Personalized Education at Four Leaves International School Tokyo: Our Daily Approach

What we believe

As a parent, what lessons do you believe are important for your child’s education? We at Four Leaves International School Tokyo believe that every day, every moment our students spend at school should be engaging, balanced, and should cover all student needs across their strengths and weaknesses. Our personalized education approach ensures every student receives targeted instruction across all subject areas, from Japanese language to science and literacy." Whether it be students’ individual progress or how we use their progress for a personalized education, we make sure to improve their understanding of whatever comes their way.

Student Progress

Tracking student progress is important in finding both an individual student’s strengths and weaknesses. Whether it be the internal struggles or a thorough understanding of a class lesson, we make sure to be readily adaptive in our learning approaches. Both thanks to the small class sizes and relationships our students have with our teachers, all of our students can be open with one another in looking for help or to advance to the next assignment. For our teachers, it helps them simplify the identification of patterns in student work and track their progress.

Organization

To speak on student progress, it’s also important to touch on organization, as it helps build a system in which how and why classes are adjusted to our students. For each of our students, throughout their classes and schoolwork, assignments and practice sheets are placed in folders that each student has their own. Upon teacher approval, they go into those folders, and with those holding uncompleted papers, into a different folder that our teachers hold onto for each student. 

In our Literacy classes, for example, the class is split into differentiated learning groups by skill level, where each group will focus on learning how to master new skills, words, or letters, depending on the group. 

Adaptive Learning Approaches

With each group having its own designated teacher, whom are also in charge of our other classes, each of our four teachers will look over each student of their group and help them through their assignments. For our baby and young groups, it ranges from the alphabet to simple words, and for our middle and advanced groups, forming sentences and sounding words out. As the teachers are quick to recognize the struggles one student or group is facing, lessons are then adjusted to combat those difficulties so they are not left behind. 

For a group that may be struggling with a certain lesson, lessons are also balanced in how difficult they can be, never being too hard where they may give up, taking into consideration which tasks would be easier for whom, and how to adjust them so they reach that balance. Instilling this is not limited to the lessons themselves, but is also practiced before they are tasked with their assignments, with our class watching fun, educational videos, or how students take it upon themselves to practice during free time, where our team is more than happy to help.

Additionally, even in our more creative lessons, we make sure certain tasks are not too difficult for our younger students, such as difficulties in cutting smaller shapes with a pair of scissors, or how hard to mix a tough mixture in our cooking classes. Steps are taken beforehand to ensure our students don’t find certain tasks too difficult or complex, as we want them to enjoy themselves before anything, so that once they can perform those more difficult steps, it is done with the same excitement and curiosity they had before. 

Conclusion

As a school, we make sure our students move at a steady pace in their lessons. While students may have an easier time understanding than others, we make sure we account for this in our different groups and how each teacher understands the strengths and weaknesses of each student. The abilities of each student are taken into account when developing lesson plans and tasks. By our team being able to adapt to our students, it keeps lessons refreshing and practical, which makes every day exciting for everyone involved.