16 minute read
Real Learning
Virtual school started for our students on February 3. But the learning they gained was real!
Dustin Wood makes a video lesson for his students.
Live from Hong Kong: It’s Teaching Online!
Home learning is a family affair at the Knoflicks!
Johnny Hogan sets up a physics experiment for his high school students.
The suspension was announced during our January Chinese New Year break, that schools would suspend classes for two weeks…which quickly turned into four weeks…and then 11… The challenges abounded: Lower Primary had to figure out how to teach through play remotely, Upper Primary had to learn new technology, Middle School struggled to balance screen time and wellbeing, and High School had to deal with the cumulative disappointments of cancelled Interims, sports and club competitions, prom, and the possibility of a cancelled graduation. Each division created home learning programs that were suited to the age of their kids. But one thing remained clear to us: Who we are as HKIS stands true, whether our classes are online or on campus. This period of time proved to us that we are truly a resilient, collaborative and creative learning community. Here, read stories about different parts of the virtual learning experience.
HKIS’s Top Tips for Fellow Educators
•Take it slow.
It’s going to take time to figure out what works best. Give yourself 2-3 weeks to test what works best for your learners and teachers.
•Shift expectations.
It takes longer to get through material than normal.
•Streamline and share the load.
Collaboration among teachers makes for great classes!
•Prioritize.
Make sure students will meet learning standards during virtual learning, and then add on the layers to benefit the whole child.
•Teach, don’t assign.
This is virtual school, not an online course.
•Create routines.
Daily structure and habits are critical, whether the student is 4-years-old or 17. Keep school hours, pick a place to work, and change out of your PJs!
•Consistency is key.
Parents and students are receiving so much information, so do your best to structure your information in a consistent way.
•Take breaks in the schedule for wellbeing.
A normal school day has scheduled breaks to get the blood flowing, or as a 6-year-old would say, get the wiggles out.
•Pick a tech and go for it.
The sooner you decide on platforms or apps the better, for students, teachers and parents.
High School Dispatch: “We’re Going Online”
In the midst of the Chinese New Year holiday, it became clear that all schools in Hong Kong would have to suspend classes for the first two weeks back from the CNY break. In the High School, we had a sense of how to do this, following the suspension of classes during the social unrest in November, when schools closed for a week. What we didn’t really understand was what exactly extended virtual learning looked like when it lasted over a week. It would take a few weeks for us to realize that virtual school is not the same as online learning. We couldn’t just upload the material and hope for the best — that was not the way to keep students interested. We had to curate information, not dump it. So we innovated. First, we decided to stick to the bell schedule and keep teaching “live” — no pre-recordings of classes — teachers and students connected on Zoom, caught up, learned a lesson, broke up into smaller groups for discussion, and came back — all in the space of a single Zoom call (three cheers for the breakout room function!). It became clear really quickly that this was the best way to capture much of the energy of the classroom — teachers and students feed off of each other, they get ideas from each other, they learn from each other — and a video call is the best way to do this, when you can’t get to a classroom. And, within a few short weeks of upending school as we knew it, kids knew what to do, teachers upskilled their tech skills, and parents were coping.
High School Humanities teacher Leo Zen Zooms with his class.
And now we find ourselves looking ahead, and thinking what this all means for us when we return to campus. For all the silver linings, there just is no replacement for having everyone on campus; the losses outweigh the gains, particularly for our seniors. We miss the lively energy of having everyone on campus, learning together, socializing together. But this has given us the space to think about how we can take the best of this virtual learning experience and keep it for when we’re all able to come together in one space again. Maybe students will have more freedom to pursue internships and apprenticeships, knowing that they Zoom in on core classes. Maybe students participating in sporting tournaments during school time could catch the class they missed later. We can’t wait to have students back on campus. We miss the chaos of a normal High School day, with its kids in the hallways and club meetings and competitions and group projects and music and impromptu student life. And they’ll be back.
Associate Principal for Teaching and Learning, Brent Brayko works from his office
AP Exams, 2020 Edition
Following a College Board decision to administer AP exams in a way that avoided group gatherings, all AP exams in 2020 were live, online, and 45 minutes long. This meant that HKIS High School students along with other students in Asia sat their exams at midnight, 2 a.m. or 4 a.m….!
A Peek Behind the Scenes of our Teachers and Staff in Action
HKIS's Facilities Management staff scrub the cafeteria tables clean in Lower Primary.
Middle School Art TA Victor Fung in an empty art room.
Ishitaa Gidwani and Claire Kirk kick the energy right up in Upper Primary,
Middle School teacher Lino Santos sorts through book donations spread across his classroom.
Kevin Krembs and Greg Ladner Zoom with Michael Coleman.
Duchess Doodle addresses her art cherubs in a video lesson.
Stan Krause Zooms with his Grade 4 students.
Hamlet Lin, High School Tech Coach, prepares an instructional video for teachers.
The Curriculum team practices social distancing.
Literacy for the Little Ones
Quynh Nguyen and Cristy Dratz play with math manipulatives for our youngest learners.
Parents across the school were given a front-row seat in their child’s learning, but perhaps none more so than parents of our Lower Primary kids. LPS students need more help from grown-ups to set up their learning and submit it to teachers, and so parents got to see the step-by-step progression of their learning. One activity that all LPS students took part in was writing books. And more books. And then more books. One parent quipped, “When my son grows up, he wants to open a bookstore. We’re getting a 25-year start on inventory!” The reason for this was simple. Teachers had to prioritize which learning standards to focus on, and bookmaking was the ideal way to do this. So it was clear: Students must write every day. And this way, they were able to meet the educational standards set for them in order to be successful to progress to the next grade level. Students also needed to honor the writing process, how to start and end a piece of writing. Producing books is a great way for kids to learn essential writing skills. They learn about different types of books – fiction, non-fiction, narrative, informational – and get to create books that interest them. The skills students learn while bookmaking are transferable – they stay on topic, they can expose how they are thinking – teachers are able to teach to the writer: where is this student in her learning. Finally, it gives students ownership over their learning, and gives them a chance to make something with a purpose. Students can immediately see themselves as writers. Virtual learning comes with a whole host of special challenges for the youngest students. And in focusing on this type of project, teachers are able to get the input they need to assess students, and help them progress in their learning. The success of this project work also depends on parents. Parents less familiar with what writing samples look like for a child may have had a certain expectation of what the book “should” look like. So the teaching teams put together author samples and a sample of writing by a child in their grade. This way, parents could quickly understand the goal of the project. Kids get to write freely, and it’s that experience that will help form a love of writing. And then students talk about their books on Zoom with their classmates, and we are reinforcing that we are a community of writers; they love to share, and they want to share their writing.
Priyanka D'Costa doing a read-aloud online
True Grid
HKIS's Home Learning Portal
A writing grid for one week this semester.
Consistency, efficiency, freeing up time. Those are the three main reasons that the Lower Primary and Upper Primary leadership decided to put together learning grids for our primary students. A grid is a weeklong learning plan for kids and gave consistency across the 10 classrooms per grade, and were created by a “task force” of teachers. Not only did this free teachers up to create richer content, but it was much easier for parents to follow, especially for those families who have kids in more than one grade. Teaching has become very, very visible: Parents perhaps have never had such a clear view of HKIS’s approach to learning at the primary level!
Lower Primary students experience multiple aspects of student life...at home!
Zoom Boom
UP students give teachers a thumbs up!
No matter how old the student, the indispensable tool, the one that makes the difference between an online course and virtual learning, the one that comes closest to recreating the social experience so important to and integral to school, is video conferencing. HKIS made the decision early on to use Zoom as a platform, and it has served well, and was used differently among the four divisions, depending on students’ ages. Across all four divisions, teachers found that it was a wonderful tool to do deep conferencing. Using secure links, kids and teachers could go one-to-one, either in a breakout room in the middle of class, or at another time.
A grade 5 science lesson with Brad Powers, Sarah Deaver, and Megan Godeck.
Crash Course: Virtual Learning
Spoiler alert: Teachers love learning. When HKIS asks our teachers what they like about working at HKIS, in third place, after liking the students and liking their colleagues, is the opportunity for professional development (PD). Unfortunately this semester, like all other gatherings, our annual visits from educational experts and conferences in literacy, numeracy, Chinese, and science were canceled, but a new form of PD emerged in real-time: How to teach remotely. Our Tech Coaches and expert colleagues switched into high gear, offering countless sessions on “Zooming In” and “Zooming Up” — how to use the video-conferencing platform to mimic the classroom experience as closely as possible; how to make the most use out of Schoology (a sort of Facebook for classes — a learning management system in the Middle and High Schools); and how to engage with our youngest learners who aren’t as tech-savvy as our older students. And as with all new learnings, there were ups and downs and bumps along the way, but in the end, every one of our teachers has been able to adapt their usual classroom teaching to the virtual realm.
LP teachers Mekala Weerakoon and Christy Niemeyer record a lesson.
It can’t happen without I.T.
Shoutout to our IT department who supported all 3,500 of us to be online during the closure! See page 39 for an interview with our head of Information Technology, alumnus Roy Bas ’94.
Middle School Mambo
Middle Schoolers may be social distancing, but had the company of their little brothers and other pets.
The changes that happen in Middle School are dizzying. In sixth grade, students are venturing into the new world of secondary school, with the new responsibilities that come with that — more independence, and a greater need for support from their parents. By the time students are in grade 8, they are more in charge of their learning, as they gear up for life in High School. This is a big range, and modifying our Middle School program to something that would work remotely for the whole school took a few tweaks. Initially, we wanted to give students the most flexible schedule possible, giving kids recorded classes and lesson plans for each day, so that they could find the routines at home that suited them best. This is what we had done in the fall when school was suspended for a week due to the social unrest in our city. However, as the school closure extended to two weeks, then four weeks, it was clear that we needed to support students by giving them more structure to the day, and we switched over to following an adapted bell schedule complete with live instruction over Zoom, in addition to the teacher videos and lesson plans. This means that students have the best of both worlds: They can review the recordings and follow lesson plans, while at the same time gaining the benefit of live video conferencing with teachers. So that was academics taken care of. But what about social relationships and general well-being? Middle School decided to take a Wednesday and make it a wellbeing day — encouraging kids to get off screens, do some reading for pleasure, and do some exercise, or, if they needed to, a breather, or, to catch up on any work they were behind on. This was a hugely popular move, so popular that it inspired both Upper Primary and High School to make their own wellbeing initiatives. Students were also thinking of creative ways to connect with their friends — setting up a peer tutoring group, or by hanging out with counselors during a “Chill + Chat” session, or with their school house during a jumbo Zoom with kids from all grades within a house hanging out online.
Data Dive: Shockingly Positive
During the school closure, it became very important for us to know how well home learning was going for our students and their families, and how they were doing in terms of wellbeing and stress during the disruption to the normal school year. Hong Kong’s Education Bureau asked all schools to find out where their families were – Adam Pecher, had they returned after the Chinese New Year HKIS’s Data Analyst Holiday? Through this, we knew that about 25% of our families were outside Hong Kong. This would help us decide how to run our virtual learning, with the understanding of which time zones our students were in. Second, we began to send out home learning surveys, with specific questions to inform us about what was working well, and what wasn’t. This was a bit nerve wracking — our teachers and parents have very high expectations of what education at HKIS should look like, and we wondered if people would be satisfied with how it comes across remotely. The answer has been a resounding yes. In High School, in particular, over 90% of parents and 75% of students were satisfied or very satisfied with home learning. This is a huge relief, and a validation of the work that our teachers, coaches and school leaders have done to streamline and make virtual learning as efficient, accessible, effective and engaging as possible. Anonymous surveys allow us to hear from the whole parent community and how they are feeling supported, or how frustrated they are. And while we hear frequently from parents who are extremely positive or negative about their experience, survey data allows us to hear from those who might have more nuanced and widely-shared reactions to the program. Data has been helpful in figuring out where we are and how we’re doing. And by asking our students and families how they’re doing now, we are able to ask again later, and compare how they fared during these difficult few months with a normal term, now that they are building new tools in resilience.
Grade 4 teachers Alex Cleary and Stan Krause collaborate to teach a lesson on colonialism.
But I Get Up Again
Wonder Wednesdays “take off” at UP.
Upper Primary students are in a unique stage. They still play, but there are academic needs. They are digital natives in many ways given their generation, but they are too young to be given full access to digital devices or social media. This posed a great challenge for teachers in Upper Primary as they took on the journey of home learning for grades 3-5. After about a week of getting their ducks in a row and trying to deliver content individually by classroom, the teachers, with the support of the admin team of principal Ben Hart and associate principals Gene Cheh and Virginia Udall, changed their course. They streamlined their classes to set curriculum standards, divided and conquered by sharing teaching responsibilities by subject, and chose a set of consistent platforms for students and parents to access. In a matter of days, students in Grade 4 who have never accessed email before were given a crash course on how to set up Gmail and track their assignments through Google Docs posted on Google Classroom. Grade 5 was already up and running on Google Classroom, and Grade 3 stuck to Seesaw to submit their work. Upper Primary is a time for students to grow in their independence. Once this system was put in place, combining all the expertise and creativity of an HKIS program, our 8 to 11-year-olds were able to shine with a profoundly increased sense of independence and a bunch of newfound technical skills!
