Participating school sharing

Islamic Primary School

Background

Since the outbreak of COVID-19 last year, teachers and students have been greatly affected in terms of teaching and learning. Teachers needed to change from face-to-face teaching to online teaching, and students from physical lessons to online learning.

But for a group of grass-roots families, learning online at home is not easy. First, their homes may lack space and a quiet environment, making it difficult for students to concentrate on their classes. Second, do they have software and hardware at home that supports online learning? On the other hand, online learning has also embarrassed some teachers, who are overwhelmed when the school requires them to produce short films and conduct live teaching online.

Fortunately, we were able to take entrepreneurial teacher leader training organised by The Education University of Hong Kong. We had the chance to learn how to apply entrepreneurial thinking and practice the 3Cs – Doing things right (Competence), doing the right thing (Character) with the right heart (Care). We agree that in a rapid-changing environment, leaders do not only need managerial experience or power. They also need empathy to lead their colleagues from crisis to opportunity, working together with their colleagues, allowing teachers to experience success, accumulating successful experiences, and driving other teachers to practice together.

What have we done?

We arranged workshops and training courses for teachers to support them to adapt to the changing teaching environment, such as preparing e-resources, using e-learning platforms, using equipment, and teaching using software. We also recorded the workshops and produced videos for teachers to revisit the content of these workshops.

Besides, the school has arranged online teaching sharing sessions for different subjects, allowing teachers who are more proficient in online teaching to share their successful examples with their colleagues. It enhances learning and teaching effectiveness during the suspension of face-to-face classes by strengthening teachers' ability to design different courses and apply different platforms.

At the same time, the school has helped students with inadequate Internet access and hardware through different external resources. Since the beginning of the epidemic, the school regularly provided e-learning platform student browsing data for teachers' reference. Teachers could learn about the students' learning progress from the data, which has increased teachers' confidence that it took them extra time to produce teaching materials.