EY Connect - Nov issue 2024

Good morning all!

I hope everyone managed to stay relatively dry over the weekend 🌧️ I was at the HK Philharmonic Symphony Under the Stars (or maybe more aptly, symphony under the rain) and they had to suspend the concert after one song because the rain was getting really ridiculous and nobody could actually hear the music on top of the racket that was rain hitting umbrellas. How wild that we have this many typhoons in November?! This SCMP article explains it.

“The waters have stored vast amounts of heat and energy from the long summer,” he said. “Global warming is also a contributing factor, enabling them to stay warm. “The sea surface temperatures this year and last year have all broken records in being very warm.“Warm waters could provide enough energy for tropical cyclones to form. If the sea surface temperatures were too low, there would be no need to consider other factors.”

How does anyone need more of a reason to believe in, learn about, and teach about global warming? 🫠

1 REFLECTION

Lisa Burman visited Hillside last week, and as an early literacy expert, we had conversations at length about how we support literacy development in younger children. She talked about the programatisation of school, how schools are moving towards bringing in different programs such as reading schemes and phonics programs, and that it brings about deprofessionalisation, eliminating the need for teacher expertise and skill. Certainly, if we simply follow a reading program, it is easy for the teacher- there's no planning involved, there's no space required for embedded or emergent learning, never mind taking into account the role of the student in their own learning journey. 

But why do we teach? We don't teach because it's an easy job. If we wanted shortcuts and pre-made lesson plans, we wouldn't be in an inquiry-based school. We teach children first and foremost, and we seek opportunities where language development is relevant, developmentally appropriate, and engaging to their learning as an individual and as a collective. 

❗Teaching children how to read and write is not only a question of pedagogy, but of identity. Who are we as readers and writers? What does literacy bring to our lives? How does it contribute to our worldview and our interactions with others?  

"Phonics [only] is not literacy" - Lisa Burman

Leaving this section with something I took away from a recent read Shifting the Balance by Jan Burkins & Kari Yates - the different components of literacy:

1 IDEA 

I recently listened to The Harvard Edcast podcast episode titled "Think You're Creative? Think Again" (21 minutes long). Edward Clapp, principal investigator at Harvard's Project Zero, wants education to shift from a traditional, individualistic view of creativity toward a participatory, socially distributed perspective. 

Key ideas from the podcast:

• Challenges stem from individualism, such as the misconception that some kids are inherently more creative, and from a "culture of power" that overlooks the social and cultural dynamics of creativity
• An individualistic view limits students by creating exclusive standards of creativity, often alienating those who don’t fit these norms
• Capital C Creativity (i.e. Darwin; van Gogh; Steve Jobs) - dead white men who aren't representative of our student population
• Advocate for participatory creativity in classrooms by shifting the focus from "creative icons" to the evolution of ideas, inviting all students to engage

1 RESOURCE

The recent Future of Learning conference held at CIS was once again a big success, with presenters across ESF and from the Asia-Pacific region. Special shout out to educators in the early years space - Anna Kuiti from ESF TCK and Pana Asavavatana from Taipei American School 🙌🏼

Here is Anna's blog - Spilling the Tea on Tech in the Early Years 

Here is Pana's website - Ms Pana Says

My current favorite tech tool is Autodraw, quite possibly because my drawing is undecipherable. It allows you to draw something roughly, and it guesses what you might have been wanting to draw:

1 WELLBEING

We all need a word of wisdom from Barbara (from the TV show Abbott Elementary)

1 QUOTE

Any kind of teaching can be done ‘badly’. Explicit teaching can be dull and disengaging, just as inquiry-based teaching can be unfocused or pitched inappropriately. It is intellectually lazy to promote a ‘good’ version of one by attacking a ‘weak’ or caricatured version of the other. In reality, the craft of teaching mostly involves a judicious and dynamic mixture of both explanation and exploration, depending on a whole variety of factors (prior knowledge, subject, purpose, age, aptitude, mood etc) to which good teachers are sensitive and responsive (see John Hattie’s work). To try to enforce a single template is bad education and bad science. - Guy Claxton

Until next time,

Brenda 

Currently reading:

The Ignorant Headmaster by Jacques Rancière

Permission to Speak by Samara Bay