The Dewey Schools in Hanoi & Haiphong Vietnam
In addition to supporting independent and public schools throughout the United States, Ventures has cultivated global partnerships, including The Dewey Schools, a network of K-12 schools in Vietnam.
As a part of a comprehensive, multi-year consulting partnership, MV Ventures’ consultants continue to collaborate with the administration and faculty to design and implement a ‘school within a school’ model where a segment of Dewey high school students will graduate with a dual-diploma – The Dewey School and The Mount Vernon School.
MVV expert consultants partnered on both a macro and micro level, leading systems change school-wide and working with individual teachers to create and implement performance task assessments, to score assessments with proficiency scales, to give high-quality feedback, and to create a culture of reflection among students and teachers. This work has transformed the learning and assessment practices throughout The Dewey Schools.
This level of transformation was built on a robust professional learning model, customized for Dewey teachers and administrators. Through curriculum redesign, inquiry-based learning approaches, and competency-based education practices, MV Ventures facilitated workshops using interactive, online workshops, site visits, and in-person training sessions.
MV Ventures continues to train teachers and administrators in a variety of different workshop series including Maker, Design, and Engineering, College Counseling, and Literacy Acquisition and Multi-sensory Phonics.
In the MDE training series, MV Ventures consultants trained Dewey School teachers to create and implement high-quality Maker, Design, and Engineering learning experiences for K-12 students. During this project, a team of MVV consultants led faculty through monthly interactive, online coaching workshops to guide them in planning and implementing MDE curriculum based on the Mount Vernon maker ed approach, the MV Compass model for Design Thinking, and an overall inquiry-based learning methodology. MVV coaching resulted in deepening capacity for The Dewey Schools’ team to create and lead learner-centered MDE experiences which sets the conditions for students’ sense of agency as they are making a positive impact on the world around them right now.
The College Counseling Department at Mount Vernon assisted Dewey to scale their college counseling program across all campuses. From specific project based activities appropriate for all grade levels to coaching around parent partnership and the high-touch junior and senior experiences, the MV team met bi-monthly over the course of a year to train Dewey leaders in career and college counseling to launch their own comprehensive program in the Fall of 2022.
Finally, literacy acquisition and multi-sensory phonics were the topic of a six-session interactive, online coaching series designed to give Dewey Schools’ educators and administrators the knowledge, skills, and tools to implement research-based instructional methods for teaching literacy, specifically phonics, using a multi-sensory approach. This series explored questions of how the brain learns to read, write, and spell as well as how to balance foundational skills with inquiry-based learning. MVV coaching resulted in deepening capacity for The Dewey Schools’ team to implement research-based literacy acquisition strategies and a multi-sensory approach to phonics instruction.
