Dear all,

Just had a wonderful weekend of volleyball at ISHCMC with the U14 MRISA tournament. Everything ran very smoothly despite the heavy rain with is a tribute to Matt, Phatt and the team of helpers. 

During that last few weeks I have been interviewing both leavers and new staff. It has been a very formative experience and I have thoroughly enjoyed the time that I have spent with each and everyone one of them. I am looking forward to the last few interviews in the next two weeks. It has been very pleasing to see the engagement with our mission and the concept that the school needs to change if it is to adequately prepare students for their future. It is clear that this understanding is deeply embedded in many of your minds. Hence, following a couple of conversations about the potential importance of learning skills over concepts and content I thought I'd share this article that was sent to me recently about , A Curriculum for Changing the World as well as some connected thinking  that links with AtL's as well as Global Citizenship for this week's Food for Thought.

This is an attempt by educators from Harvard's school of education to create a curriculum that attempts to change the world by focusing on skills and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals established in 2015.

"In Empowering Global Citizens: A World Course, Fernando Reimers and four co-authors offer an interdisciplinary K-12 curriculum that aims for nothing less. It seeks to develop the specific cognitive, interpersonal, and intrapersonal competencies crucial to thriving in the 21st century. Among those skills: the social and emotional ability to understand and work with people from diverse cultures; the creativity to develop sustainable solutions to complex problems; and a sense of confidence that individuals can (and are obligated to) make a difference.

A Global Curriculum

A curriculum, ideally, should give young people the knowledge they need to approach the future with a dynamic, accountable, forward-thinking mindset, says Reimers, the faculty director of international education policy at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. The World Course is a curriculum specifically designed with the future in view — with the idea that our future will be an interconnected one, with complex challenges that demand a sense of citizenship and collaboration that expands beyond national borders"

Becoming familiar with 'The Empowering Global Citizens curriculum' would certainly provided a good scope and sequence for skills that we should be embedding in our IB curriculums. There is no doubt to me that many of the aspects of this curriculum have been taken from IB thinking and that we do already cover them but without them being systematized or recorded. The underlying pedagogy fits perfectly with what we do, inquiry, project based learning and authentic assessment based around tackling global issues. Perhaps what we need to be doing in the future is starting our planning with the AtL's and skills and then moving to concepts and finally associated content. I know that groups of you have been focusing on skills through Grade level discussions and the AtL committee but having this fully scoped and sequenced from Early Explorers to Grade 12 would allow us to confidently say we have prepared our students to function and learn no matter what the world looks like in 2029.

I have purchased this book and another called 60 lessons for Empowering Global Citizens and hope to be sharing with you at the start of next year because it is published under a creative commons license.

The IB is a good minimum framework for what we need to be be doing but we need to take this skeleton and build upon it so that can be confident about the learning skills that ecah and every student has been taught by the end of an ISHCMC education. Building upon the Empowering Global Citizens Curriculum here is another similar view to the direction that we need to be building our education around. I am sure that many of you are familiar with this diagram from the Partnership for 21st Century Learning. If you have not been thinking about the implicit development of skills through your teaching this link to P21 will introduce you to their framework and some useful resources and support materials for planning next year. By going here you can download the framework and its definition.

Finally, a short TED about the importance of sleep for adolescent students. It is important for all of you to watch and understand so that we all have the same elevator pitch in the future when we introduce a later starting time for secondary students than primary. Our goal will be that Primary stays as it is today and Secondary moves to, at the earliest, a 9 o'clock registration/ advisory period. There will be parents who object to this start time because it doesn't fit with their schedule and search out allies on the staff so it is important that we are all aware of the key arguments and how they relate to the well being of the adolescents in our care.

Have a good Sunday,

Yours

Adrian

Food for Thought: The need for forward thinking schools

Dear all,

For years educationalists have been talking about the future and how it will be different. Videos like Shift Happens have told us about the number of jobs that didn't exist a decade ago, preparing students for jobs that don't exist yet, having more than 10 jobs by the age of 38, that social media and the internet has changed society and more. But in amongst all the interesting statistics there is a line, 'we are living in exponential times' that takes us much deeper when isolated and carefully unwrapped. Till recently I had never thought about the importance of the term exponential. At the end of last week's Food for Thought I mentioned a documentary that Sir Ken Robinson referred to as being an important factor in the need for transforming schools, Singularity. His words encouraged me to think and research more about the realization that we are facing an exponential growth in technology that is impacting our immediate lives whilst at the same time radically redefining our future existence. The person at the center of this notion of Singularity is Ray Kurzweil. In 2006 he wrote a book, Singularity is Near, and although dismissed at the time by many critics, his predictions that technology would merge more and more with sciences creating new branches such as genomics, robotics and nanotechnology appear to be very much on track. 

Kurzweil predicted that by 2029 computers could mirror the functions of the brain but with far greater capacity for retrieving stored information, solving problems and making human like decisions. We already have computers that learn from mistakes and correct their thinking, in the future they will also have a form of social and emotional intelligence as well. This is only 12 year away and children in Grade 1 will be emerging into a world that without doubt will be shaped by technology and artificial intelligence.

Here is a short 7 minute Bigthink interview with Kurzweil that talks about Singularity.

This is a much longer documentary by Stephen Hawkin, a renowned physicist from Cambridge University, who despite serious physical differences is one of the world's leading scientific thinkers. Hawkin's voice is computerized because of his disabilities. Although not always easy to follow, this 80 minute documentary is  certainly worth listening to because it raises lots of scenarios and questions that most of us have never even imagined whilst also tackling many of the criticisms of the theory. 

Of course it is easy to deny that Singularity will ever happen, just as the Luddites opposed the concept that machines will replace human labour in the factory. But there is little doubt that technology is advancing exponentially and changing our world. Algorithms and computers are already replacing jobs that we thought would be safe from technology. Many of the technological developments that Kurzweil predicts will make humans more intelligent by combining technology and the human brain in ways that were unimaginable even a decade ago. Kurzweil is very optimistic about the future and artificial intelligence but we need to be thinking further ahead to prepare our children for such a world as described in this documentary. 

We will never stop technological progress so it is inevitable that our world will look very different by 2029. Kurzweil predicts that the world after the 2040's is completely unpredictable and it is not possible to know what it will look like because of the exponential transformational progress of technology.

Here is the conclusion from an article in Forbes that further encourages us to redefine the outcomes of 15 years of primary and secondary education and the importance of the soft skills that we are working hard to impart to our ISHCMC students.

"The idea of approaching a technological singularity is both exciting and scary. While the prospects of technologies that are hundreds of times more powerful than what we have today will open up completely new possibilities, there are also inherent dangers. How autonomous should we allow robots to become? Which genes are safe to edit and which are not?

Beyond opening up a Pandora’s box of forces that we may not fully understand, there is already evidence that technology is destroying jobs, stagnating incomes and increasing inequality. As the process accelerates, we will begin to face problems technology cannot help us with, such as the social strife created by those left behind as well as others in developing countries who will feel newly empowered and demand a greater political voice.
We will also have to change how we view work. Much like in the industrial revolution when machines replaced physical labor, new technologies are now replacing cognitive tasks. Humans, therefore, will have to become more adept at things that machines can’t do, namely dealing with other humans, and social skills will trump cognitive skills in the marketplace.
The truth is that the future of technology is all too human. While technologies will continue to become exponentially more powerful, the decisions we make are still our own."

This final short video from Ray Kurzweil certainly supports many of the ideas that we are building into an ISHCMC education. Twice her refers to traditional educational thinking as being obsolete, a term used by Wagner, Zhao, Robinson et al. 

Finally, for this Food for Thought, if all of this has sent your mind spinning here is a link to the Meditation that Paul shared with us in last Monday morning's meeting.

Have a good Sunday and mothers day here in Vietnam,

Yours,

Adrian

Food for Thought: Sir Ken Robinson at EduLead

Dear all,

This will be my last post arising from the INTASE EduLead conference on Reinventing Schools. Sir Ken Robinson spoke to us live from LA where he now lives for nearly three hours. He was totally engaging and humorous as always. As last week's post was quite long I have decided to try and give you just the key points that Sir K shared with us grading the need to revolutionize education and create a culture of innovation in our schools. What he had to say is not far from where we are as a school and non of it was alien to our thinking.

• Sir Ken explained that many of the reforms that government are introducing are going in the wrong direction. He argued that the direction of standardization and testing is stifling the skills that students need most for the 21st century. 
• We are living in revolutionary times. We have never faced such rapid changes caused by technology and never had a global population over 7 billion people. Both of these factors will create incredible challenge and change that can only be answered by having schools that encourage creativity and innovation.
• "Life you end up living is the talents you uncover and your experiences. Everyone has a unique bio. These human resources need to be discovered, then refined and developed from capacity to ability by schools. To do this schools need to think differently about the resources they have at their disposal." 
• Have to change the systems that govern schools. A school's system are based around economic reasoning such as efficiency, organization and cost but having nothing to do with student learning or their preparation for the modern world. He made an analogy, shoes are important for walking outside but if the shoe doesn't fit anymore why keep polishing it in the hope that the pain will go away.
• Where governments are going                 against              Where we need to be going

           Conformity                                                   v                   Diversity

           Compliance                                                  v                   Skills demanded by the economy

           Linear view of life                                        v                   Organic development

• Learning is a natural process for humans, acquiring skills and understanding. Children love to learn. Much that we learn isn't taught, it is because we have the capacity and are interested. Education is an organized programme of learning. The problem isn't with the concept of learning it is with the education system that frames it.
• There is a need for more play in education. Sir K made the point that in a recent survey of 12,000 schools they found that children today were on average only allowed 1 hour of play per day. This is less than half that allowed to high security prisoners in the USA who receive 2 hours per day.
• If we had a blank sheet to recreate schools there would be many things that would be replaced but one that would would be teachers. Education is all about the relationship between the teacher and the students. Standards are necessary but not sufficient. It is the teacher that brings learning alive so it is important that schools encourage teachers to come alive.

Sir Ken then talked about what education enable students to engage or become:

• economically independent. There needs to be a greater focus on social and emotional skills eg. collaboration, creativity, social work and team work.
• understand and appreciate their own culture and to respect the diversity of other cultures
• active and compassionate citizens
• with the world within them and the world beyond them
• able to imagine the future
• able to create and make their imagination into a reality
• innovators by celebrating new ideas and having a culture where these are developed.

Sir Ken concluded in his question and answers referred to the idea of singularity as being a major reason why education HAS TO BE REVOLUTIONIZED. He referred to machines becoming conscious, having independent agency. He asked the question if machine have consciousness should thy have rights? We are not far way from having to make decisions whether we can discriminate between our natural world or that of machines. This raised the question that machines will take over our world because of their ability to exponentially change the world and we have no idea what this world will look like. Hence, education needs to be far more about personalization of learning, producing students who are creative, innovators, resilient, able to transfer skills and knowledge and see problems as opportunities.

Have a good afternoon,

Yours

Adrian

Food For Thought: Conference feedback 3. Visible Learning

Dear all,

As it is a long weekend, and you may have a bit more time to go through this weeks Food for Thought I have broken it into two parts. The first part focuses on the conference I attended recently and the second part on views of our world that will provoke thinking for us in our role as teachers preparing students for an uncertain future.

Part 1

At the EduLead Conference Deb Masters from Visible Learning Plus presented the latest research from Hattie that is summarized in this short article by Shaun Killian. As you will know, Hattie's work is a mega data study of millions of students in hundreds of thousands of pier reviewed research papers from all over the world. In his work he identifies over 400 different teaching strategies and creates an effect scale to measure their impact on learning. There has been some criticism of Hattie's work since it first emerged in the early years of this century, however, one has to be careful not to dismiss his message because of technicalities that in reality have no impact on his effect scale results. He freely admits that cultures may play a bigger part than recognized and that criticism of the Common Language Effect size (CLE) is correct but is not the major statistical driver for his effect size calculations. What is important throughout Hattie's work is simply his message and that is to know and be prepared to measure our impact as teachers on learning. As Hattie says:

The major argument in this book underlying powerful impacts in our schools relates to how we think! It is a set of mind frames that underpin our every action and decision in a school; it is a belief that we are evaluators, change agents, adaptive learning experts, seekers of feedback about our impact, engaged in dialogue and challenge, and developers of trust with all, and that we see opportunity in error, and are keen to spread the message about the power, fun, and impact that we have on learning — Visible Learning for Teachers (2012), p.159

 Deb Masters expanded upon what were originally the 8 Mind Frames that made a difference to learning and showed that from recent Visible Learning Research teachers building the following responsibilities / mind frames have the largest effect:

• I am an evaluator
• I am a change agent
• I talk about learning, not about taeching
• Assessment is feedback to me
• In engage in dialogue, not monologue
• I enjoy challenge / high stakes
• I develop positive relationships so it is safe to make mistakes
• I inform all about the language of learning
• I see learning as hard work
• I collaborate

Deb said that 95% of what schools do has a positive impact on student learning, just some startegies have more impact than others. From the recent research the average impact is .53. She suggested that just 4 minutes of teachers talking about practice a month will make a difference to student learning. Hopefully at ISHCMC we have more pedagogical talk than this and can hope to be making a bigger impact on our students learning

Here are some of effect factors that we often associated with improved learning but in this research are described as being nothing more than 'the politics of distraction.'

• Class size .21 ( reducing class sizes affects teacher talk and working conditions more than impacting student learning)
• Ability groupings .12
• Homework High school .59
• Homework Primary school .11
• Inquiry teaching .31 ( much higher impact if coming on top of surface based level, see below)

A few of the factors that have the highest impact on learning are:

• Teacher Efficacy 1.57
• Formative Evaluation for teachers .90
• Classroom discussion .82
• Teacher clarity .75 
• Feedback .73
• Creativity Programs .65
• Prior Achievement.63

If you would like to see the entire list then please follow this link. 

In his latest work, 2016,  Hattie has produced a conceptual model that takes the 400 different learning strategies and groups them together in phases and stages of the learning process. I have taken the liberty of taking a few chunks of his latest article on Learning Strategies, to give you insight into where Hattie's researching is developing today. 

"The model of learning proposes that various learning strategies are powerful at certain stages in the learning cycle. The model describes three inputs and outcomes (skill, will and thrill), success criteria, three phases of learning (surface, deep and transfer) and an acquiring and consolidation phase within each of the surface and deep phases. His model looks like this:



Although not a hard and fast set of demarcations, surface learning refers more to the content and underlying skills; deep learning to the relationships between, and extensions of, ideas; and transfer to the proficiency to apply learning to new problems and situations. 

The ‘skill’ is the student’s prior or subsequent achievement, the ‘will’ relates to the student’s various dispositions towards learning, and the ‘thrill’ refers to the motivations held by the student. In the model, these inputs are also the major outcomes of learning. That is, developing outcomes in achievement (skill) is as valuable as enhancing the dispositions towards learning (will) and as valuable as inviting students to reinvest more into their mastery of learning (thrill or motivations).

There are four main messages to be taken from the model:

• First, if the success criteria is the retention of accurate detail (surface learning) then lower-level learning strategies will be more effective than higher-level strategies. However, if the intention is to help students understand context (deeper learning) with a view to applying it in a new context (transfer), then higher level strategies are also needed. An explicit assumption is that higher level thinking requires a sufficient corpus of lower level surface knowledge to be effective—one cannot move straight to higher level thinking (e.g., problem solving and creative thought) without sufficient level of content knowledge.
• Second, the model proposes that when students are made aware of the nature of success for the task, they are more likely to be more involved in investing in the strategies to attain this target.
• Third, transfer is a major outcome of learning and is more likely to occur if students are taught how to detect similarities and differences between one situation and a new situation before they try to transfer their learning to the new situation. Hence, not one strategy may necessarily be best for all purposes.
• Fourth, the model also suggests that students can be advantaged when strategy training is taught with an understanding of the conditions under which the strategy best works—when and under what circumstance it is most appropriate."

There is definitely some interesting learning for this mega data study that we can and should be using to inform our teaching at ISHCMC.

Part 2

The second part of this weeks Food for Thought is to with minimal commentary draw your attention to three videos that will encourage our thinking about education and our view of who we are.

Firstly, a short film, Alike, which we shared on the ISHCMC Facebook last week and encourages questions about school and the role of creativity, difference, well-being and individuality.

Secondly, the Pope speaks on TED about our relationships with each other and how important that is in our world today. 

Thirdly, a short music video that reinforces the Pope's message and illustrates how we can be the one who takes the first step and how that can cascade to others. There is nothing stopping each and everyone of us leading the way to a kinder and more tender world.

Have a good long weekend,

Yours as always,

Adrian

Food for Thought Reinventing Education Part 2

Dear all,

Attending the Grade 12 final assembly made me realize how close we are to the end of another year at ISHCMC and there still feels as if we have a great deal to do. Thanks to everyone for another good week.

This week's food for thought is a continuation of the World EducLead conference and focuses on one of the strands that emerged; assessment. What I will do is try and capture the key thinking of a few of the speakers on this topic. It was clear amongst the 1200 in audience that some found it hard to release learning to students so that they can inquire into their own content and still be able to give their traditional tests and assessments. As Heidi Jacobs bluntly pointed out to one question she was asked, " I think that you may be missing the point with your question."

Professor Guskey made it clear that from his research the assessment that makes the most difference to student learning is that which takes place in every class and is primarily formative in nature. His work has led him to believe that its is essential that we learn from what was done to us when we were students. His four key point were:

• Assessment must be a source of information for students and teachers. We need to move away from making assessment a guessing game for students. Assessment, what ever form it takes should never be a surprise to the students. If it is it will teach our students that their hard work and effort with revision is a waste of time and that they should not trust their teachers. He suggested that at the end of every lesson students should be asked what have your learned in the lesson and the teacher should use this information for planning the next lesson
• Assessment must be followed by high quality corrective instruction. Every conversation with a student about assessment should provide strtaegies for the student to improve in the future. Deb Masters and her work with Hattie further emphasized this point.
• Students must be given a second chance to show improvement. Professor Guskey was very strong on this point when he raised this criteria for successful assessment in a school. He asked the audience how many had driving licences, how many failed their test first time and how they would feel now if that meant they could never drive? He talked about creating live long learners which means learning by doing. He pointed out that none of us are perfect and therefore we should be encouraging our students to develop resilience and grit which is built around learning from mistakes. He shared research that students learn more from making mistakes than getting it right first time. He used the Roger Staubach quote, " Spectacular achievements are always proceeded by unspectacular preparation," to further illustrate the futility of having assessment as a one off shot. He concluded by saying that all students should be given the opportunity to re do assessment task, but not the same one, one that is parallel so they can demonstrate how they have learned from their mistakes......and it should be this result that is recorded. When you stop and think about all the literate around resilience and like long learners this approach makes sense although it runs contrary to how we were treated in school.
• We must ensure that students enjoy early assessment success. He started to talk about this by asking the audience how many of us started our course with a hard assessment to show that our course is tough and let the students know that they will have to work hard to be successful. He showed research that clearly shows students are quite malleable when they start a new course until the first assessment. This first assessment, for the majority, becomes self predicting of their future achievement. The first assessment defines how they feel they will do in the future and becomes a self fulfilling prophecy for the majority. Hence, Guskey stressed that we should use the first assessment to create early success and that this will produce greater confidence, engagement and effort from our students. this approach is very similar to the use of kind words as part of the achievement culture in our mission. (This is further supported by Hattie because it creates student expectation which has an effect size of 1.44 compared with an average learning impact of .53)

In this session with Guskey he added one more important point that certainly applies to us as an IB School with a focus on AtL skills. It is one that I have never heard raised before. I did try and research it but there appears to be a great deal of information but not related exactly to what Guskey stated. The concept raised was categorical perceptions which he said explains why when students learn soft skill in one subject they do not automatically transfer these skills as we would hope and imagine to other classes. Guskey said that for skills to be transferred they have to be deliberately taught and linked in each subject. This certainly merits additional thinking and would have an impact upon how we think about soft skill acquisition across the school.

If you would like to read more detail about Guskey's work here is a link to ascd article linked to one of his books.

Dr Heidi Hayes Jacobs was without doubt the most provocative of the speakers at the conference. Here are just a few of the provocations that she raised in her first session.

" Everything should be for students not our old habits"

" We must be preparing our learners for the future not the past"

"Students must be taught the three new literacy's, Digital, Media and Global."

" We must make learning spaces that create responsive environment for students"

" All decisions regarding school should focus on pedagogy"

" We all need the courage to break the boundaries that need breaking and replace with fresh relevant solutions."

This short video catches many of the things that Heidi was talking about in her sessions. it is full of her ideas from http://www.curriculum21.com/  a great site to visit.

As this is a great deal to absorb and think about I will save the sessions on Hattie till next week's Food for Thought. Deb Masters provided many interesting findings that we need to be reflecting upon in order to develop our classroom teaching strategies across the school.

Have a good Sunday,

Yours

Adrian

Food for Thought: Reinventing Education conference Part 1, Intro to speakers

Dear all,

I hope you are all having an enjoyable and relaxed Easter weekend.

Last week I spent two days at the INTASE World EDULEAD conference in Singapore listening to some incredibly inspiring educational thought leaders and researchers discussing reinventing education. The two days were very reaffirming for our mission and vision for education and the direction that we are moving at ISHCMC, although there is some fine tuning needed and a few things that we need to learn and improve upon. I left feeling in no doubt that our ISHCMC students are and will be well served by the direction that ISHCMC is developing as a learning community. There was so much interesting thinking raised that I want to share with you, that I have decided to use my next three Food for Thoughts to firstly introduce you to the speakers and then provide you with the key points that they were making about education today.

The speakers were:

Sir Ken Robinson ( Live from L.A.) the most viewed TED speaker with over 300 million views of his TED talks. This was like a private TED session and he spoke and answered questions for over 2.5 hours. It was clear from what he was saying that a great deal of his thinking today is captured in his tow most recent books; "The Element" and "Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That’s Transforming Education"

Dr Heidi Hayes Jacobs, is the founder and President of the Curriculum Designers group that provides professional services to schools and organizations internationally to upgrade curriculum and support teaching strategies to meet the needs of 21st century learners 

Sir John Jones, ex- Head teacher at three secondary schools over 17 years is now working for the UK government as part of the Governments Polcy action Team as well as being a resident expert for Educational Leadership at Mancester University. 

Dr Marcia Tate, is the founder and CEO of Developing Minds. she had a 30 year career in classrooms and as an administrator and won awards for her contributions to staff development. Today she is very much focused on ensuring that teachers have pedagogical  strategies that allow students the opportunity to achieve in their classrooms. Her latest work is around Formative Assessment and Brain- compatible classrooms: focusing on how we know students are learning.

Prof Tom Guskey, is Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Kentucky, he has written over 20 books on education and in this conference focused very much on assessment and the need to create well designed assessments tasks as part of the instructional process.

Deb Masters, works very closely with John Hattie and his research into visible learning. her talks were very much based around the efffect size findings of Hattie's research and what we should be discussing in schools that has the biggest impact upon student learning.

Deb Masters summarizes Visible Learning Plus from Cognition Education on Vimeo.

Now you know something about all the speakers that I was privileged to have listened to last week. next week i will try and synthesize some of the thoughts that they shared.

I want to end with something that has been talked about before at meetings and that is the introduction of a management information system at ISHCMC. We were due to be installing iSAMS for August 2016 but during its delay we have been investigating more appropraite systems for our school and have moved to introducing PowerSchool instead.  We believe this will be far more useful to us and allow a gradual move to a single platform for the majority of our work with students as well as providing immense capacity for tracking student progress.  As I said last Monday Michelle had to pick an admin project for her Head training that covered collaboration, change management and school systems and she deiced that the area she could help most in was our move to PowerSchool as ISHCMC's Management system.

So just to whet your appetite her are two short videos that introduce PowerSchool. the first is 2 minutes and is an advert from Powerschool. the second 5 minutes is a more in depth coverage of what PowerSchool provides.

Have a good Sunday,

Yours
Adrian

Food for Thought: The need for revolution not just change

Dear all,

On Friday I was giving an interview to Oi magazine about the new secondary school campus and our vision for education in the new facility. The interviewer asked me how I could be so certain that our approach of inquiry, constructivism and individualized learning opportunities is better than traditional educational methodology. I suggested that he comes and visit ISHCMC and witness the release of learning that is prevalent across the School and speak to our students about what they are learning and why. I'm not sure if he will come or not.

Yet again I can start my weekly Food for Thought by pointing out that we have enjoyed another wonderful week of 'out of the box' activities at ISHCMC; an excellent music showcase, IB Diploma Art Exhibition, KG Mini Ex and Grade 5 students testing out their entrepreneurial skills in two different markets places. The diversity of the activities we are providing for our community is excellent and the way that our students are demonstrating their individuality is exactly what we are aiming for as we challenge the traditional model of schooling. The last month has clearly shown that our mission and vision for education is raising the quality and standards of our students ability to articulate their understanding and learning in an energetic and engaging manner

Two years ago I went to the World Educational Leadership Summit in Singapore and was fortunate to  attend a day long masterclass with Yong Zhao. I believe his articulation of education makes a great deal of sense and aligns closely with our vision and what we are doing at ISHCMC. So, my Food for Thought this week is to watch this Yong Zhao TED talk, where he amusingly and cleverly uses the case of Rudolph to describe his view of where education is and where it should be going in the future. For many of us this will be a positive reinforcement of what we are trying to achieve as we disrupt the model of traditional schooling at ISHCMC.

Enjoy.

Yours
Adrian