During the holidays, I found myself sitting opposite Mr. Parker on a pavement table in a generic Italian restaurant in Hemel Hempstead. After the rush of catch-up conversations and some very elongated pizzas, the conversation naturally turned to ICHK.

 It is often through contrasts that we are able to truly reflect on aspects of the world and our experience of it. It is also through these contrasts that we can come to evaluate, hone and, ultimately, try to embody the values that we have come to understand as valid and valuable.

In this case, the contrasts that I reflect upon are those that lie at the heart of different educational practices: I left ICHK for a Swiss school in 2022, and more recently have found myself teaching in an independent school in the UK. All systems have their merits and offer opportunities to learn and develop, so I do not wish to cast these institutions in a negative light. What I do want to focus on is the way in which returning to schools that operate in more conventional ways illuminates the powerful, ongoing impact of ICHK. I always recognised this in the current and graduated students, but hadn’t quite understood the deep and lasting impact that my 9 years had had on me as a teacher -and fundamentally- as a human.

The conversations I had a few weeks ago, and those with current colleagues (including those that have had their interest sparked-and those who immediately dismiss the challenge of questioning all that they have come to accept as the ‘right’ way), have re-anchored within me a sense of the importance of the approach of the little school at the edge of the New Territories.

I carry with me the strength and richness of relationship-based education: an approach that places the individual at the heart of the learning and that has the flexibility to adapt and re-adapt until it finds the right fit for the student. Each student. I carry with me the permission to pause and to evaluate whether what I am doing, the way I am interacting, are the best ways in both the short and the long term for the development of the person that I am teaching. I know that I can create a classroom that thrives when the learning is guided by the flexibility of true dialogue and care.

Part of this is shaped by the way in which a good approach allows for the recognition of the inevitability of mistakes, and equally, their place in academic learning and human development. This understanding embedded itself within me through my years at ICHK. It developed so quietly and organically that it is really only now that I realise how far that journey has taken me. I have a deep-rooted appreciation of a learning landscape that allows the physical and the emotional to gently coexist for the benefit of the individual, the community and for the future.

Sometimes it can feel like a challenge to try and apply what might be considered unconventional approaches to systems that see themselves as ‘right’ and ‘established’. It can feel a little subversive to opt to have the conversation in response to a moment of error, or to redirect a room of students to the feedback, rather than the number. Sometimes the individual is lost in the codes of a rigid system, and the immovability of expectations that place grades above true development. But this is why it is also important to keep trying, to move the conversation towards the learning- both academic and personal- and away from the seemingly ever-expanding small print of the rule book.

And so I return to the shared aphorism on the wall of the office and the pages of the ICHK website, and try to keep it at the forefront of my practice: ‘work hard and be nice’.