In Global Nexus the three principles are not slogans for the school wall; they work as planning rules. Liberal-arts bilingualism asks whether both languages are being used for a real purpose. Real experiential learning asks whether children will touch, try and return to something rather than watch it. Whole-child development asks whether the plan reaches beyond one skill and leaves room for each child's pace. An activity that fails one of those questions is either redesigned or dropped, however attractive it looks in a photograph.
Principles only become useful when they cost something, when they make a team say no to an idea it liked. This article sets out how each principle is turned into questions a teacher can ask on a Thursday afternoon while planning the following week, what each principle rules in and out, and how a team resolves the moments when the three disagree.
Why a curriculum needs principles and not only activities
Many early-years programmes are, in practice, collections of activities. A teacher inherits a folder of craft ideas, songs and seasonal events and works through it. Collections like this are not useless; good activities are hard to invent. Their weakness shows when something unexpected happens: a child is frightened of the paint, half the class is absent with a fever, the rain floods the garden, or a group of children becomes fascinated by ants on the windowsill. A folder of activities cannot tell a teacher what to do next. A principle can.
Principles are also what allow a curriculum to be taught by different people in different rooms without becoming a script. If two teachers share the same principles, they can make different choices about materials or timing and still be recognisably doing the same thing. If they share only a list of activities, any deviation from the list looks like failure, and teachers stop responding to the children in front of them.
For Global Nexus, which is taught by mixed teams of Vietnamese and international teachers who trained in different traditions, this matters a great deal. The principles give everyone a common language for disagreement. A conversation that starts with 'I do not like this activity' goes nowhere; one that starts with 'I am not sure the English here has a purpose' can be settled.
There is a further benefit for leadership. When principles are explicit, a curriculum lead visiting a classroom can ask useful questions instead of checking compliance with a timetable. Seeing an unusual activity, the lead asks which principle it serves and what the teacher is watching for. If the answer is clear, the variation is welcome. If it is not, the conversation becomes coaching rather than correction, which is the kind of feedback teachers can actually use.
Turning liberal-arts bilingualism into planning questions
Is the language attached to something the child wants to do? English used to name the parts of a seed the children have just split open is purposeful. English used to repeat colour names with no colours in sight is not. The test is whether a child could understand the word from the situation even without translation.
Which language leads, and why? Some activities are better led in Vietnamese, especially when a concept is new or emotions are running high; others work well in English because the materials carry the meaning. Planning names the lead language for each part of the day rather than leaving it to chance or to whichever adult happens to be nearby.
Is translation being used as a crutch? Saying everything twice, once in each language, teaches children to wait for the version they understand. The principle prefers that each language carries different, meaningful content, with brief bridging when a child is genuinely lost.
Is there breadth? The word liberal is a reminder that language belongs in science, music, movement, art and care routines, not only in a language corner. A week in which English appears only in songs fails the principle even if the songs are well taught.
Is Vietnamese protected? For most children Vietnamese is the home language and the language of their wider family. A plan that quietly lets English crowd out rich Vietnamese talk, storytelling and early literacy has misread the principle.
Turning real experience into planning questions
The second principle sounds obvious, since every early-years teacher believes in hands-on learning. In practice, a great deal of preschool time is spent watching: watching a teacher demonstrate, watching a screen, watching a performance. The planning question is therefore blunt. For each activity, what will the child's hands and body actually be doing, and for how long? If the honest answer is sitting and listening for most of the time, the activity needs rethinking.
A second question concerns connection to life. Children in Ho Chi Minh City live with motorbikes, markets, rain, heat, street food, apartment lifts and family meals. A theme about snow, however charming, is weaker raw material than a theme about rain, because children can test what they learn about rain on the way home. The principle does not ban the distant or the imaginary; stories take children everywhere. It simply asks that the core of a project be something children can check against their own experience.
The third question concerns continuity. An experience becomes learning when children revisit it. Planning therefore asks where the follow-up will be: a drawing the next day, a conversation in morning circle, a second attempt with different materials, a photograph that children explain to their families. Without that follow-up, a well-run field trip remains a pleasant memory rather than a step in a project.
Turning whole-child development into planning questions
The third principle works mainly as a check on narrowness. When a team plans a week around a theme, it is easy for one dimension to take over: a theme about numbers becomes all counting, a theme about families becomes all vocabulary. Planning in Global Nexus therefore includes a quick scan across the six dimensions. Where in this week will children use language? Where will they deal with feelings, perhaps waiting, losing, sharing or comforting? Where will they practise a life skill for real? Where will they make a choice and carry it through? Where will they make something of their own? Where will they puzzle over a problem?
The scan is not a demand that every activity tick six boxes. A good week might touch some dimensions lightly and go deep on two. The point is to notice when a dimension has disappeared altogether, which happens most often with emotion and independence because they rarely appear in activity folders.
The second half of the principle, respecting each child's rhythm, enters planning through the word some. Instead of 'children will cut along a line', the plan says 'some children will cut along a line, others will snip freely, and the teacher will watch for which children are ready to try the next step'. That small change in wording turns a lesson objective into a range, and it stops teachers from treating a child who is not yet ready as a child who has failed.
When the principles pull in different directions
Principles are most useful at the points where they conflict, and in a bilingual early-years classroom they conflict often. A newly arrived two-year-old who speaks only Vietnamese may need comfort more than English; the bilingual principle and the whole-child principle point in different directions. A real experience such as cooking involves heat and knives; the experiential principle and basic safety need to be reconciled. A national programme goal for the age group may arrive before a particular child is ready; the floor set by the programme and the respect for individual rhythm have to be held together.
Global Nexus teams generally resolve these tensions in a consistent order. Physical safety and emotional security come first, because no learning happens in a child who feels unsafe. That is why a settling child is comforted in the language that reaches them fastest, which is usually Vietnamese, even in an English-led part of the day. Next comes the floor of the national programme, adapted in pace but not abandoned. Then come the three principles, which shape how everything else is done.
This ordering is not a rigid hierarchy. It is a default that a team can depart from with a reason. What matters is that the reason is spoken aloud during planning rather than discovered afterwards. Teams that never discuss tensions tend to resolve them by habit, and habit usually favours whatever is easiest to supervise.
One idea, planned three ways
The difference between a principle and a slogan becomes clearer with an example. Take a monthly theme about rain, common in Ho Chi Minh City during the rainy season, and one activity within it planned three different ways.
| Version | What happens | Which principles it meets |
|---|---|---|
| Version A | Children sit on the mat while the teacher shows pictures of clouds and rain and repeats English words; each child colours a printed raindrop | Barely any: language without purpose, no real experience, one narrow skill |
| Version B | Children go outside after a shower, splash in puddles, then return indoors to sing a rain song in English | Real experience and some joy, but language is unconnected to what they did and there is no follow-up |
| Version C | Children place containers around the garden before a forecast shower, check them afterwards, compare how much water each holds, talk about it in Vietnamese and English, draw what they found, and repeat the test on another day | All three: language attached to a real task, an experience revisited, and thinking, independence and expression all involved |
Version C takes more planning and more tolerance for mess. It also leaves teachers with far more to observe and record. The practical lesson is that the principles rarely ask for more time in the day; they ask for different use of the same time, which is why they belong at the planning table rather than in the staff handbook.
Questions a team can ask at the end of each planning session
Global Nexus teams finish planning with a short self-check. The questions below are a workable version, short enough to use every week.
- Where in next week's plan will each language be used for something children actually care about?
- Which activity will children return to on more than one day, and how will they revisit it?
- Which of the six dimensions is missing from this week, and does that matter for any particular child?
- Where have we written 'all children will' when we really mean 'some children will'?
- Which tension between the principles did we notice, and how did we decide?
- What will we look for in two or three named children, and who will record it?
The final question is the one most often skipped, and it is the one that links planning to observation. A plan that names what adults will watch for is half of an assessment system already.
It helps to keep the answers. A team that writes two or three lines against these questions each week builds, over a term, a plain record of how the principles were actually applied: which tensions came up repeatedly, which dimension kept slipping out of the plan, which language tended to dominate. That record is far more useful to a new teacher joining the team than a polished description of the curriculum, because it shows the principles at work on real decisions, including the ones the team would make differently next time.
Câu hỏi thường gặp
Do the three principles carry equal weight in Global Nexus?
They are meant to work together rather than in a ranked list. In daily practice, safety and emotional security come first, the national programme sets the floor, and the three principles then shape how activities are designed and taught.
Does liberal-arts bilingual mean half the day in each language?
No fixed split is implied. The principle concerns purpose and breadth: each language should be used for meaningful activity across many areas of learning. Teams plan which language leads each part of the day according to the children and the activity.
How is real experiential learning different from simply having fun activities?
An experience in this curriculum has a purpose, involves children's own hands and bodies, connects with their lives, and is revisited over several days. A pleasant activity that is never mentioned again does not meet that standard, even if children enjoy it.
What does respecting each child's rhythm look like in a written plan?
Plans describe a range of likely responses rather than a single target, name children who may need a different starting point, and leave space for the teacher to adjust. The national age-group goals remain, but the route and timing are adapted.
What happens when a teacher disagrees with how a principle is applied?
The principles exist partly to make disagreement productive. A teacher can question an activity in terms of a principle, such as whether the English has a purpose, and the team settles it at planning rather than leaving it to individual habit.
Can the principles be used outside Global Star School?
The ideas behind them, purposeful bilingual talk, hands-on learning with follow-up and attention to the whole child, are widely shared in early-years education. Any team can use similar planning questions, although the Global Nexus framework itself belongs to its own programme.