Envisioning Innovation in Education Stories
Daniel and Gary's Story
Daniel believes that mutual learning with colleagues and continuous experimentation can enhance teaching practices.
In teaching, every teacher has a toolbox.
By learning and experimenting, improving or adding new tools,
we can be more courageous in innovating, as well as more flexible and effective in our teaching.
Gary emphasizes innovation as a process of continuously trying for improvement.
I believe that the process is more important than the result.
Innovation and change cannot happen overnight, and every attempt is a venture.
Do not fear failure.
Try, review, and then try again, and gradually, you will find a viable path.
This story illustrates
how you can approach innovation with…
Colleagues
Leverage colleagues as resources and critical friends
Embrace the mindset of “teachers are also learners”
About this EIE Story
This is the story of Daniel and Gary from HKCCCU Logos Academy (Logos). Their story highlights how they created a teacher-led professional learning community to inspire and promote innovation. Starting by engaging a small group of colleagues to meet regularly as a study group, they nurtured a sustainable and autonomous environment for colleagues to learn and share teaching practices. This was a bottom-up and self-initiated learning approach that adapted to the unique contexts and shifting needs of individual teachers.
Key Highlights of this Story
Implementing Positive Education is one of Logos’ major concerns, with aims to develop positive learning attitudes and the well-being of students and staff. Logos also promotes self-directed learning with an aim to cultivate students into lifelong learners.
Faced with high staff turnover and societal changes, Daniel and Gary saw the need for collaboration and collective wisdom with colleagues. This led them to develop the innovation focus of:
How to effectively share the EIE vision and tools with other colleagues and encourage and engage them in innovation in education?
From the EIE experience, they discovered the benefits of fostering cross-subject learning and identified an innovation focus to promote mutual learning. To test out this idea, they started small with a school-based learning community in a study group format.
Format of study group (school-based learning community):
As a study group, the team set learning goals for each session and investigated the concepts and ideas learned in EIE.
It operates in a cycle of:
Sharing theories and concepts
Co-designing lessons
Trying to implement plans
Reflecting on outcomes
Characteristics of Logos’s study group (school-based learning community):
Start small
Self-initiated / Bottom-up
Interest-driven
Expectation Management
Interested in learning more about the power of study group? Please read Gary and Daniel’s chapter in the EIE HK Book.
Conditions for promoting a school-based learning community:
Growth mindset
School support
Frameworks, Concepts and Tools Learned from the EIE Experience
Looking at Student Work Protocol
Teachers engage in looking at student work on a regular basis. What might be new is looking at student and teacher work together. Multiple perspectives allow for a better understanding of the student’s learning, give insights to the teacher for future planning, and inspire others in the group to think of their own students’ needs.
Collaborative Assessment Conference is one of the protocols commonly used for looking closely, asking questions, and sharing ideas about student work.
In this story, they highlight the significance of “Looking at student work” together with colleagues from diverse subject areas. Varied perspectives of colleagues may uncover considerations that educators might have overlooked, challenge assumptions, and offer valuable insights to improve teaching practices.
Pedagogy of Play
Pedagogy of Play framework supports playful learning through exploring the unknown, leading learning, and finding joy.
At one of the study group sessions, group members discussed and explored elements in the framework to integrate into their teaching.
Thinking Routines
A Thinking Routine is a set of questions or a brief sequence of steps used to scaffold and support student thinking. Project Zero (PZ) researchers designed Thinking Routines to deepen students’ thinking and to help make that thinking “visible”. Thinking Routines help to reveal students’ thinking to the teacher and also help students themselves to notice and name particular “thinking moves”, making those moves more available and useful to them in other contexts.
Daniel and Gary have utilized Thinking Routines to facilitate discussions and reflections in study groups. For example, a modified version of the Thinking Routine “I used to think… Now I think… ” was introduced in the final session of the first-year study groups. Gary and Daniel asked group members to reflect on their experience and to consider their next steps using the prompts: “Before I joined the study group... After I joined the study group... Now I will…”.
Other Resources
Are you interested in exploring more relevant frameworks, concepts and tools? Click here to learn more!