Broadening students' learning experiences through enhancing Values Education, Assessment Literacy and Reading across the Curriculum

Date :

25 June 2018

Time :

2:00 pm - 5:00 pm

Place :

Lecture Theatre, 4/F, West Block, EDB Kowloon Tong Education Services Centre, 19 Suffolk Road, Kowloon Tong

Aims of Activity :

To share good practices on how to:

• develop students into self-directed and reflective learners through promoting assessment as learning

• develop a school-based English curriculum to complement the whole school approach to promoting values education

• enrich the English language curriculum with RaC and STEM elements to nurture students' creativity and language skills

1:45 pm - 2:00 pm

2:00 pm - 2:15 pm

An introduction to the essential capabilities that primary students need for coping with 21st century challenges was given, echoing the ongoing renewal of the school curriculum.

2:15 pm - 3:05 pm

Teachers in Holy Family Canossian Primary School (Kowloon Tong) have been conversant with using different kinds of assessment data to identify students’ writing difficulties and to review and adjust their writing curriculum. To take a step further, they explored how students could be supported to become more active in connecting learning and assessment, thereby developing their self-directed learning abilities.  Assessment as learning practices such as developing student writing portfolios, conducting individual writing conferences and integrating self-assessment/reflection tasks into each writing activity were adopted to enhance their self-directed learning capability.  Students learned to reflect on their mistakes based on the quality feedback given by teachers; and were able to monitor their own learning progress against the goals set, paving the way for them to become self-directed learners and writers. The writing post-test results showed that students made improvement in different aspects of writing, in particular with richer content, higher accuracy and more appropriate text structure and features.

3:05 pm - 3:20 pm

3:20 pm - 4:05 pm

Taoist Ching Chung Primary School (Wu King Estate) adopted a whole-school approach to promoting values education. Priority values and themes were included in the school development plan to provide a clear direction for different KLAs to set subject goals. Teachers illustrated how those "priority values" were developed among students through the school-based English Language curriculum. By planning the 6-year English Language curriculum holistically, teachers mapped the target values with the related unit themes at each level; and designed learning activities and tasks to provide holistic learning experiences to students through integrating the elements of cognition, affection and action. Based on students' reflections and teachers' observation on their own practices and habits in relation to the target values, it was found that apart from developing more interest and confidence in English learning, students have displayed more appreciation of the place they live and people around as well as learned how to cherish life.

4:05 pm - 4:50 pm

In the past two years, one of the aims of the English Department of Buddhist Wong Cheuk Um Primary School was to support STEM education through the promotion of Reading across the Curriculum. This was done in two phases. In the first year, the English Language subject piloted this idea by infusing STEM elements into a module about famous people and inventions. Students' sense of wonder was ignited when they were asked to design a product using the closed circuit to solve real-life problems. This fruitful experience has boosted cross-disciplinary collaboration involving English Language, General Studies, Mathematics, Visual Arts, library and IT in the second year. Students were motivated to read and write multimodal texts about inventions and inventors; and demonstrated their creativity, problem-solving skills and collaboration skills through presenting their ideas and products to others in multiple ways.

To prepare students for the demands of the secondary curriculum, English teachers of Shatin Tsung Tsin School worked collaboratively with the General Studies teachers and the teacher-librarian to promote the reading of non-fiction texts at KS2. A wide range of non-fiction texts on various themes were chosen to enrich students' knowledge relating to different content subjects. Relevant learning to learn skills were taught explicitly. There was a significant increase in the number of books read by students. Students mastered the skills of extracting information from different sources, note-taking, organising and synthesising information.

4:50 pm - 5:00 pm