Professional Conversation & Learning Festival
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Name of Team
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NYGH People
Development Team
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Title of Project
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Professional
Conversation & Learning Festival
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Facilitator
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Mdm Ng Chuen-Yin
and Mrs Whang Ai Lee
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Team Leader
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Mrs Toh-Lim Ai
Wah and Mr Luis Lioe
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Secretary
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Members
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Senior Teachers
Guild
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Initiated on (date)
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2 Jan 2018
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Completion date
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5 Nov 2018
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Objectives/Targets
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Professional
Development in Nanyang has been evolving over the years and one of the
visions for PD@NYGH is to build a community of reflective professionals
who continuously improve themselves in order to bring out the best of our
students.
Prior to 2018,
the school-wide PD has been implementing teachers’ learning programme that
included having bi-weekly PD session on Wednesday morning, where we invited
various teachers to share about their programmes and practices, and included
having concurrent sessions to break teachers into smaller groups that catered
to teachers’ diverse interest. Although there was positive feedback on this
model, the general feeling is most of the time, the teachers spent time in
listening to the sharing and we did not really have sufficient time for
teachers to have conversation to internalize the learning and build on each
others’ reflection to improve the practices together.
With the
introduction of Singapore Teaching Practices (STP) by MOE in 2017, the PD
committee took the chance to re-design the PD sessions in order to build
opportunities for inter-department staff conversation that are aligned to
STP. In the design, we also looked into tapping on the strengths of our
Senior Teachers (STs) to facilitate the group conversation that are anchored
in pedagogical practices, so that each session would help every teacher in
the group to talk about and reflect about their practices using STP as the
tool that it became a rich learning together in a small group. It was also envisioned
that each group would take the initiative to continue the conversation in
daily work that would spearhead further collaboration such as observing each
other’s classrooms and the discussion about tackling the issues in teaching
and learning together.
With this new
format, we envisioned to have a Learning Festival (LF) at the end of the year
for all the staff to celebrate the journey together. We envisioned that the
story from each group throughout the year would be something that is worth
sharing and celebration by every Nanyang teacher that will pull everyone
together as a community of reflective professionals and set the good note to
end the year 2018, and to keep improving ourselves in 2019.
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Implementation Process
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The following stages of implementation
took place in Semester 1 (2018).
T1W2: The PD committee shared with the
whole school on the PD format and direction, and conducted a Learning Need
Analysis based on the 4 Teaching Areas (Positive Classroom Culture, Lesson
Preparation, Lesson Enactment, Assessment & Feedback) in the STP, where
each teacher identified which area of growth and development that would like
to focus on in 2018. Based on the teachers’ responses, all teachers were put
in a group having similar area identified for further conversation. The
documents in this week briefing was given in http://gg.gg/T1W2Direction
T1W6: The teachers sat in the assigned
group for the first time, and each group was facilitated by an ST. The focus
of the discussion was the intent of “why teach” which provided good warm-up
for teachers from different department to share their personal stories and to
find the commonalities and spead of various teaching strategies that each
teacher used. Generally they found the session was enriching and
heartwarming.
T1W10: The teachers, in the same
group, engaged in a case study provided by PD team to familiarise themselves
with STP. The case study shifted teachers’ perception on the relevance to
their practices. The feedback can be seen at https://padlet.com/luislioe/T1W10PD.
T2W2 : At first, the plan was to let
the groups to discuss similar conversation as in T1W10 focussing on
real-issues that each teacher faced. However, with some queries from the
staff, we use the chance to use this time to gather feedback about the new PD
format and gather feedback for the new direction. Generally, there is a
feeling that it was difficult to continue building the good momentum that has
been created in the earlier conversation due to the short span of
conversation time (30 minutes per session) and the gap in between the
sessions (2-4 weeks apart due to Staff Contact Time and Positive Education
sessions in between). Furthermore, staff also expressed challenges in
aligning the group conversation with the existing work that they have been
doing in their Department and committees. The conversation in this session
was captured on http://gg.gg/T2W2feedback
and the response from PD team to the staff was given on the following week: http://gg.gg/T2W3response
Taking the staff feedback into
consideration, the PD team together with the STs explored various ways to
improve the current format while at the same time keeping to the intent of
building the community of reflective professionals. One possible way was to engage
staff in a conversation on specific part of STP (chosen to be “Assesment and
Feedback”) by sharing a provocative issue about the tension between graded vs
non-graded assessments on students’ learning outcomes by distilling the
content from research done by Dr Anastasiya Lipnevich whom we invited to have
a conversation with Positive Education team in early Term 2. The sharing was
led by Sandra using the following documents: https://tinyurl.com/T2W6Assessment
and the staff feedback was captured in https://padlet.com/luislioe/T2W6PD.
Again, the short duration of the session (30 minutes) did not allow for staff
to deliberate on the issues which we acknowledged as the biggest constraint
to bring the conversation into a deeper level.
In T2W8, the last PD session in
Semester 1, we decided to do online sharing of teams, led by Wee Meng
(SH/EdTech) in Nanyang who have piloted the Students Learning Space (SLS). The
sharing can be accessed from https://tinyurl.com/T2W8SLS.
The online format was decided in view of the mid-year exam period and
post-exam activities that was deemed inconducive to have a face-to-face
session.
After Semester 1, the PD team and the
school leader reviewed the implementation of the new PD format in Semester 1
to decide on the implementation in Semester 2. In the review, we acknowledged
that the new PD format:
· Had a lot of potentials for staff to learn from each
other about pedagogical practices
· Had started to familiarise staff with the STP
structure and content
· Had promoted interaction and engagement between
staff from different Department
However we acknowledged the following
major constraints to continue with the same format:
· Too short of the session to lead to deep
conversation (constrained by 30-min duration)
· The format of having the following alternate
sessions per week: PD à Staff Contact Time à Positive Education à Staff Contact Time à PD à … actually bring disadvantage to build up momentum
and continuity.
The above 2 constraints led the PD
team and school leaders to prioritise the following objectives in Semester 2:
· Create space for inter-department staff engagement
conversation
· Change the format of the sessions, to put on hold
Positive Education and PD conversation, and reduce the number of Staff
Contact Time for continuity of conversation.
Therefore in Semester 2, we allocated
3 Staff Contact Time and the rest were for inter-department conversation. We
generated new grouping of staff during June Staff Meeting and used the
platform for Strategic Direction conversation where each group was led by the
Key Personnels (HOD/SH/YH). The whole of the strategic conversation was
documented on the following platforms and the last conversation took place
during Home Learning Days in September 2018:
MOE Workplan Seminar & School Direction:
Curriculum Discussion:
During the Home Learning Day, there
was an activity where all Department shared their review of the programmes in
2018 in the format of posters, and time was given for every teacher to do
gallery walk and put up comments/questions on each poster presentation. The
comments/questions from staff was collated and it became the basis for
Learning Festival that was set on 5 Nov 2018.
The Learning Festival was then
conceptualised to consist of the following 2 sections:
· Professional
Narrative: Where each teacher
explored the story from every Department sharing
· Social Narrative: Where teachers volunteered to conduct workshop of
their own personal interest (such as cooking, baking, cycling, movie,
mindfulness and meditation, floral arrangement, etc) and the staff engaged
with another staff in different setting and context.
The event was successful and we
received positive feedback on both professional and social narratives.
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Extent of Improvement/
Targets met
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Despite the
challenges in meeting the initial format, that were mainly due to structural
constraints in building up momentum, we have moved the NYGH teachers a few
steps into a vibrant community of professionals. The changes/tweak done also
helped to explore various possibilities and inform the need for structural
support in 2019 in order for the conversation to take place. The feedback
from the staff along the way (that was gathered at the end of almost every PD
session) also helped to capture the staff’ learning that helped us to check
if the movement goes according to the intent of the whole PD programme and
prevented us from just focusing on the challenges/weaknesses.
The general
feedback from teachers in the Professional Narrative section during Learning
Festival is as follow:
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84.4%
(SA+A) felt that the objectives were achieved.
·
90.3%
(SA+A) felt that the presentation was clear
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71.7%
felt that the duration was just right, while 28.3% felt that the duration was
too short. None of the feedback gave impression that the duration was too
long, which suggest good interaction time.
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The
most common strengths that the teachers acknowledge is the opportunity to get
to know different Department work (something that they seldom had chance to
know in the past) and the opportunity for future collaboration (which would
help in reducing overcrowding and streamlining the various programmes)
Below are the
general feedback about the Social Narrative section during the Learning
Festival:
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89.1%
and 92.3% (SA+A) of teachers and EAS felt that the objectives were achieved.
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89.9%
and 90.3% (SA+A) of teachers and EAS felt that the presentation was clear
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87%
and 92.4% (SA+A) of teachers and EAS felt there was a good range of workshops
offered
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91.3%
and 92.3% of teachers and EAS felt the duration was just right.
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Some
of the strengths highlighted were good bonding sessions among EOs and EAS,
the opportunity to get to know one another and the awareness of the diversity
of staff, the opportunities to see the different side of our colleagues, fun
and relaxing learning experiences , and good choices to cater to different
staff interest.
Overall, the
Learning Festival provided a good closure for the year to celebrate the good
work that we have done professionally as well as to promote engagement among
staff. All these should be seen as the good starting points for the next year
journey.
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