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Liz Heron

What does Shakespeare's Macbeth have to do with Chinese history? This was one of many brain-teasers tackled by teachers at the first conference held in Hong Kong by leaders of Project Zero, Harvard University's renowned education research group.
This month's two-day conference, hosted by Victoria Shanghai Academy in Aberdeen, was attended by 254 teachers, including the entire VSA teaching staff, and drew educators from 22 other international schools and six local ones. A separate one-day event for parents attracted 160 people.
The professional development conference, specially designed for VSA and Hong Kong international schools, addressed two themes: educating for global competence and creating cultures of thinking. Each one was based on an educational research project run by the group.
Veronica Boix Mansilla, Project Zero's principal investigator, who led the sessions on global competence, says: "At Project Zero, in collaboration with the Asia Society, we have developed a framework for global competency that suggests people are globally competent when they are able to understand and act upon issues of global significance."
The model proposes four fields in which students can develop global competence by learning to understand the world through disciplinary and interdisciplinary study. They are: investigating the world, recognising perspectives, communicating ideas and taking action. Each field breaks down further into several specific skills and abilities.
"In the workshops, we look at what global competency is," Boix Mansilla says. "And we spend quite some time with the teachers looking at why global competency matters today."
The speed of globalisation, the global job market, the impact of migration and pressing issues of human rights were among a host of reasons explored with teachers about why young people need to gain such global competencies.
"We spend time looking at the qualities we would like kids to develop and we look very carefully at examples of students' work to identify these qualities. Then we look at units of instruction developed by the teachers and how to redesign them with global competency in mind."

Teachers in VSA's Chinese department had taken Macbeth, which was being taught by the English department, and wanted to examine in class how it represented questions such as authority, power and masculinity, before using it as a lens to look at similar situations in Chinese history and literature.
Participants discussed how the interdisciplinary topic could be addressed by picking similar Chinese plays and getting students to consider issues in comparing literature across languages, such as cultural nuances, commonalities and universal themes.
The workshop on creating cultures of thinking was led by Harvard's senior researcher Ron Ritchhart, director of the Cultures of Thinking Project - run in partnership with Bialik College in Melbourne - which looks at how to create a school-wide culture of thinking.
Ritchhart's work at Harvard has focused on the question of how to create school cultures that enable students to develop learning-oriented "dispositions", such as open-mindedness, curiosity, creativity and being knowledgeable.
"In the workshops, we look at how we can support students as thinkers and make their thinking more visible," he says. "Among the tools we use are thinking routines such as 'connect, extend, challenge'. The routines are simple structures that teachers can use in class with students to help scaffold and support their thinking."
"For example, using 'connect, extend, challenge' with a reading exercise, you would ask students to make connections with other things that they know, their experience and other books they have read. The extension piece would be to find out how the material is extending their thinking and the challenge piece would be to identify the puzzles raised from that particular reading.
"Most of the routines are designed to work across all grade levels, with adults as well as children, and across all subject areas. What we have seen in schools that use this is that performance in the International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma goes up."
After Washington International School, in the US, introduced the programme, the proportion of students gaining the top grade of seven in the diploma's English-language (A) paper doubled - from about 16 to 20 per cent to about 35 to 40 per cent.
Over the years, Project Zero has influenced the IB curriculum by leading the debate in educational theory, and a recent revision of the IB's Middle Years Programme incorporates the notion of global competence. Boix Mansilla has worked closely on interdisciplinary teaching methods with the International Baccalaureate Organisation, which adopted her framework for interdisciplinary teaching.

	It gives teachers practical ways of thinking about thinking and learning to learn

	Tom Woods, VSA
Richard Parker, VSA's secondary principal, says: "This programme is a perfect fit for the IB. It allows teachers to more fully understand the major concepts of the IB, where they derive from, and what they look like in practice."
Tom Woods, deputy principal of VSA's primary section, who attended the thinking cultures workshops, says: "For a long time, we have been talking about meta-cognition and the need to equip students in the 21st century with a skill set that goes beyond memorising facts.
"But one of the nice things about Project Zero is that it gives teachers practical ways of thinking about thinking and learning how to learn. You are teaching the children how to go deeper."
Ellie Mockler, a VSA drama teacher, who took part in the global competency workshops, says: "These two days of training have absolutely fascinated me. They have really opened my eyes to a new way of teaching."
Mockler says she has already developed practical teaching plans based on ideas from the workshop, which she will be using in her lessons. "In drama, we are going to be looking at the topic of identity within the arts, and exploring global awareness through monologues," she says.
"The students will be researching the lives of people from different walks of life all over the world - a young child from Israel, for example, or someone from the Ukraine - and writing monologues of what they would be expected to say."
 


Hong Kong teachers learn how to give students an international perspective

Ron Ritchhart (left) and Veronica Boix Mansilla. Photo: May Tse

Richard Parker, VSA's secondary principal.

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Conference shows educators how to help students become creative, global thinkers
