‘Early Education Professional Development Advanced Course: Early Literacy Support (2020-2021)’ (Unit 3: Adjustments in the Support Program, Class A)
‘Early Education Professional Development Advanced Course: Early Literacy Support (2020-2021)’ (Unit 3: Adjustments in the Support Program, Class A)
25
Oct
25/10/2021
DLCRE partnership project ‘GEG Chinese Literacy Education and Research Project’ (GEGCLEAR) co-organised the Teacher Training Program ‘Early Education Professional Development Advanced Course: Early Literacy Support (2020-2021)’ (Unit 3: Adjustments in the Support Program, Class A.
To introduce the GEGCLEAR support program’s assessment design and assist teachers in employing assessment to adjust their teaching strategies, GEGCLEAR co-hosted the online teacher training program ‘Early Education Professional Development Advanced Course: Early Literacy Support’ (Unit 3: Adjustments in the Support Program, Class A) on 11th September, 2021. A total of 33 teachers from 3 project kindergartens, namely Escola Dom João Paulino, Colégio de Santa Rosa de Lima (Secção Chinesa), and Our Lady of Fatima Girls’ School participated in the session. They learned how to enhance their teaching outcome by incorporating assessment, teaching and accommodation into a coherent instructional framework.
There are two sessions in Unit 3. In the first session titled ‘Support Program’s Assessment and Adjustments’, speakers elaborated on the assessment mechanisms and their purposes in the support program. For instance, assigning students into corresponding groups based on their screening test results, understanding students’ individual differences based on their assessment results pre- and post-support classes so as to evaluate the outcome of the support program, monitoring students’ learning progress through sessional assessments to adjust teaching progress.
The second session titled ‘Scaffolding in application: Accommodating differences’ explains how teachers can design teaching activities by applying scaffolding principles. To provide teachers with the opportunity to practice, this session also arranged an activity in which teachers utilized the provided teaching materials to demonstrate a mock teaching session which takes into account students’ assessment results and individual differences for teaching strategies adjustment. Recognizing the well-articulated design and teaching, speakers from the project team offered constructive feedback on how their teaching could be optimized, allowing teachers to further reflect on the needs of each student.
The ‘Early Education Professional Development Advanced Course: Early Literacy Support’ teacher training program is hosted by DSEDJ’s Division of Teacher and Research Staff Development and co-hosted by GEGCLEAR, a partnership project of the Domingos Lam Centre for Research in Education (DLCRE) at the University of Saint Joseph (SUJ). Unit 4 ‘Reviewing the Support Program’ is tentatively scheduled to be held in 2022, with details to be announced.
