Envisioning Innovation in Education Stories
Lauren's Story
Lauren emphasizes the importance of having the courage to innovate…
… because innovation inherently involves challenges and failure…
We need courage to be vulnerable and share our failures with colleagues and students.
We need courage to persevere and remain resilient in the face of challenges.
We need the courage to take risks and share experiments.
This story illustrates
how you can approach innovation with/by…
Yourself
Use reflective practice to review practices
Set an inquiry focus to investigate and promote innovation
Colleagues
Leverage colleagues as resources and critical friends
Students
Empower students through voice and choice
Embrace the mindset of “teachers are also learners”
About this EIE Story
This is the story of Lauren Minnie, an English Language & Literature teacher formerly from Marymount Secondary School (MSS). Her story is about how she used documentation and reflection to innovate in her classroom and as a department with colleagues.
Key Highlights of this Story
MSS promotes six core values to students: Reverence, Gratitude, Compassion, Integrity, Perseverance, and Wisdom. The school offers a holistic education focusing on pastoral care and the school’s main concerns in 2023-2028 are as follows:
i) to enhance students’ well-being through building a greater sense of purpose in life
ii) to cultivate students’ ownership for them to be future-ready learners
During the EIE journey, the MSS team recognized the critical role of cultivating a culture of thinking. It is not only for student development, but also for teacher growth.
In this story, Lauren highlighted the effectiveness of documentation in supporting her continuous reflection and adjustment in teaching practice to approach educational innovation. The following lessons learned from EIE inspire her to engage in self-reflection, actively collaborate with colleagues, and respect students’ voices and choices to improve teaching practices.
Key learnings from EIE:
1) Make learning visible and meaningful
Record students’ learning processes and thinking, evaluate teaching practices, identify effective strategies, and align innovations with examination demands
2) Empower students and teachers
Recognize and honor the voices and choices of students, and foster reflective moments for both students and teachers
3) Engage in evidence-based discussions with colleagues
Observe, share and interpret the learning of students, and engage in discussions about the learning process and outcome with colleagues from looking closely at student work
4) Create space to reflect with colleagues
Allocate time and space for colleagues to observe each other’s lessons, provide constructive feedback, and challenge underlying assumptions
She also emphasized the conditions that allowed her to document and reflect for innovation:
Inquiry focus
Persistence
Dedicated time and spaces for colleagues to share, learn, discuss and reflect together
Lauren’s Picture of Practice:
Documentation and self-reflection
Documentation involves observing, recording, interpreting and sharing. Please find the reflection slide prepared by Lauren that captures her observations, recordings, and interpretations of learning moments involving her students and herself, which we would like to share with you.
Passion Projects
Passion Projects is a semester-long project-based learning experience where students research a self-selected topic and complete listening, speaking, reading, and writing tasks. Interested in learning more? Please read Lauren’s chapter in the EIE HK Book.
Frameworks, Concepts and Tools Learned from the EIE Experience
Documentation
Documentation is an inquiry strategy that can be described as the practice of observing, recording, interpreting, and sharing in different media the processes and results of learning in order to deepen and extend learning.
Four core practices of documentation
Observe
Observe learning contexts with an open mind and curiosity, or with an intentional focus.
Record
Use different media to create tangible artifacts that can inform the future, in order to yield new understandings and perspectives about learning and to serve as the “memory of the group”.
Interpret
Observe documentation with an open mind and curiosity or an intentional focus – alone, with colleagues, or with learners.
Share
Sharing learning in order to communicate its purposes, demonstrate pride in the work of learners and teachers, and shape attitudes about what learners and teachers are capable of.
Documentation takes various forms across different media, including handwritten notes, sketches, photos with reflective notes, audio recordings, short videos, etc..
In addition to the reflection slide above, you can find an exhibition board curated by Lauren to share her learnings with colleagues at an EIE Learning Community event on the left.
This board encapsulates the learning moments of students, illustrating how she interprets the process and outcomes of student learning. It also incorporates her reflections on the lessons learned from her teaching experience.
Reflective Practice
Reflective Practice can be described as the process of probing our identities, and understanding how our identities influence how we view and understand our students, as well as how we view and understand the teaching and learning environments where we work.
3 simple questions, “Who am I?”, “Who are my students?” and “What is my context?”, were considered in Lauren’s reflection.
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 notice and name particular “thinking moves”, making those moves more apparent and transferable to other contexts.
Lauren also used Thinking Routines in Passion Projects to scaffold student thinking and make their thinking visible.
For example:
Think, Feel, Care: Encouraging students to consider the different and diverse perspectives held by the various people who interact within a particular system
Appreciate, Wonder, Suggest: Supporting students to quickly generate constructive feedback or to respond to ideas, documentation, or other material presented by peers
I used to think… Now I think…: Helping students to reflect on their thinking about a topic or issue and explore how and why their thinking has changed, as well as helps consolidate new learning
Other Resources
Are you interested in exploring more relevant frameworks, concepts and tools? Click here to learn more!