Our post-Dragon Boat Festival meeting saw some new faces join us to help expand our PLC with fresh ideas and inspiration for the final few weeks of the school year.

We discussed topics, including:

• Peace education – its links to international education and application within different cultural backgrounds.
• Reflection on what it means to be an educator and evaluating teaching practices.
• Book Bites – finding additional time for promoting literacy within packed schedules.
• Pros and cons of admin operations.

Photos from the event:

Our second meeting of the year where we discussed:

• Exam specific scaffolds and how they can be built into the use of reflections.
• Inquiry teaching strategies.

We are excited to hear how Tom’s “Book Bites” reading initiative goes in our next meeting.

After a slight gap in meetings we were pleased to start our the new year with our first PLC meeting of 2025.

We shared and discussed the following topics:

• Support and scaffolds for EAL inclusion in the main stream.
• Using Suno.com, an AI song generator, as part of student’s project.
• The 5E Model and how to integrate it into the ELA classroom.

With winter flu season upon us, we decided to take our fourth meeting online. We talked about different inquiry models, differentiation and AI tools that support teachers.

It was great to meet again for our third meeting. We took time to discuss some of our recent learnings, successes and challenges.

Our second in person meeting gave us a lot of opportunities to test the meeting structure that we decided upon at our first meeting.

Meeting participants:

Chioke, Ed, Thomas

Topics:

Our anchoring Papers were:

• Developing Great Teaching Lessons from the international reviews into effective professional development, Teacher Development Trust
• The Myth of the Performance Plateau, John P. Papay and Matthew A. Kraft

We followed this up with:

• 3 Ways Administrators Can Nurture Teacher Growth, Melissa Roy
• Smoothing the Way for Change, Beth Holland

Meeting Begins:
Participants began by reviewing our anchoring texts.
After reviewing the papers, the communal threads and understandings could be defined as:

A. Validation that teachers can continue to improve and develop, that “old dogs can learn new tricks”.

B. Teacher lack of motivation or growth may be linked to school culture or lack of mentoring.

C. Teacher buy in is critical in development.

Second Phase:

(Sectional/subjects PLC sessions, connecting the topic of discussion to the experiences and specific knowledge of the sections/subjects.)

We applied knowledge of our subject and sections to the paper specifically to our context.

We discussed:
I. Examples of constantly developing teachers in our schools and how they positively contribute.

II. Personality traits that innovative teachers espouse
+resilience, enthusiasm, solution driven, growth mindset,
– leadership, bossiness, ego-driven were mentioned as detrimental

III.  Which papers we personally preferred and connected with the most:
Ed: The Myth of the Performance Plateau, John P. Papay and Matthew A. Kraft

Thomas: The Myth of the Performance Plateau, John P. Papay and Matthew A. Kraft

Chioke: Smoothing the Way for Change, Beth Holland

Third Phase (skipped with just 3 participants)
PLC sessions divided by randomizer to allow intersubject and intersection discussion and digestion of topic material

Fourth:
Community collaboration, with applying topics towards our educational goals, following a reciprocal feedback cycle.

Thomas: Hopes to take conclusions from these papers to his next school (congratulations Thomas!) and that these papers should be reconnected to development and discussions in future PLC meetings, as it can form an excellent pre-requisite thinking activity or agreed-upon way to approach our thinking, namely that we can all improve.

Chioke: Teacher buy-in and being an (empowered) agent of change is vital to reforming and improving a school. Teachers are the engine that drives the school forward, and revitalizing teachers needs to be the focus of any school that seeks to improve or even to maintain.

Ed: Further research into the best metrics, stratagems, and methods to both gauge and effect change is needed. That being said, the idea that teachers do not plateau (without wanting to or giving up) is a powerful one that comes as a relief. The idea of someone’s best professional years being in either the middle of their career, or worst, at the start, is incredibly bleak. This idea of continual improvement should be a starting point of each PLC, or professional development. Furthermore, administrators should invest time and effort into determining what factors in their schools are demotivating teachers, or contributing to any sense of a “plateau”.

After a lot of digital collaboration, on Sunday, November 20th, 2022 NIET’s founding meeting happened to set out our expectations, ambitions and topics for the year ahead.

Meeting Structure

First:
Theory and Knowledge; research papers and exploring overarching themes connected to International Education.

Second:
Sectional/subjects PLC sessions, connecting the topic of discussion to the experiences and specific knowledge of the sections/subjects.

Third:
PLC sessions divided by randomizer to allow intersubject and intersection discussion and digestion of topic material

Fourth:
Community collaboration, with applying topics towards our educational goals, following a reciprocal feedback cycle.

Topics

For our next PLC meeting we will discuss:

•  Developing Great Teaching Lessons from the international reviews into effective professional development, Teacher Development Trust
• The Myth of the Performance Plateau, John P. Papay and Matthew A. Kraft

Follow on articles:

• 3 Ways Administrators Can Nurture Teacher Growth, Melissa Roy
• Smoothing the Way for Change, Beth Holland

Topics of further discussion:

1. Which do you need more of at your school? PD or action research?
   What challenges are you facing in your educational context?
2. What steps could you take (alone or as a school community) to improve?
3. What value does feedback and growth mindset serve to educators as well as students?

Schedule

To meet four times a year with the next meeting to be confirmed later.

Ambitions

To grow NIET from its founding group of three to that of other educators and teachers across Beijing, China and the world.

As a group we will promote NIET within our professional networks to encourage expansion as a PLC.