How can students coming from public schools quickly adapt to the international curriculum?

How do we support students immersing themselves in an English teaching environment?

How do we effectively implement differentiated learning?

Students' academic success depends on the teaching they get from their teachers and the learning they do themselves. King's teachers have rich teaching and school management experience, providing them with a deep understanding of students' characteristics and the situations they find themselves in. By combining the best elements of the Cambridge International curriculum and the Chinese National curriculum, they have created a curriculum that blends Chinese and Western learning and that allows each student to learn at the level appropriate to them. Every one of our teachers meticulously plans the content and form of every one of their lessons on the basis of the King's curriculum outline and learning goals, combined with their knowledge of the specific learning needs of their class.

Cross-Curricular Learning: Learning for 'Mastery’ 

Knowledge is not unidimensional in nature. Once a student has gained knowledge in a certain area, how are they then able to use that knowledge in other areas? KSS places great importance on Cross-Curricular Learning to help our students improve their ability to apply and integrate their knowledge in other areas once they have gained a comprehensive understanding of the subject matter. Over the course of an 8-10-week period, our students will approach the main topic from several different angles and through several different disciplines, guided by their teachers' seamless integration of the curriculum contents into their lessons.

Let's take the curriculum for Grade 3 as an example. When our students cover the topic "What are rivers, and how do they work?", they will focus on different aspects of the topic in their different classes. In English class, the children will read and write texts involving rivers, and learn related vocabulary. In History, they will explore ancient Egypt along the river Nile. In Geography, they will cover the physical geography of rivers and the impact of rivers on human geography. In Art class, they will create various works inspired by the theme of rivers. In Science class, they will conduct experiments to find out about related scientific principles, and so on.

This type of cross-curricular learning supports our students in developing their integrated and critical thinking. By learning about a topic from multiple angles and in multiple ways, students can deepen their understanding of it, allowing them to flexibly apply what they have learnt to solving practical problems, and to become more adaptable to the diverse world around them.

Differentiated Instruction: Meeting Students' Individual Learning Needs

A common question from parents is: "my child's level is ahead of the average for his/her age, what does the school do to meet his/her learning needs?" A similarly-common concern from parents is: "my child's level of English is not yet very high, what kind of support will the school provide them with to increase it?" Or perhaps they might ask: "my child previously attended a public school, will they be able to adapt to the international curriculum?"

Being very familiar with the questions and concerns of the school's parents is a key factor in teaching at KSS. We employ differentiated instruction in the form of "Challenging Differentiation" to provide the appropriate level of challenge for advanced students, and in the form of "Supportive Differentiation" to provide the appropriate level of support for students who are a little behind their peers. Our teachers prepare classroom tasks and homework tailored to the specific situations and requirements of their students in order to meet their individual learning needs. We follow the principle of teaching at the level appropriate to each of our students, to ensure that every child receives an education that is appropriate to them, and which allows them to achieve their best possible learning outcomes. 

In English class, for example, learning support does not mean that students whose level of English is lower than average for their class are assigned additional homework, nor does it mean that they are provided with full translations into their native language. Rather, teachers use 'scaffolding', in the form of filling-in the blanks, picture explanations, example sentences, etc., to provide the required support to those students. At the same time, our teachers will ask targeted questions based on the level of each student, and employ positive reinforcement to encourage them to keep improving their level of English.

Students of advanced ability, similarly, are provided with an appropriate level of challenge. For instance, by asking more complicated questions, their teachers encourage a deeper level of thinking, causing them to think harder about how to apply their knowledge to challenging tasks. Furthermore, in the classroom, students of different levels of ability can be paired up so that they can help each other and make progress together.

Dialogical Teaching: Turning Students into Classroom Instructors

Every new teacher who joins KSS attends a series of training sessions to help them comprehensively understand the King's curriculum, as well as the school's educational principles, teaching methods, and teaching expectations. In order to guarantee that the quality of our teaching remains high, our school has a specialist teaching manual that requires our teachers to use various educational techniques to even more efficiently fulfil the learning goals outlined in our curriculum. Simultaneously, the teaching manual emphasises maintaining consistency in the progress made across our grades and classes, ensuring that all of our students make progress towards their learning goals together. 

At KSS, different subjects are taught using different approaches so that our students are better able to master the skills and knowledge required in each subject. The approach we use most often is dialogical teaching. Unlike monological teaching, the dialogical teaching approach that we use at King's greatly emphasises interactivity in the classroom, both in the form of teachers and students interacting, and in the form of students interacting with each other. In class, the teacher will pose a carefully thought-out question that initiates the students’ thought process and elicits debate, thereby turning them into classroom instructors.

When students become classroom instructors they are motivated to take initiative, which causes them to increase their knowledge and their retention of that knowledge while they discuss the topic and interact with each other. Our teachers also actively take part in their students' discussions, while paying close attention to every students' facial expressions, so that they are able to effectively gauge their level of mastery of the topic. When a question is being answered, the teacher does not emphasise that the answer is correct or incorrect, but joins the student in exploring their answer and encourages them to think about the question more deeply. This approach not only motivates students to express their views with confidence, but also encourages those students who are afraid of making mistakes to participate in the discussion.

Furthermore, according to cognitive load theory, the capacity of our working memory is limited, and unsuitable teaching approaches can overburden students' memory load. At King's, teachers employ dialogical teaching to split large topics into several smaller pieces. Examining these smaller pieces one by one helps our students build a knowledge framework around the topic, aiding them in their acquisition of knowledge and in storing that knowledge in their long-term memory.

In addition to our daily teaching, we at KSS are very aware of the importance of family-school communication. To help our parents better understand the nature of teaching at King's, we provide them with several channels of communication: four school reports per year, Coffee Mornings, Mastery Open Classrooms, parent-teacher afternoon tea, our PTA, class meetings, and so on.