Head of School Blog

Mar 21
2017

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. It’s a...

Mar 09
2017

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...

Jan 10
2017

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...

Nov 21
2016

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...

Oct 31
2016

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...

Oct 18
2016

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. It is also relevant to other...

Oct 04
2016

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. I thought it would be...

Oct 04
2016

Student Achievement, Adaptive Expertise and the 5+1 Model

Since 2013, we have adopted what we call the 5+1 Model at ICHK. Based on the insights of five thinkers working in education and beyond, but taking its inspiration more widely, the 5+1 Model gives guidance to our teachers about how best to engage with pre-teen and teenage learners so as to boost...