Vice Principal, Beacon Hill School, English Schools Foundation
Andy Thompson has worked in education for 27 years. Twenty-five years in Hong Kong working for the English School’s Foundation in four of their schools. He is an experienced classroom teacher and leader within PYP schools. Andy has worked as a PYP Coordinator across two schools and, for the last eight years, as a Vice Principal. He is an experienced PYP workshop leader. Andy is passionate about developing student agency and well-being. He has led multiple whole-school and cross-foundational initiatives in most curriculum and whole-school development areas.
The International Baccalaureate has renewed its focus on conceptual understanding, prompting our school to adopt a more concept-based inquiry approach towards the Primary Years Programme, in part inspired by the work of Rachel French and Carla Marschall. Despite being an established PYP school, we faced challenges in shifting students from merely sharing knowledge to achieving deeper, transferable conceptual understandings to prepare them for the future world. Over the past three years, we have implemented significant changes to our written and taught curriculum, embraced inductive teaching methods, and increased intentionality around the role of Conceptual Understandings. Our efforts aim to increase student voice, encourage intentional, conceptual questioning and increase engagement. We aim to elevate the prominence of concepts and create opportunities for real-world application, enabling students to generate ideas and take meaningful action now and in the future.
We will share our findings through a hands-on exemplar Unit to highlight some of the inductive teaching approaches we now utilise. You will also have the opportunity to see for yourselves how use of a tailor-made AI bot can support teachers in generating, adapting and evaluating teacher and student conceptual understandings.