Navigating Hub Teaching: Triumphs, Challenges, and Insights from Our Grade 4 Team

We’re excited to embark on a new chapter in our teaching journey at the International School of Addis Ababa. This year, our Grade 4 team is diving headfirst into the world of hub teaching. Building on the firm foundation already established in the elementary school at ICS Addis, we’re transforming our horseshoe-shaped ILE into a dynamic learning space where collaboration, personalization, and student agency thrive.

Our Context

Our team is a diverse mix of experienced educators and newcomers to team teaching. We have four internationally-hired advisory teachers, including a Learning Support Lead, three locally-hired education assistants, and an EAL teacher who also supports Grade 5. ICS Addis is a fully-inclusive school so, with a group of 66 students — a vibrant mix of international and local learners, we’re eager to explore how hub teaching will meet their unique needs.

The Plan

Our goal is to create an agile learning environment where we can seamlessly integrate co-teaching, team teaching, parallel teaching, and assistive teaching. We’ll be using a design thinking approach to continuously refine our practices based on student data and observations. Through this blog, we’ll share our triumphs, challenges, and insights as we navigate the complexities of hub teaching. Join us on this exciting journey as we build a personalized and engaging learning community for our Grade 4 students.

Throughout our year, we plan to use a design thinking, prototyping mindset in which we will re-design learning experiences in response to anecdotal observations and student data. We will use a five-step reflective, dialogic process as follows: observe, ideate, prototype, reflect, and iterate. At the end of each cycle, we plan to share our experiences through this blog and with our ICS colleagues.

In our next post, we share about how we went about building a firm foundation of relational trust amongst the teaching team.