IHead of Middle Schoolnterview with

Features of Middle School Curriculum The curriculum of Middle School is based on that

of Hong Kong Education Bureau with an Inter-national Education approach, with particular em-phasis on Information and Communication Tech-nology (ICT)-infused teaching, inquiry-driven and independent learning. For the assessment, rubric assessment is adopted, which assesses performance along a task-specifi c set of criteria. Th rough the 12-year education, Lutheran Academy nurtures students’ knowledge, skills, attitudes and actions continuous-ly. Since the mainstream subject content of Middle School curriculum is based on the Hong Kong Cur-riculum Development Institute’s guidelines, the ex-tent of knowledge is suffi cient to prepare students to meet the DSE in Year 12. Unlike most local schools, Lutheran Academy does not put emphasis on paper-drilling but promotes inquiry-driven learning. Stu-dents are encouraged to consolidate their knowledge through self-learning. Furthermore, the school will continue reviewing the balance of three learning style directions: inquiry-driven, content -driven, and pa-

per-drilling. Meanwhile, the quantity of home tasks and examination paper drills of the middle school students will increase along with their upgrade to higher year.

Now, in addition to mainstream subjects in lo-cal secondary schools (i.e., English, Math, Sci-

ence, Humanities, Music, PE, Art, etc.), some more distinctive subjects are included in our middle school curriculum, for instance, Drama and Foot Technol-ogy and Textile Technology, which can improve stu-dents’ communication skills and are related to daily life. Moreover, students can learn diff erent languages in the foreign language lessons. Take this year as an example, students are learning Japanese in Year 7, French in Year 8. In Year 9, half of them are taking Japanese while another half are taking French. Every student learns conversation skills and grammar of wither Japanese or French for about one and a half year, laying the foundation for further studies. In ad-dition, the school organizes Global Classroom every year to broaden students’ horizons, providing oppor-tunities for students to learn beyond classroom with their teachers and classmates overseas or in Hong Kong. Now, some middle school students have al-ready taken part in the school sports teams and music teams and represented the school in some competi-tions. Alongside with the development, the school also plans to develop social work team and other uniformed groups so as to provide students with all-round learning. In line with the launch of IBDP in September 2014, the middle school is going to set new milestone to strengthen the curriculum in eight subject disciplines that moves with times.

MS. QUEENIEMiddle School of Lutheran Academy refers to Year 7 to 9. In this issue, we have interviewed Ms. Queenie Cheung, Head of Middle School.

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Attitude is the Key to Learning

Although the middle school curriculum integrates information technology as tool of teaching and

home tasks, Ms. Queenie emphasized information technology cannot and should not replace “pen and paper” completely. Th ey should be balanced and complementary to each other. For example, students are required to turn off the computer and jot notes or focus on discussion when the teacher is giving a lecture or they are having group discussion. She also stressed the diff erence between “getting done” and “doing well”, the quality of their home tasks refl ects their endeavor to learning. IB curriculum empha-sizes students’ understanding, level of extent, analy-sis and presentation, whereas being earnest is the key to learning. Ms. Queenie intends to set more specifi c index with Ms. Bridget1, so that students can under-stand the requirements and scoring criteria more clearly, hence promoting their standards.

Requirements of studying IBDP

Under the DSS guidelines from the Education Bureau, for Year 10 to 12 from 2014/15, there

should be no more than 49% of students enrolling IBDP. In other words, no less than 51% of students

will enroll in DSE.

Due to the diff erent curriculum expectations be-tween DSE and IBDP, they will conduct classes

separately even though some subjects are the same. Compared with IBDP, the proportion of school-based assessments in DSE is relatively lower whereas as much as 50% IBDP assessments are school-based. Instead of only preparing for one examination, this requires perseverance and sustainable good perfor-mance. Th erefore, support and expectations adjust-ment from the parents is important for the students enrolling IBDP. As the DSE curriculum is more fo-cused, it is more suitable for students who intend to further develop in certain disciplines such as pure sci-ence,

Under the DSE curriculum, except a few schools provide Sports, Arts and Music as elective sub-

jects, most local schools include these in Other Learn-ing Experience (OLE). In contrast, the DP curricu-lum is more comprehensive and emphasizes more on holistic education, like the university preparatory classes. In addition to the six subject groups (including two lan-guages, Mathemat-ics, Science, Hu-manities and the Arts), students are required to take three core subjects which include Th e-ory of Knowledge, Creativity, Action, Service (CAS), and the Extended Essay (EE). For EE, stu-dents need to com-plete an essay of at least 4,000 words on a topic set by themselves. In early March, 38 students went to Cambodia to off er voluntary service in an or-

  1Ms Queenie is responsible for administration, student aff air and coordination between diff erent departments in middle school, whereas Ms. Bridget, the MYP coordinator, will keep in touch with IBO, help review and adjust curriculum so as to ensure the teaching modes in line with IBO standard.

phanage, which prepare them of CAS. Ms. Queenie believes students need to have a very high psycho-logical quality to undertake multiple tasks within two years. It is important that students are able to organ-ize and express their views sensibly, work under pres-sure, and have good time management skills, etc. in order to study IBDP.

Procurement Policy of School Library

In addition to managing the middle school, Ms. Queenie is also leading the development of the

school library. Th ere were two main categories of pro-curement, the fi rst one is teaching content re-lated, our Teacher Li-brarian, Mr. Wallace, discusses with the teachers of each year level on what kinds of books are needed in respect of thematic inquiry and purchase accordingly. Th e sec-ond category aims at

fulfi lling a balanced development of the library col-lection, such as buying the essential books like ency-clopedias and also books which are valuable but less well known as well as the popular ones.

Extension of Opening Hours of Library

Currently, the library opens from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm. In response to the increasing number of

students and rising demand of the use of libaray, the opening hours will be extended to 6:00 pm starting September 2014 to facilitate students to read and do research. By observations, the current library users are mainly primary students. On one hand, Ms. Queenie is deeply gratifi ed they have developed a reading hab-it for pleasure. On the other hand, she hopes Year 7 to 9 students could try harder to make good use of the library resources in the future, not merely seek-ing information from the Internet, but also exploring the knowledge from books in research. In addition to expanding the library collection with interesting and appropriate books, the school also organizes a num-ber of activities to promote reading. For example, promotion of forty chosen Chinese books was held in each year level of middle school, in which students wrote book reports and awards were given as encour-agement, and the response was overwhelming.

Developing Students as “Booklovers”

Both Ms. Queenie and Mr. Wallace are booklovers, they do hope students can enjoy reading, so they

strive to develop a better library for students. Some middle school students have joined in the librarian team now, probably Year 4 to 6 students would be in-vited to join later. Besides tidying up bookshelves and maintaining order in the library, Ms. Queenie also hopes to cultivate them to become “booklovers” who will recommend diff erent resources to the readers. Students who are independent and able to give dem-onstrations are welcomed to join the team. Mean-while, the school also welcomes parents to donate books (excluding comics), parents only need to fi ll out a form and hand in together with the books to the library.

Postscript

From the interview, we deeply feel how Ms. Queenie hoped that more middle school students could

enjoy reading, which we very much concur with. No matter how rapid the information technology devel-ops, but “a good book in hand” has an irreplaceable eff ect on personal cultivation and language ability, in which one could slowly savor the information, emo-tions and values through words. Let us work together to create “book-loving” families and culture a genera-tion of reading!

LAPT Members’ Privileges

LA parents are successful in many trades and some of you are shop or restaurant owners.

If you or your friends are willing to provide our LAPT members with diff erent pref-erential shopping discounts (upon showing a valid LAPT membership card), please

feel free to contact Ms. Fion CHAN of the Student and Administration Offi ce for fur-ther discussion.

We believe that it will further enhance the cohesiveness and the sense of identity among members. All personal information collected will be kept confi dential

and the terms and conditions of the privileges off ered are as decided by the vendors. We have also uploaded the shopping privilege list to our home page since January 2014 and it will be updated when new shopping privileges are added.