.
The Professional Learning Communities(PLC) at our school focus on improving the teaching and learning(T&L) to support the Whole School Curriculum(WSC) . Through structured PLC sessions, teachers engage in an ongoing cycle of sharing expertise, discussing ideas and working collaboratively that promotes deep team learning, improve teaching skills and student outcomes. The four strands of PLC are:
• Formative Assessment - Making Thinking Visible
• STEM (Skilful Teacher and Enhanced Mentoring)
• SPARCS (Shuqun Personalized and Asynchronous Curriculum for Collaboration and Self-directed learning)
• Tutorial Relationships
The PLCs help to stretch teacher thinking on how to improve T&L outcomes both quantitatively and qualitatively by exploring what is possible with the maturation of ICT affordances and ICT-infused learning environments.
The projects described in this proposal are a result of drawing various learnings from the different PLC strands by capitalising the widely ICT-enabled learning environment in the school. Both projects sought to actively engage students in their learning through personalising instructions and partnering pedagogy using technological tools.
The Chinese teachers drew from Formative Assessment and STEM strands and the ICT tool Padlet, to design lessons based on Making Thinking Visible Using Padlet. Thinking routines are phrased as questions and posed on Padlet to draw ideas and responses from students. With teachers serving as facilitators in discussion, students exhibited drive and self-regulatory dispositions to manage flow and development of ideas. They also demonstrated agency when trying to socially resolve cognitive dissonances occurring from diverse ideas.
In the science project based on SPARCS, the teachers explored and reflected on their journey in the second year of practising the flipped classroom. The focus of the classroom experiences shifted from monitoring students' viewing of videos and completion of exercises in the classroom to exploring how learning could be more personalised and how ownership of learning could be transferred to the learner through partnership in the classroom.
The presentation seeks to show how teachers, faced with a myriad of choices from ICT tools to various T&L strategies, are able to explore various means and transform the interactions with their students.
