From the Principal’s Desk – 07 March, 2019

Dear Parents,

We are excited to announce that everything is on track for the opening of our new canteen on the first day of next term. The full details of the service will be communicated to parents in an email next week: including the lunch menu options, price, booking and purchase system. In the interim, please diairise one of the evenings of Monday 18 or Tuesday 19 March from 17:00 – 19:00. The staff of Fedics, including Byron, our resident chef, will be on hand in the canteen to provide you with further information about the food service including some tantalizing tasters and fresh coffee.

It is hard to believe that we only have a week and a half of school remaining this term. The time will prove a busy one, with the Senior Primary camps, Primary School Celebration of Learning classroom displays and Parent-Teacher meetings, High School One-Act Play Competition, and Barefoot Day on the last day of term. High School parents can look forward to receiving their children’s first academic report of the year on the last school day. Parent-teacher meetings for high school parents will be scheduled during the first week of next term.

This week I’d like to share with you the thoughts of Marc Prensky in an article entitled “The Goal of Education is Becoming”. The writer enquires whether learning is the best word to describe the goal of education in our schools. He argues that learning is the appropriate word if our aim is for our students to graduate from school as learned scholars. However, while learning is important, it is a means to an end.

“The real goal of education, and of school is becoming… Most of us would prefer our children become the very best people they can be, capable of effective thinking, acting, relating, and accomplishing in whatever field they enjoy and have a passion for.”

“We spend so much time and effort looking at test scores, averages, and other petty measurements of ‘learning’ that we have little time or energy left to focus on who our students are (or are not) as individuals,” he says, “what they love or hate, or what drives them. We shouldn’t be surprised, then, if they become people we do not like or respect, or if we have concerns about their potential contributions to society… There are probably billions of people in the world who have finished school without becoming what they could have. Some may have acquired knowledge and skills through their education, but have accomplished little or nothing.”

Rather than constantly asking how much students have learned and obsessing about how to measure learning, Prensky believes we should be asking, “What did you become that you weren’t before? Have you moved in a positive direction to better yourself and society?” He believes teachers should sit down a few times a year and write to students and parents about what each student is becoming.

And students should be asking themselves, “Who am I becoming? Have I become a better thinker? If so, in what ways? Am I able to do things I couldn’t before? What is important to me and why? Can I relate comfortably to individuals, in teams and in virtual communities? Can I make the world a better place?”

“If we had different expectations,” Prensky concludes, “who knows what our kids might become?”

We are so fortunate at HBIS to have the exceptional International Baccalaureate curriculum and philosophy that informs and guides our educational approach with its aim to “develop inquiring, knowledgeable and caring young people who help to create a better and more peaceful world through intercultural understanding and respect”.

With the IB learner profile as the goal of our education, we aim to develop graduating students who are: inquirers, knowledgeable, thinkers, communicators, principled, open-minded, caring, risk-takers, balanced and reflective.

Kind regards,

Gavin Budd