2018年11月1日

We welcome four students and Ms H S Chen, English Teacher, of Luhe High School, our sister school in Beijing.  Not only will the students attend classes with us for three days on 14-16 November, but Ms Chen will also teach a class and have a professional development session with our English Teachers.  In different occasions, I have mentioned fondly that teachers have to be “stubborn” species; we need to firmly believe that we are on the right track before we can pass on our thinking to students.  But it will take others in the profession to tell us, and huge effort in reflections, if we are really on the right track. Therefore, I value professional development opportunities among teachers of different schools.

 

To that end, we are doing two things. Firstly, we will be signing sister school partnership contracts with schools in Bangkok, Kota Kinabalu, Seoul, and Toyama in this academic year, in the hope that our teachers and students will have more exposures of different kinds. Not only will students visit each other every other year, but we also hope that there will be exchanges on leadership styles and management concerns.

 

Secondly, our school takes initiative to organizing inter-school staff development events. The first seven-school development day is on 9 November, when each school, as a venue, hosts a key learning area activity: Chinese, English, Mathematics, Liberal Studies, Sciences, STEM education, and Values education.  In each key learning area, teachers from different schools will do individual presentations, highlighting their school strengths and signature programs in the KLA to others. Then an invited expert in the area will comment further on the topic assigned. All teachers will then go into groups to explore further how other schools conduct their programs, and share their difficulties, before they return to their own school group and plan for an activity in the area for their own school.

 

We can improve only by reflections: examining our weaknesses and borrow and adapt workable ideas from others.  I wish these two events a success.

 

 

Anson Yang