Envisioning Innovation in Education Stories
Veronica's Story
Veronica believes in the power of teamwork, she said:
When we promote innovation in education, there is an important mindset encapsulated by our school’s motto:
“No one is perfect, but a team can be.”
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 Veronica Yau, Principal of Fanling Kau Yan College (FKYC). Her story explains the 6 effective strategies for promoting whole-school innovation with colleagues. Through a school-based professional learning community (PLC) that positioned colleagues as resources, FKYC enhanced its self-regulated learning (SRL) approach to promote students’ deeper thinking and learning.
Key Highlights of this Story
FKYC has promoted SRL for more than 20 years. During the EIE project, they aimed to enhance their SRL approach by asking:
1) How can we empower teachers to apply thinking routines in a whole school approach?
2) How can FKYC students make learning visible to support & reveal the depth and complexity of their learning?
To address these, FKYC saw the importance of implementing measures that support not only students’ learning, but also teachers’ learning. By establishing a professional learning community (PLC) to reflect on existing practices and explore new ideas, this community served as a platform for cross-subject teachers to explore theoretical frameworks and push collective learning for school-wide improvement.
Veronica highlights 6 strategies that enabled the FKYC EIE PLC to innovate through a whole-school approach:
1) Finding relevance between new approaches and school development direction
2) Promoting interdisciplinary learning and collaboration among teachers
3) Creating time and space for colleagues to get together to learn and share
4) Cultivating a strong sense of purpose within the team
5) Managing expectations of colleagues
6) As a school leader knowing when to “Step in & Step back”
Frameworks, Concepts and Tools Learned from the EIE Experience
Teaching for Understanding (TfU) Framework
Developed by Project Zero researchers at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, the Teaching for Understanding (TfU) framework invites educators to design meaningful learning experiences that prioritize students’ deep understanding over rote memorization. It asks four key questions:
Generative Topics:
Understanding Goals:
What topics are most important for my students to understand?
What about these topics needs to be understood?
Performances of Understanding:
What kinds of learning experiences will best help students develop and use understanding flexibly and thoughtfully?
Ongoing Assessment:
How will I (and my students) know how well and how much they have understood?
Source: Education Bureau. Fanling Kau Yan College - Effective Leadership for Curriculum Transformation (粉嶺救恩書院 — 有效帶領課程變革)
As mentioned in Veronica's story, the TfU framework aligns with their school goal of promoting self-regulated learning (SRL). It has helped them re-examine and prioritize students’ understanding as the central focus of teaching, and make students’ thinking visible to assess their level of understanding in the learning process.
As part of their 2022-2025 school development plan, FKYC aims to elevate their SRL approach to “SRL Pro” by shifting beyond “engaging students in SRL” to “empowering students in SRL”. This involves fostering students as visible learners who can demonstrate deeper thinking in the learning process.
Key TfU ideas have been incorporated into the SRL Pro framework. FKYC has also adopted Thinking Routines as a valuable tool to assist students in organizing and visualizing their thinking, enabling them to deepen their understanding and make their learning more visible.
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.
Source: FKYC Open Class Presentation, January 16, 2024 (Wed)
Thinking Routines frequently used in FKYC:
See, Think, Wonder: Encouraging students to make careful observations and thoughtful interpretations.
Claim, Support, Question: Having students form claims, explanations, or interpretations and support them with evidence, to cultivate students' reasoning skills
Connect, Extend, Challenge: Helping students connect new ideas to those they know and encourages them to reflect upon how they have extended their thinking as a result of what they are learning about or experiencing
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!