We have welcomed Abbie Tsang to our Chinese Team and she was impressed with how the children responded to her challenges in class last week. Abbie joins us from Beacon Hill School where she was a classroom teacher.
With the addition of Abbie to our team we have taken the opportunity to make a change to our structure. Instead of the children being mixed as a year group we are trialling the children staying in their home classroom. This means that 4M children will stay in 4M and 4F will stay in 4F were as in the past these two classes would be mixed. They were mixed as children where put into a 3 pathways across the two classrooms. We have decided to keep them in their home classrooms this year as a trial.
The idea of splitting the children into 3 pathways (Pathway 1, 2 and 3) may work well for larger schools but as we have only two classes per year group we are effectively splitting two classes into 3 pathways (instead of the idea being where the children are split 1 x Pathway One, 1 x Pathway 2 and 1 x Pathway 3). The concept works well for schools who have a wide range of abilities but a vast amount of our children are in Pathway 1 meaning that we usually have pathway 1-3 in the same classroom anyway.
The major advantage of this trial is that both Abbie and Mary and the whole department can plan collaboratively. They can do this as they are teaching the same pathways (1-3) to the same year groups. In the past this has not always been possible as the teachers were teaching different content as appropriate depending on which pathways they were teaching.
Glenealy School, when I was there as VP, moved from splitting the children into Pathways to keeping the children in their home classrooms and this has proved very successful. They have continued to teach in their home classrooms and their head of Chinese and Principal both see this move as crucial in terms of the success of their Chinese program.
Our team will differentiate to ensure the children are exposed to work at their level and this is the most important aspect. We will trial this until the end of the first term and then evaluate its effectiveness to determine what happens in Term 2 and beyond.