Established in 2012 and licensed by the Vietnamese Government, Greenfield School is a leading bilingual private school in Hanoi, offering education programs for grades 1-12. As a proud member of the Cambridge International School System (ID: VN455), we serve a vibrant community of nearly 3,500 students and 350 staff including 190 teachers and 160 employees across three distinct pathways: the Vietnamese MOET Programme, the Cambridge International Programme, and the Global Citizen Bilingual Programme. Reflecting our growth and commitment to our mission, we successfully launched our second campus in the South of Vietnam in 2023.
Our mission is to cultivate happy schools where students are comprehensively developed into responsible, adaptive citizens. Recognising that this requires a deliberate focus on essential life competencies, we began our journey with the Skills Builder framework during the 2022-2023 academic year. Our initial work focused on building a foundational awareness across the school. We introduced the common language of the eight essential skills through school-wide communications, visual displays, and parent workshops, and piloted the direct teaching of the skills with a targeted group of high school students.
Building on that foundation, we have since systematically embedded the skills into our curriculum. The framework is now a core pillar of our Personal Development Skills (PDS) and Career Counseling subjects in our middle and high schools. We have moved from simple introduction to active practice, integrating skill development into project-based learning, extracurricular events like debate and storytelling competitions, and using the Skills Builder Hub to inform teaching and track student progress. The essential skills are no longer a new initiative; they are a recognised and integrated component of the Greenfield student experience. As we apply for the 2025-2026 accelerator, we do so as a school with a proven track record, ready to deepen this integration across all subjects and grade levels.
The overall impact of the Skills Builder programme at Greenfield School has been the successful and transformative embedding of the essential skills framework at the Beginning Level within our Global Citizen (GC) pathway. The impact has been a tangible shift in how both our teachers and students approach, articulate, and develop core life competencies.
Engagement and Impact of Training: We fully engaged with the Accelerator by establishing a dedicated lead team that attended all training. The support from Skills Builder was fundamental; it gave our GC faculty the pedagogical tools and confidence to move from theory to practice. From the training, our lead team developed and delivered targeted professional development for all Middle and High School teachers within the GC pathway. This training directly enabled them to use the Skills Builder Hub for baseline assessment, plan explicit skills lessons, and create a unified skills-focused culture within their classrooms. Implementation and Impact on Students: The most significant impact is the creation of a precise, shared language of skills within the GC pathway. We see students who are now better able to self-assess their strengths in Teamwork, articulate their approach to Problem Solving, and respond to targeted feedback on their Presenting skills. The programme has provided a clear, structured roadmap for developing the well-rounded, responsible citizens that are the hallmark of our Global Citizen pathway.
We embedded "Keep it Simple" by making the Skills Builder framework a ubiquitous and consistent part of the Global Citizen pathway,while also raising general awareness across the school. Within the GC pathway, the eight skills and their icons are integrated into:
Daily Classroom Language: GC teachers explicitly reference the skills and specific steps in lesson objectives (e.g., "Today’s goal is to master Step 4 of Listening").
Formal and Informal Feedback: Feedback on assignments for GC students frequently refers to specific skills and steps, making it targeted and actionable.
Parent Communications: For parents of GC students, the skills are a key discussion point in conferences and report cards, making them partners in the process. School-wide, we have used posters, our website, and general workshops to build a common awareness, but the deep, consistent use of the language is intentionally focused within the GC pathway to ensure its simplicity and effectiveness are not diluted.
Our approach has been a strategic, phased rollout within the Global Citizen pathway to create a continuous K-12 skills journey for those students. Phase 1 (2022-23): We began with a focused pilot in our High School Global Citizen pathway (Grades 10-12) to establish best practices.
Phase 2 (2023-Present): Following its success, we expanded the programme to formally include our Middle School (Grades 6-9) within the Global Citizen pathway.
Current State: We now have a vertically aligned curriculum map for Grades 6-12 specifically for our GC students. For example, a Grade 7 ‘Teamwork’ activity focuses on sharing ideas, while a Grade 11 project demands students manage conflict and provide constructive feedback. We are now mapping foundational skill-building activities into our Primary curriculum for future GC students, ensuring they arrive in Middle School with a solid base to "Keep Going" and build upon.
We focus tightly by empowering our Global Citizen pathway teachers to break down skills into single, teachable steps. A lesson is not about "Teamwork" in general; it is about mastering a specific, focused step of Teamwork. Differentiation in Practice: A GC teacher might design a lesson focused specifically on Creativity Step 6: "I use my imagination to explore and generate a range of ideas." Based on formative data from the Hub, students who have mastered this are challenged with an extension task on Step 7, while students who are struggling receive more direct instruction and scaffolding on Step 6. Assessment Support: The assessments on the Skills Builder Hub are fundamental to this tight focus. A GC teacher assesses their student group, identifies the precise step to target for the majority of the class, and then plans differentiation up and down the framework. This ensures every student is working at their specific point of need.
Within the Global Citizen pathway, we ensure continuous practice by intentionally mapping skill development across its entire curriculum, moving far beyond dedicated PDS lessons. In GC Science labs, students practice Teamwork and Leadership by taking on defined roles to complete experiments.
In GC Humanities, Socratic seminars provide a rich environment for practicing Listening and Speaking, where students must build on each other's interpretations.
In GC Project-Based Learning, students must synthesize multiple skills—Problem Solving, Creativity, and Leadership—to develop and execute long-term projects.
This cross-curricular reinforcement within the pathway ensures that GC students see the skills as the fundamental tools required for success in all their academic work.
We bring skills to life by connecting the learning within our Global Citizen pathway to authentic, real-world challenges that often benefit the wider school community.
Community Projects: Our Global Citizen students led a campus-wide waste reduction program. They used Problem Solving to analyse the issue, Teamwork to implement solutions, and Speaking skills to report their findings to the school leadership, creating a real-world impact.
Industry Engagement: We host guest speakers who share with all students how they use the eight essential skills, but our GC students then participate in smaller Q&A sessions to dig deeper into the application of these skills in a global context.
Authentic Problem-Solving: Our Global Citizenship Scholarship program challenges applicants to develop detailed initiatives to address community or global issues, pushing them to apply skills like Creativity and Leadership to solve tangible problems.
Having successfully established the Beginning Level across our Global Citizen pathway, our clear and focused goal is to deepen this work by advancing to the Intermediate Level. Our next steps are centered on depth and sophistication, not expansion.
Advance to the Intermediate Level: Our primary objective is to successfully embed the Intermediate Level of the Skills Builder framework across our entire Global Citizen pathway (Grades 6-12). This involves moving beyond foundational teaching to challenge students with more complex, multi-step projects that require a sophisticated synthesis of skills.
Deepen Teacher Expertise: We will provide advanced training for our Global Citizen faculty, focusing on teaching and assessing higher-level skill steps. We will establish a Professional Learning Community (PLC) for these teachers to share best practices for Intermediate-level instruction.
Enhance Student Agency and Ownership: We will introduce formal digital portfolios for all GC students. They will take ownership by curating evidence of their skill development at the Intermediate Level and using these portfolios in student-led conferences.
Perfect our Model: Our focus is on perfecting a high-quality, deep implementation within the Global Citizen pathway. The resources, expertise, and proven success we generate will serve as a powerful internal model for any potential, future consideration of expansion to other pathways.
