From the PDHPE classroom to history, science and beyond, teachers at Queenwood School are working to raise the bar in discipline-specific writing skills – and an instructional framework is paving the way.
Good teachers differentiate, plan and deliver powerful lessons and provide effective feedback to their students – among many other things. But what of the great teacher? The traits of a great teacher in the 20th Century are no different from those of the 21st Century and will probably be the same in the 22nd Century.
Shakespeare. A name that can conjure up joy and groans, fear and love, laughter and confusion. He’s been around for a while for a reason. Schools, universities, curriculum authorities, theatre companies and film directors all contribute to his ongoing cultural and educational currency.
‘You had to be there’ – a phrase that highlights the importance of physical presence in order to truly understand. For me, it perfectly sums up the central purpose behind our recent trip to Kempsey, a town roughly 400km north of Sydney, and particularly a moment that a small group of Year 11 Queenwood students shared as they stood under a tree listening to a story.
If I were to single out one essential strategy for parents wanting to protect their children online, it would be having those awkward conversations now, while everything is going well.
Explicit teaching about risks is important, but the real challenge is to find a way to cut through the cognitive barriers to make the advice real for teenagers in their own lives. The voices of peers are often heard more clearly, so our team spent some time working on how to increase these opportunities at school.
Western education aims for a well-rounded personal education, rooted in the Classical Greek view advanced by Socrates in Plato's Republic. It is a student-centred view that focuses on examining our own lives and developing critical thinking skills. In contrast, Chinese education is mainly based on Confucian pedagogy within an exam-oriented system.
A few years ago, some researchers put individuals in a comfortable but sparsely furnished room with nothing to do. It was boring. Participants were, however, also given a device to administer electric shocks. It turns out that 67% of men and 25% of the women tested would rather give themselves painful electric shocks than sit with their own thoughts for 15 minutes.
Both at home and school the girls must be provided from an early age with opportunities to experience failure safely. It is also important not to rush in to fix problems for them, despite the desire to see them happy and thriving at all times.
An area of focus for this year is numeracy development, particularly deepening girls’ number sense. While it is really satisfying to use calculus to find the equation of a tangent to a cubic polynomial in Year 12, you can’t do that if you can’t add, subtract, multiply and divide numbers.
Formal education is one of the many ways that children learn and develop but even before they walk through the school gates, experiences at home and within the community start a child’s learning journey and will continue to have a significant impact throughout their entire life.