This week IEN discusses the evolution of the Olympia Schools, founded as a small kindergarten in 2003 by Ms. Minh An Pham and several other parents. Since that time, Olympia has grown to encompass a kindergarten and a primary, middle, and high school with a combined enrollment of 1,200 on a common campus in Hanoi. The post is based on a conversation between Thomas Hatch and Minh An Pham (Co-founder, Board of Directors), Quoc DanTran (Head Of Mathematics Department, Vice-head of Academic Council), Dr.Thuc AnhVo (Head of Foreign Languages Department; English teacher),and Thanh HaLe (Head of Science & Technology Department).
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.
The power of love, dissatisfaction, and determination
The founding and development of the Olympia Schools is a familiar but inspiring story. The story begins with love and a deep belief in education. It requires some money or material resources but relies on determination, connections, and social capital. Along the way, success builds on a whole series of critical decisions – and sometimes “fortunate accidents” – that contribute to micro-innovations and adaptations that make it possible for the school to find a supportive community and create the conditions where alternative approaches to education can take root.
The story of the Olympia School begins in 2003 in Hanoi, when Ms. Minh An Pham and three of her friends were looking for kindergartens for their children. It was almost ten years since the Vietnamese government had begun loosening some requirements related to education and other sectors. Economic development was in full swing, and more and more international companies were finding their way to Vietnam. All four friends got jobs at one of those international companies and Ms. Pham told me that experience gave them opportunities to see the confidence and independence of their co-workers’ children. That exposure reinforced their concern that – although many Vietnamese students excel in academics – they often seemed to lack what she called “life skills.” As Ms. Pham put it, it seemed as if Vietnamese students had lost their confidence in speaking up and sharing their ideas. She attributed that to a school system based on a Confucian education tradition that emphasized memorization, examination, and respect for teachers, coupled with a tendency for Vietnamese parents to constantly compare how their children were doing and how they ranked academically.
With a growing international community and increasing opportunities for international work, Ms. Pham and her friends wanted to make sure that their children gained both academic and life skills and that their children could learn English along with Vietnamese. When they looked around to find a school that could meeting those goals, however, they did not see any public kindergartens that met these criteria. There were a few private options that Ms. Pham and her friends thought seemed more like day-care centers than schools, and there was one private kindergarten imported from Singapore. But even that – very expensive – option only ran from 9 – 3 PM, still not long enough to take care of their children while the four women worked. Seeing no other options, the four friends began to think about creating a kindergarten of their own.
With a growing international community and increasing opportunities for international work, Ms. Pham and her friends wanted to make sure that their children gained both academic and life skills and that their children could learn English along with Vietnamese.
The power of social networks
Their first steps toward developing a school came with the help of another colleague at work. Although Ms. Pham had graduated from a teacher training institution in Vietnam, she went straight into the business world after graduation. As a consequence, she had never worked in schools and was not that familiar with early childhood education. But, Ms. Pham told me, the four friends were fortunate to work with a woman whose mother was a well-known educator who specialized in kindergarten. As Ms. Pham described it, “she was our first teacher,” and introduced the four friends to a number of educational experts who helped them learn about other early childhood approaches, including the “Reggio approach” that originated in Reggio Emilio, Italy. As they visited local schools and traveled to observe private kindergartens in places like Ho Chi Minh City and Singapore, they focused more and more on schools that emphasized “developmentally appropriate practice” as well as some schools that were inspired by Howard Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences. On the one hand, Ms. Pham explained, these approaches provided broad support for children’s development and encouraged children to be independent. On the other hand, they also fit well with the Vietnamese national kindergarten curriculum. Notably, the national curriculum was already divided into areas that concentrated on physical, musical, and ethical development, and the four friends felt those subjects aligned well with the different strengths and abilities highlighted in theory of multiple intelligences.
They expanded their group of advisors as they were introduced to more and more people, including several working with not-for-profits like Save the Children, who had extensive experience in Vietnam. Those advisors looked at the plans to combine MI-based and developmentally appropriate curriculum with the Vietnamese national curriculum and concluded: “this is doable.” With that green light, Ms. Pham bought textbooks and gathered teaching materials and, with the help of their network of experts, reviewed and aligned them with the national curriculum. They rented a small house in an alley of Hanoi and worked with a designer to renovate it; they drew on the connections and expertise of their advisors to recruit and hire teachers; and, after an intense six months, opened their doors to the “Dream House” kindergarten and welcomed a small group of six students – four children of their own and two children who lived nearby. To make it all possible, Ms. Pham worked the evening shift at her job and spent the whole morning at the kindergarten.
Key developments in the first years
The four friends were fortunate to have the means and the relationships to get the school off the ground, but, as Ms. Pham explained, they also had to credit their houses to the bank, draw on their salaries to make sure they had enough money to pay the teachers, and “every time a student quit the school, we worried so much that we would not have enough money to keep going…” Nonetheless, the school grew year-by-year, from 6 students to 12 students, from 20 students to 60, as the first cohort expanded and progressed through the grades.
By 2007, they were able to start the year with both a group of primary school students and a group of secondary school students. Along the way, several key decisions helped to create the time in the day and the space in the curriculum that they needed to stay true to their original vision of a developmentally based, holistic, education aligned with the national curriculum. First, they decided to teach Vietnamese and English in an integrated way. As Ms. Pham explained, she had seen private schools in Ho Chi Minh City that were teaching English, but only as a separate subject. “Our innovation,” Ms. Pham said, “was to teach English along with the other subjects.” That meant teaching key skills and concepts in math, science, and history in Vietnamese and then teaching the related English vocabulary in the same class. This innovation created space in their schedule because they did not have to find time to teach a separate English course. Furthermore, the subject teachers teaching in Vietnamese could co-teach with their colleagues teaching English, making coordination and communication easier. Perhaps most importantly, from the students’ perspectives, instead of having to make connections between concepts and vocabulary taught in different classes, they encountered an integrated curriculum that reduced confusion.
“Our innovation,” Ms. Pham said, “was to teach English along with the other subjects.” That meant teaching key skills and concepts in math, science, and history in Vietnamese and then teaching the related English vocabulary in the same class.
Second, although Vietnamese public schools generally ran for a half-day (usually from about 7:30 AM to 12 PM, 6 days a week), Dream House decided to run a full-day program, from 8 AM – 4:30 PM. That decision created additional time during the school day that allowed them to meet the national curriculum requirements, add and integrate the teaching of English, and incorporate the teaching of their own “life skills” curriculum. In particular, the national curriculum requirements for social science included both ethics and society and nature, but Dream House chose to split social science up by teaching nature during their science classes and then teaching ethics and society in their life skills class. As Ms. Pham put it, “we reconfigured all the subjects in the school day and made it a comprehensive approach, integrating Vietnamese and English.”
With those critical decisions and strategic choices, the basic structures for their primary, middle, and high school were in place. Capping off this period of development, what began as Dream House, moved to a new, larger campus in 2010. As part of a competition to come up with a new name, the Olympia School was born, the winning teacher paper declaring it a symbol for wisdom and success.
Next week: The “School of Change”: The Olympia School Story (Part 2)
