This week, the discussion of the evolution of the Olympia Schools continues with a focus on the school’s development since it moved to a new K-12 campus in 2010. Established initially as a small kindergarten in 2003 by Ms. Minh An Pham and several other parents, Olympia has grown to encompass a kindergarten and a primary, middle, and high school with a combined enrollment of 1,200 in Hanoi. The post is based on a conversation between Thomas Hatch and Minh An Pham (Co-founder, Board of Directors), Quoc Dan Tran (Head Of Mathematics Department, Vice-head of Academic Council), Dr.Thuc Anh Vo (Head of Foreign Languages Department; English teacher), and Thanh Ha Le (Head of Science & Technology Department). Last week’s post, The Evolution of an Alternative Educational Approach in Vietnam, covers the first part of this conversation.
This discussion builds on previous posts documenting the founding and evolution of a variety of different schools and educational programs including the development of the ETU School in China (Beyond Fear: Yinuo Li On What It Takes To Create New Schools), the Citizens Foundation in Pakistan (Expanding to Say “Yes”: The Ongoing Work of The Citizens Foundation in Pakistan), Second Chance in Liberia, (Accelerating Learning in Africa: The Expansion and Adaptations of Second Chance), and Fount of Nations in Malawi (Building equal learning opportunities for differently-abled children in Malawi: An interview with Patience Mkandawire on the evolution of Fount for Nations). Taken together, these post show how powerful educational experiences, often ones that deviate from conventional and “accepted” practice, can take off in all kinds of contexts.
Since 2010: The “school of change”
In describing the Olympia School’s development since its move to a new campus, Ms. Pham and her colleagues called it “a school of change.” Every summer, they seem to be making repairs and improvements in their classrooms in the school environment, but they are also constantly changing and improving their curriculum. As I talked with Ms. Pham and her colleagues, however, I began to get a sense that Olympia could be termed “a school of incremental change” – a school striving to make a series of small changes and adaptations every year rather than radical leaps. Dr. Vo, Head of the Foreign Languages Department, described the steps toward interdisciplinary project-based learning since her arrival in 2015. “Every summer,” Dr. Vo told me, “we’ve been working on improving the program while teachers are on holiday.“ At first, she explained, English teachers might take 2 hours out of the 7 hours a week they spent with in class with their students; but gradually, they began working with other teachers to pursue a project where they might try to integrate another subject into the English projects. More recently, however, their project-based approach has grown as teachers from a number of different subjects work together to create projects that are truly interdisciplinary, pursued across subjects, in and out of school.
To illustrate, Dr. Vo described a sustainable development project organized around critical questions like: “Should we build more hydro-electric plants?” and “is hydro-electric power sustainable?” In the process, students explored issues in natural science, history, and geography by looking at how electricity is delivered to different communities in Vietnam and how the factories affect local life. Students worked in a group to do a report – which they also had to write up in English. For math, students calculated costs and benefits. For economics, they had to develop a sustainable idea to present to their peers and teachers in a kind of competition (inspired by the show “Shark Tank”). Over the years, what might have begun as a project carried out in a subject like physics, has expanded to engage the whole school, culminating in an entire day devoted to sustainable development with a showcase where students at many different levels can share what they have learned.
Olympia has now reached a point where the process of developing a theme and guidelines for school-wide projects has become an integral part of their planning for the year. That planning includes collaborative meetings during the summer – and through weekly collaborative meetings throughout the school year – among all the teachers who look together at the national curriculum requirements, the school requirements, and the student needs in order to pick a theme for the year. They then decide which over-arching questions to ask, which products to produce, and what kinds of assessments to have. Recently, they have begun engaging the students in the selection of the themes as well. Last year, they selected the theme “learn smart, be happy, and go global.” As part of that effort, students designed a variety of different products including a “floating house” to help farmers deal with flood season and model of a ”smart home” with an alarm system for fire safety (which was covered on the VTV News).
Changing time
The school has also made some critical structural changes which have helped it to use time to support both students’ academic development and their wellbeing. For example, during the COVID-19 school closures, they planned their schedule taking into account both the content they needed to cover as well as concerns about the amount of time students needed to spend on their screens. Aided by the fact that the Vietnamese government reduced some of the requirements for content coverage, to reduce screen time, they decided to start the students’ day later and end earlier than normal; instead of scheduling periods back-to-back, they also gave students a break in between classes. In addition, they made room for movement activities in both the morning and the afternoon. Although many aspects of the schedule shifted back after the closures ended, the school has created a period after lunch when students can get more one-on-one support from their teachers and advisors.
In order to meet the demands of the national curriculum and to prepare students for the entrance tests and university admissions requirements in the US, the UK and other countries, the school has also shifted their ninth grade – normally the last year of lower secondary school in Vietnam – into the first grade in high school (similar to the US). As Ms. Pham explained, that move gave their 9th graders a chance to get acquainted with their high school program and to build a strong academic foundation; but it also created time in their schedule to take a number of elective courses and to choose an academic specialization in a subject of interest like social studies, psychology, or economics before they graduated high school. This arrangement enables students to prepare both for college entrance tests like the SAT or IELTS used in other countries and for the Vietnamese national exams in mathematics, literature, foreign languages, and natural sciences or social sciences (which can also be used for admission to Vietnamese universities).
Ultimately, this arrangement makes it possible for their students to participate in the school’s three different programs of activities: their academic program; an art, music, and physical education program (that is also reflected in their extra-curricular offerings); and their LIFE program (focusing on student wellbeing and social-emotional development). With these changes, Olympia has now had thirteen graduating classes, with last year’s class including 76 graduates.
Managing resistance?
With such an unusual educational approach, some resistance and friction in a conventional system is to be expected, but the school has found ways to work with the larger system. Those efforts have included participating in some of Vietnam’s early efforts to explore competency-based learning as an alternative to “textbook-based” teaching in 2013. As part of a pilot project, the school’s science teachers began looking at how they could make their classes more experiential and active. Although they did not know it at the time, that project set them up well for the government’s announcement in 2017 that the whole country would shift to a competency-based curriculum.
Not surprisingly, the emphasis on testing and exams in the Vietnamese system has presented some constraints. In Hanoi, in particular, at the end of 9th grade, students have to take an exam in Vietnamese language and in Mathematics to get a certificate to graduate and enter upper secondary school. Naturally, many schools focus specifically on preparing their students for those tests. At Olympia, however, given that the 9th graders are already part of the high school and almost all continue on to 10th grade they submitted a proposal to the municipal government to use their own 9th grade assessments in place of Hanoi’s 9th grade graduation exams. Olympia’s approach included formative assessments such as projects and writing portfolios used throughout the year along with some traditional, summative exams at the end of the year. When Hanoi agreed to that proposal, Olympia was able to admit their students directly to Olympia high school without taking the city’s test. Since that time, many other private schools have followed suit with their own assessment approaches.
Olympia’s older students still face some exam pressures, but perhaps not as much as in some other systems because in Vietnam students are now allowed to use their grade point average for college admissions and, in some cases, they can use scores from the SAT’s or the IELTS for both entrance to college in Vietnam and in the US and elsewhere. In addition, students who began at Olympia in primary school have had instruction in English throughout their school year, and, as a result, are often able to take and pass the national exams in English well before their final year, further relieving some of the exam pressure that often coalesces at the end of students’ high school experience.
Even with a long record of getting their students into university in Vietnam and other countries, some resistance from parents, particularly those who are used to more conventional approaches, is inevitable. As Ms. Pham described, “It’s very difficult to make all of the people satisfied. Some parents want to reduce the burden for their students, and others want to make sure their students are getting enough academics, and they want the teacher to make sure the students are doing their work and aren’t playing games.” In response, the school regularly spends time helping families understand what they school is doing and why. Those efforts include ongoing workshops for families that are designed to help parents learn how to support their children through different developmental stages and how to support them academically. “It’s only when parents don’t understand that they resist.,” Ms. Pham says, “and whenever we roll something out, we have a lot of meetings and workshops so we can listen to each other and work together to find a solution. We have a lot of opinions, but we agree that the teachers need support for the children.”
On to the next stage…
“This is a time for the school to enter a new stage. We’ve been through the “setting up” stage; we’ve made changes to the curriculum; and now it’s time for a focus on innovation and improving our quality.”
When our conversation turned to the next steps for the school, Ms. Pham and her colleagues pointed to deeper learning as a critical point of emphasis. As she put it, they want to see students applying their knowledge and really understanding what they are learning and why they are learning it. As part of that emphasis, the teachers are working on developing interdisciplinary projects and on learning how they can use ChatGPT productively to help teachers teach the content and to be more student-centered at the same time. Ms. Pham summed it up this way: “This is a time for the school to enter a new stage. We’ve been through the “setting up” stage; we’ve made changes to the curriculum; and now it’s time for a focus on innovation and improving our quality.”
International Education News 