Every year, International School Ho Chi Minh City (ISHCMC) provides Professional Development (PD) Days to ensure that its educators and staff stay current with the latest pedagogical practices and educational trends. These PD days allow ISHCMC faculty to engage in meaningful professional learning that enriches their knowledge, skills, and expertise in their respective fields. By providing these opportunities for continuous professional growth, ISHCMC ensures that its educators remain knowledgeable and inspired to provide the best possible education for their students. This investment in the professional development of its faculty translates into high-quality education for its students, which in turn helps them succeed academically and in their future careers.

This year, one of our key learning priorities has been to enhance the teaching and learning of literacy, particularly for our multilingual learners. To achieve this, we engaged external consultants Tania Lattanzio, Director of Innovative Global Education, and Tonya Ward Singer to work with our teaching faculty during the first two weeks of March.

 

 

Tania and our educators collaborated to review and refine our core literacy continuum, ensuring that it aligns with our definition, belief statement, guiding principles, and AERO Standards across the PYP, MYP, and DP. During these sessions, grade level teams and subject departments received valuable guidance on how to teach literacy conceptually through units of inquiry.

Tonya, a literacy specialist, offered her expertise to our team in a series of workshops, planning sessions, and classroom modeling. She helped our faculty to develop effective strategies that accelerate language and literacy development for our multilingual learners.

 

 

Through our literacy-focused professional development sessions, our faculty has gained new insights and techniques for teaching language and literacy that can help our students develop crucial communication skills. By providing targeted professional development for our faculty, we can ensure that our teaching practices are aligned with our school’s mission and vision. This, in turn, can help us create a cohesive and consistent learning environment that fosters student growth and development.

At ISHCMC, we recognize that professional development is essential for our teaching faculty to improve their skills and provide the best possible learning experiences for our students. We are proud of our commitment to providing our faculty with opportunities to continuously develop their teaching practices, and we are confident that these efforts will help our students flourish as energized, engaged, and empowered learners.