Teacher and Student Perspectives on Maintaining Bridging the Gap Community in a Makeshift Online Classroom

DESIGN FOR LEARNING The ISM Promise For the International School of Myanmar, a focus on learning recalls its foundational promise

By Dr. Aloha Lavina, Director of Curriculum International School of Myanmar

In its beginning, the International School of Myanmar (ISM) was founded on a grandmother’s hope for her granddaughters. Picking up her granddaughters from school one day, ISM founder Daw Khine saw that they were in classes of 60 students, sitting passively, listening to the teacher. Daw Khine wanted her granddaughters and many children like them to experience “better quality and well-rounded education that meets international standards.” The promise of a quality international education was at the heart of ISM’s foundation.

More than two decades later, ISM revisits its founding purpose as it addresses school improvement initiatives using an ecosystem approach. ISM focuses on learning as a community by re-visioning teaching and learning as “The ISM Promise.”

A curriculum audit and a self-study in SY 2019-2020 revealed to the ISM community a list of definite priorities for teaching and learning. These priorities formed the basis for ISM’s curriculum action plan.

Finding Common Ground A useful inquiry cycle for systems work is the four lenses of the Common Ground Collaborative (CGC). CGC organizes learning around four D’s which suggest a way to look at school as an ecosystem that cycles through four learning phases: define, design, deliver, and demonstrate (Bartlett & Eldridge, 2014). ISM inquires about its own re-visioning through each of the four learning phases.

Defining Learning Like many international schools, ISM has co-created the language it uses to speak about teaching and learning over many years of collaboration. And, like many international schools, the language of learning gains definition from how students and adults learn and talk about learning through time. Consolidating a common glossary for learning addresses the question, What is learning and how do we do it? (Bartlett & Low, 2020). To answer the question and define learning for its community, ISM has spent the last three years creating principles that guide a framework for learning.

Designing Learning In 2020-2021, ISM turns its attention to design, using its framework. The shared school-wide goal this school year is to create the systems that turn its principles of learning into practices. Some of the systems that ISM has created and enacted this school year address the following:

• Alignment between instructional planning, classroom instruction, and assessment

To strengthen the alignment of the written, taught and assessed curriculum, ISM redesigned its unit planner so that there is more concrete and targeted guidance embedded in the unit planning process. For example, instead of a blank box titled Essential Questions, ISM’s Unit Planner specifies the creation and use of questions that target content, concepts and disciplinary and interdisciplinary understandings.

• A tighter connection between professional learning and classroom/school needs

Professional learning is distributed through four layers. The first layer addresses whole-school goals, such as alignment between written, taught and assessed curriculum. The second layer of professional learning addresses departmental goals, for examples, the science department is working on strengthening the student experiences of inquiry in science through phenomena, and the math department collaborates to design its curriculum backwards from the culminating AP years down through Pre-K. The third layer of professional learning happens in smaller teams, with goals set by the teams. For instance, Pre-K investigates projectbased learning and the use of single-point rubrics to create conversations about learning between the students and teachers. Finally, the fourth layer of professional development is based on individual growth goals, and is closely linked to ISM’s professional expectations for teachers.

Senior leadership has embedded its professional development into the calendar year to address school-wide goals. The seminar from Thinking Collaborative’s associate trainer Ochan Kusuma-Powell focuses on facilitating collaborative teams and was co-designed with Director Ben Marsh and Director of Curriculum Aloha Lavina. Starting with an outcome mapping with the members of the leadership team, the leadership team meets with Dr. Powell once or twice a month, using contextual polarities and issues as conversation points for rehearsing and applying collaborative capabilities and norms.

• Ways to make data more accessible to inform instructional decisions

With many years of data, ISM is currently inquiring into ways to make data more accessible to teachers and students. One of the indicators for achievement is the ability of teachers and students to be able to speak about and predict achievement, whether descriptively using standards-

derived criteria or grades (Hattie, 2012; Marzano, 2003). ISM aims to turn data not only into information but also use the information to provide insight, and over time, perhaps sustain as part of the school’s wisdom about effective teaching and learning. As part of its inquiry into using data to improve learning, ISM is focusing on crafting better questions to ask of its data, facilitating data conversations, and using the common glossary of learning in these collaborative sessions.

Delivering Learning Like many schools in 2020, ISM has had to hold virtual school because of lockdowns and stay-at-home directives due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Distance learning has presented a new set of challenges and approaches to learning for both teachers and students. ISM has been able to make quick pivots, such as providing virtual labs for science, quickly providing online student platforms for different subjects, and leveraging its professional development budget to cover teachers’ Zoom pro subscriptions, to name a few. The school uses short surveys to find out where the professional development needs are for teachers to strengthen distance learning, and has reallocated time and resources to bringing professional development for virtual delivery into the school.

Demonstrating Learning Along with the data visualization that ISM is investigating, teachers have begun to inquire into the question, How do we know we have learned? Using the once-a-month Pre-K to 12 meetings, for example, the English Language Arts team is collecting samples of student work and using a tuning protocol to arrive at a shared understanding of standards mastery in writing, an integral value as one of the school’s Student Learning Outcomes. Student assessment is only one of the data sets that show school improvement. Some teams are also involved in gathering data about effective instruction. As part of their subject review, the Arts team have created a process for peer observation of practices in the arts classrooms, using the same standards used in the school’s teacher effectiveness appraisal and growth system.

Curriculum is our Promise to our students and families ISM appreciates that the curriculum is a promise that we make to the families who entrust their children’s education to our school. The ISM Promise calls for the learning at ISM to be visible, coherent and guaranteed. As we continue to inquire and improve learning in the school, the ISM Promise is about working together to create clear pathways to success for each student from Pre-K to 12. For the community, the ISM Promise bridges the past to present, embracing the growth of the school from its founding to where we are now. Present actions resonate with the words of ISM founder Daw Khine, “We hope and believe that all of us can work together as one to build a stronger ISM.”

References Bartlett, K., & Eldridge, G. (2014). “The Learning Ecosystem.” Common Ground Collaborative. Retrieved from https://commongroundcollaborative.org/what-we-do/ on November 17, 2020.

Bartlett, K., & Low, D. (2020). The Learning Playbook; Building experts in the learning game. Brussels: Common Ground Collaborative.

Hattie, J. (2012). Visible learning for teachers; Maximizing impact on learning. New York: Routledge.

Marzano, R. J. (2003). What works in schools: Translating research into action. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

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