Prior to the start of this year's school year, Harrow Hengqin arranged a two-week customised training for all staff, covering the curriculum system, assessment development, English language learning, student behaviour, Harrow's Pastoral Care System and Safeguarding Policy. Throughout the training, veteran teachers were arranged to lead new teachers in interactive and explanatory sessions to ensure that Harrow's teaching and learning norms and campus guidelines were fully understood and implemented.
The INSET Week is specially arranged for a team of staff from the Harrow Little Lion Kindergarten in Zhuhai to participate together, helping to bridge the concepts and standards of Harrow's education system, as well as helping to make the future transition from Kindergarten to Primary School smoother.
Safeguarding& Pastoral Care
An important lesson in the full training is School Safety and Safeguarding. At Harrow, we always put them first, and student safety is the responsibility of every Harrow staff member.
Although all Harrow staff have undergone rigorous child Safeguarding training and have been tested and assessed by a professional organisation accredited by the UK Department for Education, every year at the start of the school year, Harrow Hengqin conducts a full training programme on child safeguarding, reinforcing, over and over again, the new and existing staff's knowledge of a wide range of children's safety and physical and emotional well-being issues, as well as their ability to respond to emergencies.
The DSL posters will be prominently displayed on campus.
Pastoral Care is the school's provision to ensure the physical and mental wellbeing of pupils and is an essential foundation on which learning can take place. Harrow Hengqin's high standards of Pastoral Care extend to all aspects of school life in order to promote the personal development of students. Therefore training on the whole school's Pastoral Care System is one of the key elements of this training.
The Deputy Head, Ms Kirsty Lowery, asked teachers to implement Pastoral Care practices to a higher standard, and asked them to enhance one-to-one care for students during tutorial time, as well as to optimise communication channels between teachers and parents, among other things.
Great Improvement in Teaching Skills
Harrow Hengqin encourages teachers to continue to grow, pursue excellence and teach effectively. The senior management team and the Heads of Subject provide appropriate academic training for the teachers, and the AISL Education Group also sends education experts to provide guidance.
Lower School Refined English Teaching Methodology
In terms of training, the Lower School focuses on teachers' grasp of curriculum planning and students' situation. The homeroom teachers implements the record of each student's learning situation after each lesson and continuously follows up on the students' learning situation in order to provide personalised teaching for the students.
The Lower School has always attached importance to all-round English language acquisition and creative practices. Teachers analysed the key points and difficulties in learning both English and Chinese at the same time at a low school age, and optimised the teaching plan. During the training week, we further deepened the teaching method of "Talk for Writing", one of the English Language Acquisition Programmes taught by British education experts.
Talk for Writing is based on the thinking and creative processes involved in ‘being a writer’, including knowing how to generate and develop ideas; drawing on a breadth of reading; and understanding how to draft, refine and improve writing. Young writers benefit from explicit exploration of these processes through supportive talk, so as to share the thinking involved in creating writing. Talk for Writing also involves the oral learning of model texts and the oral development of new versions so that children internalise the language patterns that they need for writing, adding to their linguistic competency.
Sparks of Teaching
in Upper School
Possibilities for interdisciplinary collaboration can be explored in the new school year
We need to motivate students in the classroom and optimise discipline management programmes
We need to have confidence in our students and set higher expectations for both academic and personal growth.
To initiate new subject challenges and encourage students to participate in different competitions to lay the foundation for university applications in advance
The addition of the new teachers brought more new inspirations for teaching in Upper School. During the training session, everyone expressed their views, recorded notes carefully, and worked towards the direction of continuously optimising the experience of the Bilingual Integration Programme, so that Harrow students could become even better.
In the new term, the Upper School has also introduced a brand new learning platform, Kognity, to support students at IGCSE. After the start of the school year, the Upper School will be offering students training on the use of Kognigy, which will provide strong and systematic coaching and support for students' learning.
Kognity is an excellent global digital IGCSE textbook and learning platform. The platform has a student system and a teacher system. The student system includes textbooks, notebooks, reading aids (including translations and visual presentations), a practice centre and an assignment centre. The Teacher System includes all of these features as well as student tracking, which provides a wealth of information about student progress.
AISL Provides Guidance for Chinese Department
At Harrow Hengqin, we emphasise bilingual and bicultural teaching so that the students can develop an international outlook and at the same time possess a Chinese soul. Ms Isabel Xu, Director of Bilingual Education at AISL Education Group, and Ms Linda Wang, Deputy Director of Chinese Education at AISL Education Group, came to Harrow Hengqin to provide training to the Chinese teachers on teaching Chinese language under the theme of the New Curriculum.
In the training, they emphasised teaching for deep learning, discussed Chinese language teaching based on the Big Idea, further introduced the method of integrating large unit teaching with departmental textbooks to the teachers , and once again sorted out the relationship between core issues and big concepts. They guided the teachers step by step to practice large unit teaching design, ultimately helping them complete their own large unit teaching design plan.