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Scope the Focus for Greater Alignment (Yew Fai)

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Scope the Focus for Greater Alignment (Yew Fai)

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As Mdm Wong has shared, there seems to be competing areas of focus for SCT, with different people (i.e. LD, ID, ICT Champions, etc) spreading the one-hour session thin. Perhaps there can be a more concerted and aligned direction provided to all subjects' and levels' TTTs, i.e. the school learning direction, and the learning direction can be split into different areas for different quarters.

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TTT should be a dedicated period for teachers to engage in professional development activities, such as sharing of best practices, learning new strategies and collaborating with colleagues. It should not be merely used for administrative matters.

Also, the onus of provision of PD should not be in the hands of a few. Everyone should take on ownership of their own learning and their peers' learning too. Hence, we should work towards a professional learning community and there should be no backbenchers.

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"Professional Learning Community (PLC) is essentially a process to foster a culture of professional excellence in schools across the system. PLC helps educators learn how to improve student outcomes in a systematic, timely and holistic manner, and also to enhance their own professional development." (https://academyofsingaporeteachers.moe.edu.sg/professional-excellence/our-plc-journey/overview/)

Be it action research, learning circle or lesson study, teachers in different teams examine their classroom practices in a systematic and rigorous manner in order to become more reflective and effective. To make it more manageable and sustainable, the PLC can take up one quarter of the year, so that it is not seen as draggy and daunting.

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Professional Learning Community (PLC) is essentially a process to foster a culture of professional excellence in schools across the system. PLC helps educators learn how to improve student outcomes in a systematic, timely and holistic manner, and also to enhance their own professional development.

It is where educators work interdependently to achieve teaching goals for which they are mutually and collectively accountable.

Sharing by a PLT in Science at Woodgrove Secondary

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Professional Learning Community (PLC) is essentially a process to foster a culture of professional excellence in schools across the system. PLC helps educators learn how to improve student outcomes in a systematic, timely and holistic manner, and also to enhance their own professional development.

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IMHO, also based on my observations from my other ex-schools, there really are a lot of SCTs in Nanyang. On the average, most of the other schools have SCT once a month (though there is one school with SCT every single week too). When there is an abundance of such meetings, there tends to be a flood of items to be shared across these meetings. Everyone wants to have a piece of it and, in the end, not everything that is shared needs to be shared face-to-face.

Once the number of times of meeting is scoped, there will be a greater level of scrutiny as to what should be in the agenda and what could be taken as read when place in the Oracle or emailed out.

If possible, we should move the SCTs out of the Gallery. While the Gallery can house every staff member, the lecture style setting really is not conducive for discussion and collaborative work. I am wondering if we can set up the Interaction Room to house everyone instead?

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Have a Spread of Different Focus (Yew Fai)

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Have a Spread of Different Focus (Yew Fai)

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I agree that there is a need to spread the focus of the Wednesday meetings so that the Level (SDT), Department (both IP and HDD) and whole-school PD can enjoy that Wednesday platform.

This will allow the different teams of staff to have the time and space to meet, learn and deliberate on their specific agendas.

I am particularly interested in the whole-school PD affordances. With specific Wednesdays carved out for professional learning, the TL Team can finally work on our Brown Bag idea on some of these Wednesdays.

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Greater Role and voice for Teacher Leaders (Cat)

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Greater Role and voice for Teacher Leaders (Cat)

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Right now, not all departments are tapping fully on Teacher Leaders as their valuable resource. Hence, I would like to suggest that certain designated slots throughout the year can be owned by Teacher Leaders (and intentionally put down in black and white in the level TTT plan) to share on pedagogical practices that support the departments' needs. This will ensure that Teacher Leaders are focused in supporting and beefing up the T & L of the school. It will also narrow the gap between them and Middle Managers.

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Developing a positive department culture for  improvement in school culture (Cat)

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Developing a positive department culture for  improvement in school culture (Cat)

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Besides T & L business, a slot or two per semester can be put aside to focus on departmental team building. Topics such as using the 7 habits or anything relevant to bring about a positive shift of mindset that is aligned to the school can be shared during TTT to develop our teachers to be reflective practitioners. We will start building the culture of every department. These efforts will gradually culminate to developing a positive school culture.

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Replace TTT with Open Classroom and possibly several other forms (Cat)

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Replace TTT with Open Classroom and possibly several other forms (Cat)

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Open Classroom is a good practice but it does not seem to be taking off as quickly as we have hoped. We can schedule teachers to observe their peers in the following:

1. Open Classroom

2. Walk throughs to just observe a particular strategy in a class

These sessions can take the place of TTTs for that particular week or two for everybody. Time is given for teachers to digest, discuss and reflect on their takeaways. More thought would have to be put in for the scheduling.

This will help develop our teachers to be reflective practitioners.

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Is there really a need to take attendance at SCT? What is the rationale for the attendance? I believe that it is the onus of everyone and anyone who misses that SCT to find out or read up what was missed.

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Hybrid model for Wednesday Meetings (Chee Min)

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Hybrid model for Wednesday Meetings (Chee Min)

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I do see and recognise the importance of our Wednesday meetings where all staff will gather together at a common time and platform. I propose a hybrid model where we can schedule and have different kind of meetings over the different weeks in a Term. Some are for mass meeting & important updates (eg. from MOE HQ, Exams matters, etc), some for mass workshop/training/PD, some targeting at certain specific levels or groups of staff and some simply specifically set-aside for staff bonding/well-being activities. Just my thoughts..

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Rethink & revamp the usage and design of the Interaction Room (Chee Min)

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Rethink & revamp the usage and design of the Interaction Room (Chee Min)

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I always enjoy the rich group interactions and discussions during workshops and PD sessions. While the design of the Gallery and frequent setting-up of tables & chairs in the Hall is limiting and may not be most feasible or convenient, we can look into the layout and furnishing of the Interaction Room to make it more ideal and conducive to facilitate mass workshops/training to accommodate group setting and discussion.

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If staff wellness, morale and belonging in the school are important, then greater emphasis, effort and importance can be and should be directed towards staff well-being, their voices or even SEWC too. With SLs articulating and demonstrating its importance through intentional and practical ways and processes.

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Current TTT can be enhanced through more open and reflective sharing of practices from all teachers of the same level and subject. Open classroom can be a honest and open platform for sharing of good and reflective practices among the common group of teachers too.

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Book Sharing/Articles Sharing at department/ level meetings (Cat)

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Book Sharing/Articles Sharing at department/ level meetings (Cat)

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Everybody is busy but we can help one another keep abreast of the latest pedagogies by sharing interesting articles and books. As a department, we can also scrutinise new policies by MOE. The articles can be entries on reliable websites such as Edutopia or even our local SingTeach . Teachers can come to department meetings after reading the articles to carry out productive discussions which will help teachers have valuable takeaways. This will inspire teachers to read especially on research or evidence based approaches and its relevance to our context.

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TTTs can be scoped into a few focused areas, e.g. dept updates, PLC, sharing of practices by Teacher Leaders and dept teachers, etc. Every week there will be a different focus. These focuses can also be stated in the school calendar to serve as reminders for all to follow. Currently, most of the TTT time is used up for dept meetings and this left very little or no time for PD, especially if we intend to bring back PLC. All the more, we need to set aside time to discuss. Many times, the agenda can be quite ad-hoc. So with focus areas stated in the calendar, it can also help to scope our agenda too.

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Modes and contents of meetings (Yew Lin)

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Modes and contents of meetings (Yew Lin)

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Not sure if we still need to set aside dept meetings on Wednesdays if it is included in TTT. Wednesdays meetings can continue to be level meetings, SCT, staff bonding and personal wellness sessions, just like currently. To take care of wellbeing of staff, we should set aside more sessions for personal PD or wellbeing sessions so they can also use their Skills Future funds to upgrade ourselves. There can be hybrid mode of meetings, both f2f and online. Wednesday meetings should preferably keep to within 2 hours, unless if it’s staff bonding and we are travelling out such as a dept outing. Therefore, we need to decide what contents are must to share and others we can inform staff to read up in Oracle or send via email.

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Skills upgrading during curriculum time (Yew Lin)

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Skills upgrading during curriculum time (Yew Lin)

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Besides in-service courses, there are also learning opportunities that we can tap on using our Skills Future funds. However, many of these courses are conducted during curriculum time and are full day courses. Will staff be granted to attend Skills Future courses during curriculum time? We can put a cap to this, e.g. if it’s going to be during curriculum time, we can attend only 1 per year so as not to burden the relief system.

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Open Classrooms (Lesson Study, Action Research) - Si Ming

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Open Classrooms (Lesson Study, Action Research) - Si Ming

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We can make TTTs more exciting and action-packed, rather than just sitting down and talking about things. We can sharpen our saws better if we put into practice what we say.

Open classrooms are more effective and enriched if we follow through a cycle (not just observe one lesson and then that's it).

Cycle:

1) One session of pre-lesson discussion, facilitator can brief teacher members on what lesson is about, objectives etc

2) One session of open classroom. Facilitator can swap lessons with other subject teachers, use TTT time to conduct lesson with own class (if game enough, facilitator can get member teachers to facilitate student groups during activities

3) One session of post-lesson discussion (multiplying effect when all member teachers give their opinions)

This cycle can be done once a term, TTT member teachers can take turns to lead this cycle.

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Time and Space for Quality Meetings (Si Ming)

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Time and Space for Quality Meetings (Si Ming)

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We can still keep the spread of focus but should streamline or cut down such that time and space is factored in for teachers to read up and prepare.

Example: Have SCTs on alternate weeks if possible (understand there will be non-negotiable meetings eg mass messages from MOE etc). The week that has no SCT, teachers can use the time and space for discussions/preparation for the next meeting. Eg if next odd week meeting is about awards criteria, then this even week should not have sct but rather, let teachers read up and discuss with level teachers about what the awards criteria is (own time own target as long as by next week, teachers are fully prepared for meeting)

We should focus on quality instead of quantity.

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While a lot of effort and time have been put in to engage students and improve their learning experiences, what about for staff? What can we do to engage teachers more? Eg format of meetings: instead of one person speak, can there be a few facilitators to conduct round robin to create multiplying effects?

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Got an interesting lesson idea or a lesson you tried? Conduct it during TTT and treat your member teachers as the students. I attended a workshop once and it was so interesting. The facilitator gave us the exact worksheet she used in class for a lesson that she had tried out, got all of us to do it and brought us through snippets of the lesson. We get to experience what it was like to be on the "receiving end" (as students) and the post lesson discussion was so rich as we knew what to modify, improve and adapt for our own use in our classrooms based on the profile of our students. It is through such facilitation that we pick up phrases/techniques to use for classroom management as well, by learning from the facilitator :)

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Agree with Si Ming that the SCT time should be spent on quality discussions and non-negotiables that must be conveyed FTF. Some messages can be read offline and does not need to take up the time during SCT. Let teachers have the afternoon to mark / unwind will be very useful. Its upsetting and tiring to have 10 hours of work (7am to 5pm) and still have to mark after that.

Like the idea of having different "genre" of agenda for SCT. A specific week for a specific "genre".

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TTT should focus on PD instead of admin matters which teachers can find out and read up offline. LD / any teacher can raise any ideas for classroom activities and teachers can brainstorm instead of LD proposing and coordinating like what's happening now. Teachers can take turns/just in time, to share their best practices or ways to make student's learning easier.