EDU 653

Driving Questions

Pre-Reflection

Since I work in Hong Kong and my working environment is the private international school community, I've seen that each school often has their own action/learning plan and is often very different from other schools in the city. These plans initially are crafted around the specific guidelines from the HK Education Bureau's initial guidelines (which are sometimes also different for each school depending on politics and the relationship that the school has with the government), then that plan is customised to meet the demographics and context of the individual school. This may vary in numerous ways, including how the school handles students who went away over the summer to visit family and got "stuck" abroad (due to quarantine/travel restrictions) and how they manage support being provided for these students, if any.

There are some things that have changed which may be permanent, such as parent-teacher conferences. In some schools, these have been moved to fully being online, and have had a resounding approval from parents of that shift, since it's often easier for parents to connect, where they would otherwise have to plan to leave work or need to make difficult arrangements to physically come into the school.

Virtual assemblies on zoom seems like they may be here to stay as well, at least for a little while, due to social distancing.

Another thing that has changed in my part of the industry is that it is now a "buyer's market", meaning parents are using this time to upgrade schools for their child and get them into schools that they wouldn't have been able to get into prior to covid. This actually started when protests began in HK in 2019 as families began to leave to go back to their home countries, like Japan, India, Australia, etc.

In many cases, schools are now bending over backwards to keep their classrooms full, lowering their standards and allowing things to slide more than before. An example of this happened at my school recently where a student was caught plagiarising for the 3rd time. Normally this would be the student's "3rd strike" and result in the student being expelled. However, since students and families are leaving Hong Long, or have more opportunity to upgrade to better schools, these kinds of issues are being handled in a more relaxed manner, to ensure customer (student) retention.

The top schools in the industry are the only schools who have not been affected by this as these are the schools who typically always have a long waiting list for students to get in, and the only difference for them is that their waiting lists are smaller. However, most are still at capacity.

A big part of our learning plan this year has been vaccine-dependent. Meaning we haven't been able to do certain things in our school, like hold afterschool clubs, until reaching a certain percent of our community being double-vaxxed.

In terms of the idea of where leaders in my field are communicating and sharing up-to-date practices, I immediately think about LinkedIn and Twitter. There is a lot of real-time conversation happening on these platforms. LinkedIn mostly being a place for administrators communicating about school policies and Twitter being a place to find teachers communicating about what's actually happening in the classroom. Following these platforms closely gives me the ability to see current trends in education, school management, and classroom struggles.

Researched Sources Used / Notes

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Presentation

For the purpose of this presentation, I assumed the role of a high school principal presenting to faculty in the first week back at school at the end of summer break. I incorporated a learning plan as the "House Keeping" section of the presentation.

In terms of the requirement to "share data or public plans from other districts", as well as my "district's remote learning plan", there is no website that applies to me that holds this information, since I teach at a privately owned international school in Hong Kong. My school receives general guidance from the Education Bureau, and has some leeway to modify this guidance within its context. All private international schools here have their own guidelines that are not public. There is no "district" or "state" data available in my region.

Reflection

I found this activity challenging in my context. Since I don't work in a "disctrict" of schools, per se, I could not complete the guidelines to find this type of publicised information since I live in Hong Kong and work at a private international school here. My school (like most private schools) is not part of a big set of schools, and is set up as an individual business which receives guidelines from the Education Bureau of Hong Kong. And the only thing that closely related to finding "what neighboring states are doing" was to think about other international schools throughout my region. Which was also difficult as this information isn't really made public. And just from informal conversations with colleagues at other schools, I've heard that the Education Bureau guidelines vary widely between schools, often changing based on political reasons, and can be modified to meet the needs of each school, to a certain degree. So each of these guidelines are very contextualised for each school. My response to these instructions were to think about how my school has set guidelines based on rules that have been given to use by the EDB, which I reflected in the "House Keeping" portion of my presentation video.

For the purpose of this activity, I pretended to be the high school principal in my school, giving an info session to teachers for the first week back after summer. I focus on applying tech to each of the areas of this assignment, just where I felt it was needed. And just where I felt it would be beneficial to support student learning.

One of the things I focussed on in how to improve learning was to really think more about the social and emotional impact of the pandemic, and thinking about redesigning learning so that there's more of a focus on group work, project based learning, and the reduction of standardised testing and simple straight forward tests like from Google Forms, so we can have students working on tasks that improve critical thinking skills and build those social skills back up again. In terms of utilising the tech to keep students engaged, I asked teachers to record all lessons, and posting these for students online. And to mitigate the extra time for dealing with this constant media management, I suggested using a platform like YouTube live-streaming, which auto-uploads content.

Finally, I closed with focussing on teacher health and well being, as it can't only be about the students, and if the teachers aren't healthy, they won't be able to take care of the needs of their students.