What is ECNUAS high school education

A talk with the high school staff on November 8 2021

What is ECNUAS HS Education? I am often asked to answer this question, sometimes by parents, sometimes by friends, sometimes by colleagues in the school, sometimes even by myself. I guess you have similar experience when you don’t know how to describe what we are doing in a convincing and systematic way. As a member of this school, we should be proud of what we are doing together. Being able to articulate our own work can make us more confident about it.

For the answer to this question, frankly speaking, I had no idea of the answer when I walked into the school about two years ago and I still don’t have a clear and definitive answer after the two years. What I do know and believe is that building a good education takes years and that it takes efforts of generations of leaders and teachers. There is no end point of the journey, yet I am sure this school is heading towards the right direction owing to all the efforts that all staff members contribute as well as the deliberation, design, and plan contributed by the leaders in the high school including subject group leaders, heads of houses, and the leadership team. As a member of the team, each of us should believe in the right direction of the school.

In a sense, the education and curriculum of every school is unique because of its distinct community, study body, the make of staff, and other sociocultural characteristics. This realization can help us understand why we cannot just copy and paste practices from other more successful schools. We often learn good practices by visiting other schools, by talking with leaders or teachers from other schools, or by reading stories of other schools. However, to plant these practices in the soil of our own school would take more than just knowing what and how they do. For example, I visited one school in Suzhou last year and learned some good practices of English curriculum and teaching methods of the school. I was so impressed by the average TOEFL score of the graduating class in the school that was above 105. I asked myself what we could learn from them. After a careful comparison between the context of their school and our own school, the answer was unfortunately little that we can borrow right away due to remarkably different traditions, students, and teachers.

Although this kind of eye-opening learning-from-elsewhere opportunities is still very important as to our staff members’ professional development, we should understand that at the end of the day we will have to think about our local problems and design creative solutions to them by our own in the unique context where we work. Therefore, I don’t envy other schools that might be more successful in this or that aspect of their school work. I come to understand that we have to develop problem solving skills in our own unique school context and this requires critical and creative thinking. When we cultivate critical and creative thinkers among our students, obviously we ourselves will have to be critical and creative thinkers. When we encourage our students to become risk takers, we ourselves should also dare to consider new perspectives and experiment with new approaches to curriculum and teaching.

Private education is always an innovative sector in the education system. I think this is why the society needs private education, why the government permits its existence, and why parents choose it provided with strong public education systems in many countries. Private international schools should be even more innovative and progressive as this type of schools caters for the families that consider education of their children outside the regular education system. Studying abroad is just a symptom on the surface, underneath it is the desire of parents and students for more care for the child, more customized services, higher quality of teaching and learning, and better educational outcomes. We are working in this sector; therefore, we should understand the nature of it, the demand of it, and sometimes even anxiety associated with it. With this understanding, hence, we will adjust our attitudes to the work you have to face day in and day out, hone our skills for better relationships with students and parents, and calibrate our actions towards the demand of a better international education.

After six years’ worth of continuous effort by many people, ECNUAS high school is getter better. About this matter of fact should we be one hundred percent sure. However, we should be always conscious that at this stage the school is still distant from the standards of a good school. For example, the school is still very young, our academic leaders and teachers are still relatively inexperienced, the make of our students is not ideal, the curriculum especially school-based Grade 9 and Grade 10 curriculum needs a lot of improvement, the facilities in the high school need to be upgraded urgently, and the campus is not ‘smart’ enough given than so many advanced technologies are already accessible to the education sector. On the top of these systemic issues, we have to also admit that our leaders and teachers occasionally make strange or stupid human mistakes. I made mistakes too, many of them in my career and quite a few of them recently.

Every school has its own problems, difficulties and sometime mistakes, some of them are obvious, some are hidden so that you can only identify them once you are in the school for a relatively long period of time. For example, in a school, incidents of teaching could happen when a teacher missed to teach a class, miscommunication could occurr when a homeroom teacher forgot to pass an urgent document to students or parents, or misunderstanding could take place when we read one important email too quickly. Bigger issues could be, for example, one teacher’s teaching disengages students in the class, proper trainings might not have been offered to some new teachers, or the leadership team hasn’t articulated the curriculum and associated standards to several teachers.

I think the problem is not having problems or making mistakes but how to view and approach these problems. Some problems are caused by imperfect procedures, policies, and rules or some colleagues’ poor implementation of these policies. Sometimes we make mistakes due to mere pressure of the job or just lack of time. Regardless reasons for and types of problems or mistakes, in this school, we don’t hide them, we face them, we engage with them, we try our best to find solutions to them. Only when we have the right attitude towards our work and the setbacks in front of us could we become an innovative and improving educational institute.

Right attitude may come from a good understanding of the real situation. We must know what we are good at. We must also know what we are developing or missing. More importantly, as a member in this organization each of you should know where this organization is heading towards. We should believe in the direction of our shared journey. Therefore, I would like to discuss with you what ECNUAS HS education is and try to articulate some key points about it. When we have to focus most of our time and energy on daily routines and pressing exigencies, should we occasionally pause, sit back, and reflect in order to be sure we are doing the right thing and we are still running with the team?

I will answer nine questions in relation to the ECNUAS high school education.

1. Where is the place of the high school education in the ECNUAS curriculum pathways?

2. Besides the mission and vision of the school, what are the main characteristics of our education?

3. What the ECNUAS high school learners or graduates should look like?

4. What is the underpinning framework of the high school curriculum?

5. What are the components in the curriculum framework?

6. How do we support students to fulfil their study plans?

7. How does the student pastoral care system work in the high school?

8. Why do we say our university admission results are improving?

9. What are the main strengths of ECNUAS High School?

Given the information about the whole picture of ECNUAS HS education, next I want to talk about four recommendations to you.

First, I would like to present the whole picture of our HS education and curriculum so that I can bring everyone in the team to the same page. This picture is yet completed, it should be constantly under review and further development as a result of our collective problem solving in this particular school context. As a staff member of the school, you must understand what this organization does, so you will know how to improve it and sometimes defend it when necessary. For instance, when you are accused of what this school wasn’t able to do, you can tell the accuser what we actually are able to do otherwise. One small example could be that we don’t have sports classes for Grade 11 and 12 students, yet we have sports activity related clubs. Another example could be that we don’t have full time Homeroom teachers, yet on the top of part time Homeroom teachers we have Heads of Houses who are also involved in students’ personal and social development.

Second, given the complexity of the curriculum of the school every person in this school must possess or develop multiple sets of skills if you want to be successful in the school. This is determined by the nature of private international education, this is also determined by the complexity of the curriculum we are building together. If the total amount of work at this school and the teacher-student ratio are two constants, then one team member’s relatively lighter responsibility implies heavier work load of others. The current teacher-student in the school is about 1 to 5, or 0.20. When the number of students increases, this ratio can be eventually reduced to about 1 to 6, or 0.17. So, I know we won’t have too much room to increase the number of teachers. Before we hit 0.17, everyone should be aware of what we are getting at and hence learn to adjust to that new reality. Certainly, more students means more income for the school, in turn higher salary and benefits for the staff. We should also be positive about it.

Third, we must build a robust curriculum continuum and must pursue higher quality of teaching and learning. In the end, the curriculum is the interface where teachers interact with students day in and day out. What content we place in the curriculum? What standards we use to inspire and evaluate students? How do we support learning for those who lag behind and extend learning for those who are more capable? These questions should be constantly asked by every teacher and every academic leader in the school. Some teachers may think “give me more capable students, hence I will teach better”. I want to say, sure we will try to get more capable students, but when it comes to student recruitment the processes and decisions are more complicated than you think. Our high school is already small, it can’t be smaller as being smaller would reduce possibilities of offering richer educational programs. We have been already rejecting some student every year, but historical results of the school, its location, competitions in the region and the city, the facilities, even the canteen are all limiting factors in the process of recruiting students. In this school, the better logic sequence should be flipped to “I teach better, hence I will have more capable students to teach”. Yes, it is true, we will have to earn good students from the market.

Fourth, every staff member in the school must learn and work with the team. You are part of a very complicated business, no one would be solely credited because of any success of any student or any success of the school. Education is complex. No simple causation can be found. School is also a so called loosely-coupled system, meaning many factors contribute to it yet no clear lines could be draw from one point to the other. This understanding is deeply wired in my view of school and education. Therefore, I am conscious I should always take blames but not credits in the school. I encourage team learning and group work, I know the effect of team collaboration is much larger than the mere sum of individual efforts. There are many good examples around us in the school. We saw the Chinese group’s collaboration on applying dramatic techniques in teaching Chinese literature; we also saw cross-department projects such as Math-Arts collaboration, Arts-TOK collaboration, co-teaching in the English group, etc. We also have open class weeks when teachers in Groups learn from each other for the purpose of improving ways of planning and teaching.

Given these professional learning and practicing opportunities, I think each of us should be open to new knowledge, new skills, and new ways of doing things. When you feel the students in your class are not engaged, probably it is the time for you to learn and try something different. When you see some students in your class don’t improve, probably it is the time for you to better understand them and hence differentiate accordingly. If you don’t know what to do, you can firstly approach your co-teachers, secondly your Subject Group Leader, lastly the academic leadership team for advice. If none of them could provide an answer, then probably some new professional learning opportunities, such as an external workshop, should be created. In any event, I think everyone in the team must seek to learn, to change, and to improve, hence, the collective capacity of our team will be magnified even greater.