Why and how we promote sport at ICHK
One of the advantages of being a small school is that all our students have a real opportunity to take part in the full range of sporting activities that a school has to offer. A good number of our students will have been on teams ranging from Football and Volleyball, from Touch to Bouldering. … Read more
Second Annual Science Fair – Head of School’s Address
Thank you parents, students and staff for attending our second annual Science Fair.
My intention over the next five minutes or so is to explain briefly why I believe that this evening’s event is such a significant one in our school’s calendar.… Read more
The world of work changes. And schools?
In a recent bulletin I linked to an article in Magenta, with the suggestion that:
… Read moreThose interested in understanding how our world is changing with the development of more sophisticated and pervasive digital technologies might find this article an enjoyable insight.
The Non-Mystery of Examination Inflation
Coming from the UK and working in secondary education, I have grown accustomed to the annual media storm that centers on the release of the IGCSE and A Level results in the late summer. It’s a perennial British pantomime of which, happily, we get only a mild version in Hong Kong.… Read more
Escaping The Factory School
There are a number of well-established, even taken-for granted, features of school structure and organisation that seriously hold back education, particularly at secondary level. In each case, they are quite clearly inadequate, even damaging of learning, and yet in each case they linger on in the mainstream.… Read more
Individual Differences and the Learning Environment
Perhaps the most effective way of exploring how ICHK aligns with the fourth of OECD’s transversal conclusions is to step outside of the South East Asian educational environment for a moment and to invoke the principles that have catapulted a European nation, Finland, to the forefront of the global education agenda.… Read more
The Role of Emotions in Learning
The third transversal conclusion drawn by the OECD speaks directly to the wealth of research that confirms that learning results from the dynamic interplay of emotions and cognition.
Indeed, to one extent or another, emotions are always either supporting or inhibiting learning, and the job of school is to create the mood-environment in which learning is made more not less likely.… Read more
Human Technologies at ICHK
The second of the OECD’s “transversal conclusions” resonates so strongly with our approaches to education at ICHK that I would like to continue to explore it here in this second part of this piece.
In the first part, I examined to ways in which our 5+1 model directly impacts on our capacity to foster meaningful collaboration and cooperation between students.… Read more
Creating a Culture of Cooperation
In their review of current best practice in education, as informed by recent research in the learning sciences, the OECD draws this second “transversal conclusion”:
Once again, this speaks directly to our 5+1 model, in not just one but several of its dimensions.… Read more
Active Engagement and the Curriculum
In their review of the lessons that should be drawn from latest research in the learning sciences, the OECD list seven “transversal” conclusions that, they insist, should be the hallmark of the 21st century learning environment, but which, they lament, generally are not.