Grade 9 Discover the Leader inside themselves!

“He who thinks he leads, but has no followers, is only taking a walk.” John C. Maxwell

On Wednesday 30^th September, the first generation of High School students at Avenor College commenced a ten week programme to develop their leadership skills. Our school values a broad, rich education, and for this reason, our students will have the opportunity to do far more than simply prepare for examinations during their four years with us.

Authentic Leadership is an educational programme that identifies and develops the leadership potential of young people. On successful completion of the five modules of study, students will have the opportunity of becoming an Ambassador. Before the course, our students met some existing Ambassadors of the project, and everyone was very enthusiastic about starting the programme.

The partnership between Avenor College and the Leaders Foundation came about due to our shared vision and values. The Leaders Foundation is about aspirations, unique experiences and values. Together we aim to empower the next generation of leaders, promoting a model of leadership where change starts at the bottom. The Leaders Foundation say:

“We contribute to the modernization of Romania by developing responsible leaders and a mentality oriented towards involvement and action.”

http://www.leaders.ro/

During the first session, Grade 9 students pondered what makes a person a leader. They worked interactively with the course leaders, and every voice was valued. Here is an extract from the course materials:

“A leader is a person who has a vision and who is using one sort of an influence to mobilize one or more people to follow him in order to achieve satisfaction. The leader’s vision is based on positive results for all who follow.

A leader has the ability and the responsibility to determine the level of expectations, to motivate, inspire and seek new ways/methods of action. A leader needs no formal status or official position to persuade; therefore everything results from their ability to communicate with people around.”

The Leaders session was held in the Grade 9 form room this week, with a wonderful view of the forest as a backdrop to the activities. Future weeks will see the students experiencing different environments, both within and beyond the school campus. This is the inception of the next generation of Authentic Leaders!

For those of you interested in reading more, here are some recommendations for books and websites:

Secrets of Success; Dale Carnegie

The 360 Degree Leader; John C Maxwell

Emotional Intelligence; Daniel Goleman

www.leaders.ro

www.ccl.org

www.hbr.org

Cambridge University study suggests that 14-year-olds who spend even an hour a day watching TV or online fall behind peers
‘Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.’Albert Einstein

On Saturday, I read a report in The Guardian with the title: Teenagers who watch screens in free time ‘do worse in GCSEs’. This study, undertaken in Cambridge was published last week and provides an interesting snapshot of the influence that screen time has in terms of academic success at GCSE. By screen time, I am referring to watching TV or movies and playing online games.

If you would like to read the article for yourself it is on the Guardian website: http://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/sep/04/teenagers-who-watch-screens-in-free-time-do-worse-in-gcses

Now, I am not the sort of person who simply believes what I read in the newspapers! If I see something, I ask- who wrote this; where is the evidence; what is the back ground to this story? So, I found the original research, which was published in The International Journal of Behavioural Nutrition and Physical Activity. The lead author is Kirsten Corder from Cambridge University and for those of you interested in reading the whole paper; it is available here: http://www.ijbnpa.org/content/12/1/106.

As an educator, I am very keen to keep up to date with new research, and this particularly caught my eye as we are all aware that young people spend much of their free time in front of screens in this day and age. The good news for me is that the study clearly shows the benefits of reading and self-study, whilst highlighting the detrimental effect of screen time on academic performance. However, I was surprised and a little shocked by the extreme effect increased screen time has in lower grades at GCSE.

Just to clarify, GCSEs are the UK equivalent of the IGCSEs our students prepare for during the first two years of High School. The ‘I’ is simply international; the courses are equivalent levels.

The research from Cambridge University suggests that 14-year-olds who spend an hour a day on screens during their leisure time score nine fewer points at GCSE when the sum of their grades is calculated – the equivalent of dropping two grades from a B to a D. Two extra hours results in 18 fewer points at GCSE. The length of time children spend watching screens is frequently a battleground in families, with parents increasingly powerless to control their children’s viewing – which has moved beyond TVs and computers, on to smart phones and iPads.

But on the strength of their findings, the authors suggest that parents who are concerned about their children’s GCSE results should consider limiting their time on screens. The researchers, led by the Medical Research Council epidemiology unit at Cambridge, studied 845 pupils from secondary schools in Cambridgeshire and Suffolk.

They measured levels of activity and sedentary behaviour at the age of 14, then compared this with their performance at GCSE. Additionally, they asked pupils to assess the amount of time they spent doing homework and reading for pleasure.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, the study found that pupils who did an extra hour of daily homework and reading performed significantly better at GCSE than their peers, achieving on average 23.1 more GCSE points. A child’s level of physical activity appeared to have no effect – good or ill – on academic performance, though previous studies have found a beneficial effect in some subjects.

“Spending more time in front of a screen appears to be linked to a poorer performance at GCSE,” said report author Kirsten Corder. “We only measured this behaviour with pupils aged 14 and 15, but this is likely to be a reliable snapshot of participants’ usual behaviour, so we can reasonably suggest that screen time may be damaging to a teenager’s grades. Further research is needed to confirm this effect conclusively, but parents who are concerned about their child’s GCSE grades might consider limiting his or her screen time.”

For me, as Head of High School and Head of English at Avenor College, these results are compelling; not only because of the negative effect of screen time, but also because of the very strong evidence that homework and reading for pleasure are critical factors in educational success.

Reading for pleasure, in the mother tongue and in English, is something that we need to encourage our children do to. In the coming weeks, I will share some recommended reading for older children and teenagers, and I would welcome any suggestions that any of you would like to share with me.

Finally, our policy of encouraging students to do homework is clearly shown to be good practice. Life is all about balance, and our children need leisure time, of course. However, when you see that one extra hour of reading or homework per day can have such profound effects on results, I am sure that you will agree that this is something we should be encouraging our children to do.

Denise Trickett, September 2015

Am citit recent un articol ce conținea în esență observațiile unui important cercetător român din domeniul educației – Solomon Marcus – despre învățare. Acesta afirma că „adevărata învățare constă în formarea unor capacități de observare și experiment, de sensibilitate și de intuiție, de gândire, cunoaștere, înțelegere și comportament atât în situații standard, cât și în situații inedite”. Eu aș putea continua această idee afirmând că școlarii mici, aceia care își construiesc ceea ce se cheamă achiziții fundamentale, observă, descoperă, cunosc lumea folosindu-se de joc. Pledez pentru joc, pentru joacă, pentru timp prețios la școală, unde activitățile educative includ jocul cu toate avantajele lui.

J.Piaget spunea: „Când un copil se joacă, el pune în mișcare toată capacitatea sa de a stăpâni și influența realitatea”. Astfel, prin supravegherea atentă a jocului copilului, vom reuși să înțelegem mai bine ceea ce este în sufletul său, ceea ce își dorește să primească și să i se ofere.

Jocul îl face pe copil să se simtă fericit. Un copil fericit are o imagine bună despre sine și are încredere în el. Este plăcut pentru cei din jur, înțelegător, învață bine și este cooperant, răspunzând pozitiv solicitărilor profesorilor săi într-o mult mai mare măsură decât copiii triști, mânioși.

În joc, copilul dobândește putere, creându-și o lume a lui unde el poate controla ceea ce se întâmplă. Or, aceasta îl ajută să accepte mai ușor realitatea obiectivă odată ce jocul s-a încheiat, altfel va căuta puterea în relație cu ceilalți prin violență, opoziționism ori amânare.

Se mai spune despre joc că reprezintă munca depusă de copil, deoarece cea mai mare parte a activităților desfășurate de un copil presupune activitate de joc. Astfel, prin intermediul jocului, copiii își îmbunătățesc experiența cognitivă, învață să manifeste o anumită atitudine – pozitivă sau negativă – față de ceea ce întâlnesc, își educă voința și, pe această bază formativă, își conturează profilul personalității.

După cum spunea Émile Planchard în lucrarea Introducere în pedagogie, „jocul copilului nu este numai  o oglindă fidelă a personalității sale în formare, ci poate fi utilizat și ca auxiliar educativ și chiar să servească drept bază a metodelor de predare în școlile preelementare și elementare”.

Indiferent de vârstă, jocul este fundamental pentru comunicare. El eliberează stresul, stimulează creativitatea, iar pentru copii este un mediu sigur de exprimare a sentimentelor, de explorare a relațiilor și de mărturisire a dorințelor.

Jocul nu este niciodată timp pierdut, cu condiția să se respecte anumite reguli implicite.

The first day of a new school year is always an exciting time. Here at Avenor College this academic year is particularly special, as we have opened our new High School with a full Grade 9 class. Of course I am continuing with my responsibility for English throughout the school, but my role as Head of High School is a challenge and a privilege and I wanted to share a few of my thoughts about new beginnings and challenges.

Here we are at the start of another school year – all those opportunities and challenges stretching out ahead of us. The start doesn’t last very long – it’s almost over already – but it is a significant part of the school year and it cannot be regained once it has gone.

The plans we make, the principles that form the foundations of our plans and the actions we take first, before we act, are vitally important. Good foundations enable us to build our lives. These concepts apply to whatever we might attempt in life.

I believe it is all about foundational attitudes, about taking seriously the plans that we put in place now. If we get those plans right at the start, then, when the pressure is on because of a deadline or exams, we will all be well in control.

But, teaching is not all about what we can plan for. One of the great joys of working in a school is the fact that each new day offers new challenges, and our students often surprise us in many ways. We need our good foundations, but we also need to be flexible, open-minded, and proactive.

School life can be likened to a building with good foundations, but it can also be compared to a race. We can picture the life ahead for our students as a marathon; the race of life. When training for a marathon, athletes will begin with short practice runs, working their way up to longer distances. The school year is like one of those practice runs- training for the future years at school, and for the longer distances of working life. Running a race involves taking one step at a time. Every day is one step forward.

Sometimes, when running a race, athletes reach a point where they are tempted to give up because they ‘hit a wall’ physically- their energy levels are low and they lost the focus on reaching the finishing line. Like athletes in a marathon, when we ‘hit a wall’ and everything seems to go wrong, we can be determined to do the best we can, stay focused and keep going. We need to enable our students to keep their focus, to maintain their confidence and to have the drive and determination to succeed.

Ann Leiberman, a renowned American educator, has this to say: “Great teachers empathise with children, respect them, and believe that each one of them has something special that can be built upon.”

As teachers, we must never quit believing in our students and we should nurture in them the qualities of perseverance and determination. Whilst we all hope for happiness for ourselves and the children in our care, we also know that life throws up unexpected challenges. I wish it were true that we could make life easy, but the fact is, life is difficult at times. Each of us will face sadness, failure and trial as well as times of great happiness and success. We need to equip our children with the skills and emotional resilience to cope with the difficult parts of life as well as enjoying all of the good things.

One of the most profound moments for me was after our opening ceremony, when parents, grandparents and students had toured the school, met some of the teachers and collected their new school bags. A parent who was about to leave said to me:

“Take care of them. They are the most precious thing we have.”

This is something that we should never forget, as educators. Childhood is short, and the moments are precious. Our children themselves are precious and we need to care for them and nurture them, ensuring that we focus on the needs of every unique individual in our care.

Denise Trickett September 2015

Am putea deja să scriem un scenariu în care, actorii sunt elevii clasei a III-a. Adăugăm apoi dorinţa de a-i educa frumos, de a le arăta lumea, de a-i învăţa să fie prieteni, să rezolve tot ce este de rezolvat, s[ emane multă bunăvoinţă, atenţie la detalii şi răbdare.

Am văzut creşteri şi progrese, de la o săptămână la alta. Aş vrea să vorbesc de schimbările care apar de la o sută de zile petrecute împreună, la altă sută de zile împlinite.

La început, era un efort şi să numeri zilele, să le rosteşti, să vezi pe panou cum se mai adună o zece… apoi, a devenit un exerciţiu matematic, să ştii să scrii numerele mai mari decât 200, 300, 400, 500…Am continuat să numărăm zilele iar din clasa a III-a, am scris şi în agenda elevului, zi de zi, numărul zilei pe care o trăiam. Deja, înţelegem cum se adună zilele. Înţelegem şi dimensiunea timpului… ne mişcăm diferit dacă ştim că avem o secundă, un minut, o oră, o săptămână, o lună, un an… şi ne facem planuri în funcţie de cât timp avem la dispoziţie.

Elevii au continuat să vină la şcoală cu zâmbetul pe buze şi au început să se admire pentru ceea ce sunt, pentru ceea ce fac şi mai ales să își umărească scopurile, să îşi recunoscă emoţiile şi să inventeze jocuri. În cele 500 de zile de şcoală, ei au ajuns să se cunoască suficient de mult încât să poată recunoaşte, accepta, admira ceea ce îl face unic pe fiecare. Dinamica grupului este intensă, pasiunile se dezvoltă, munca este înţeleasă ca o necesitate şi adulţii sunt priviţi acum cu mai multă înţelegere. Adulţii (părinţii, profesorii, bunicii) din viaţa lor sunt cei care îndrumă, cu răbdare, iubire şi atenţie, activităţile şcolare şi extraşcolare.

Jocurile de rol au ajuns să iasă din sfera lecţiilor de limba română şi reuşim să ne asumăm roluri şi în pauze, în excursii, la serbări, precum și în activităţile comune cu alţi elevi din şcoală. Elevii au experimentat, cu responsabilitate, cum este să fii profesor! În urma lecţiilor pe care le-au ales, le-au pregătit, le-au susţinut, îndrumat… fiecare a aflat că nu este uşor să fii în faţa unui grup de copii şi să îţi atingi obiectivele. În acelaşi timp, au spus că este frumos şi interesant, dinamic şi provocator să fii numit profesor şi să coordonezi o astfel de activitate.

La împlinirea a 500 de zile de şcoală ei au experimentat cum este să fii un observator al unor lecţii, alegând la ce ore şi la ce clase ar vrea să participe. Tot atunci, excursia la Iaşi, Ipoteşti, Gura Humorului ne-a învăţat multe despre ţara în care trăim, despre prietenie, bucurie și decizii. Momentul de reflecţie a arătat, de fiecare dată, că implicarea elevilor în luarea deciziilor, în alegerea sarcinilor, în procesul de învăţare este drumul cel mai bun pentru creşterea şi educarea armonioasă a lor.

Cartea „11 la puterea 500″ aduce şi finalul de an şcolar, arătând că, fiecare din cei 11 elevi, a reuşit să exprime ce simte, să arate ce ştie, să aprecieze lumea şi oamenii apropiaţi. Eu, când eram la şcoală, primeam la final de an cărţi pe care să le citesc. Copiii Omega, au primit cartea pe care ei au scris-o. În mâinile lor s-a aşezat cartea cu peste 100 de pagini, poeziile şi povestioarele scrise de ei, cu cinci capitole şi poze din activităţile desfăşurate între 400 şi 500 de zile de şcoală.

De aceea, „11 la puterea 500″ înseamnă puteri precum: înţelegere, învăţare, emoţie, joacă, implicare, iubire, simţire, prietenie, talent, încredere și bucurie.

As Head of Avenor College International High School I am delighted to say that we have some outstanding students enrolled for the next academic year. We have a wonderful school environment and a team of teachers who are ready to inspire and encourage our young people on their educational journey. As creators of the future, we have hand-picked students who have demonstrated academic ability, leadership aptitude, abilities in music and drama, sporting achievement, or entrepreneurial skills. The most important thing a school can do is enable its students to achieve their potential, which is why we have our students at the centre of our plans for the future. For the academic year 2015-2016, all places at Avenor International High School are now taken.

If you would like to join them, provide us with your email address and phone number and we will contact you to arrange a meeting to talk about how to enroll at Avenor.

Full name

Phone number

Email address

Ultimately, the success of Avenor College International High School will be down to the achievements of our students so it gives me great pleasure to introduce some of them to you.

Click on each picture to find out more about each one of them:

 KINDNESS

Mark Twain said: ‘Kindness is the language that the deaf can hear and blind can see’ and I think that the world could do with a bit more kindness just now.

In April, I attended the ECIS Leadership Conference in Brussels, along with our Managing Partner, Andreia Mitrea, and our Deputy Head, Marilena Nicolae, where hundreds of Principals, Directors and Board Members were gathered to share experiences, learn from one another and celebrate 50 years of ECIS-http://www.ecis.org/. All member schools have to adhere to ECIS ethical practice, and Avenor College is proud to be a Full Member of ECIS.

During the conference, we had the pleasure of meeting John Hendry, Director of Student Welfare at Geelong Grammar School, Victoria, Australia. https://www.ggs.vic.edu.au/

As the biggest boarding school in the southern hemisphere, Geelong has an outstanding reputation, and is a place where the care and nurture of the individual is embedded in the educational process. John spoke about forgiveness, kindness and restorative justice. He believes that international schools can create world peace. He has very kindly provided us with several of his own blog entries, and I am sharing ‘The Way Forward’ with you here in its entirety.

Denise Trickett, May 2015

 

The Way Forward

Kindness, Forgiveness & Reparation 

The Golden Rule…. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you..” and the Hippocratic Oath …”First do no harm..” underpin how we live in relationships at Geelong Grammar School

People live in relationships. When people live and work together disputes are inevitable and errors are made. Relationships are tested. The intimacy of a school community is such that effective dispute resolution is essential if people are to live in relationships where individuals and the community flourish. Disputes can be resolved if the disputing parties accept the need for and believe the reparation process will be transparent, fair and provide an opportunity to develop a shared understanding of the issues. The process can succeed if the parties feel they have been well treated, there is no residual resentment and there is a mechanism for restoring trust, honesty, integrity, compassion and hope. To do this, forgiveness must be exercised by all parties. The aim is to restore dignity to relationships.

Geelong Grammar School wishes to foster a community based on trust. When harmful behaviour or conflict occurs, we emphasise repairing the damage caused to relationships and finding mutually acceptable ways forward. This practical philosophy can transform the way community members think, feel and act towards each other.

Forgiveness underpins the School approach to dealing with mistakes. Many mistakes are made by young people through lack of careful attention to others or to rules. Often there is no intention to harm, and when harm is intended, the young involved may have little real understanding of the effects of their harmful actions. Actions impact on others and these must be understood for the safety of all.

Geelong Grammar School’s approach to relationships is based on moral precepts which value both the individual and the community. Our pastoral principles and behaviour management practice promote wholesome transformative relationships and eschew intimidation, fear or overt exercise of authority. The relationship reparation practices we use to resolve disputes encourage people to rethink, to learn, to appreciate, to understand, value and respect others. Our approach recognises and attends to difference, and is fundamentally educative. Parties grow through this approach to recognise mistakes, to understand that mistakes have to be addressed, and so better understand life. Parties recognise that relationships have been disturbed and need repair requiring a co-created positive approach.

The quality of a relationship has many determinants but fundamentally five present as being significant.  They determinants are 1. Trust, 2. Forgiveness, 3. Integrity, 4. Optimism (hope), and 5. Compassion.  The notion of a relational living world underpins how we live together.  Error is of course how we learn and error must be managed positively in a relational sense.  Resilience is about recognising an error and being able to repair in every sense the impact of the relationships resulting from the error.  This is complex for the error has to be recognised, accepted, fully understood in its impact and then the error maker must accept the pivotal role to begin to repair the relationships disturbed.  This of course begins with acceptance, then forgiveness of self for making the error and dislocating relationships and perhaps causing hurt and a sense of loss.  Those relational “partners’ who have felt that the relationship has been harmed also must accept and acknowledge the error, understand the error circumstance, forgive the error maker and then work “with” the error maker to co-jointly work to repair the relationship damaged. The co-creation of the repair process is essential for although the “heavy lifting” is substantially done by the error maker the damaged party share a responsibility to repair the relationship to the best that is possible.  The obligations exist and the process requires all the 5 determinants of a relationship to be addressed individually and in concert.  This process is determined by the relational “partners’ involved.  The object is to repair and to restore peace. The “heavy lifting” aspect of the relationship repairing process is the consequence associated with the mistake.

“The quality of a community (individual relationships, family, community, nation) is not to be judged on its successes but rather on the humane and constructive approach it employs to the management of mistake.” 

John Hendry

“Forgiveness gives us the capacity to make a new start… And forgiveness is the grace by which you enable the other person to get up, and get up with dignity, to begin anew… In the act of forgiveness we are declaring our faith in the future of a relationship and in the capacity of the wrongdoer to change.”

Archbishop Desmond Tutu

John Hendry September 2014

Avenor College joined hundreds of educators, managers and board members at the ECIS Leadership Conference in Brussels in April 2015, celebrating 50 years of ECI Schools.

Avenor College is part of a huge trend in international education and membership of ECIS and official status as a Cambridge International School links us with organisations from all continents. The term International school no longer just refers to schools for expats- it means both private and state schools worldwide who prefer an international model of education. We found ourselves amongst like-minded professionals at different points on their schools’ educational journeys.

Assessing what we value- not just valuing what we assess

We had the opportunity to further develop our school’s relationship with Cambridge International Examinations. CIE is experiencing exponential growth worldwide, with IGCSEs being the most popular qualification in the world. Importantly, although students use IGCSEs and A levels to access international universities, increasing numbers are using them to get into universities in their own countries. We can be confident that our choice of IGCSEs for our new High School is a good one. For our whole school approach, we found that our aim to incorporate transdisciplinarity alongside subject-based academic rigour was strongly advocated by the Director of Education at Cambridge International Examinations, Dr Tristram Stobie.

A nation of critical thinkers would be difficult to govern

Graham Brown-Martin, founder of Learning Without Frontiers, and author of Learning {Re}-Imagined, posed this interesting question: How come children in the 19^th Century were able to use all the technology available to them, when 21^st Century students are not? We saw how technology is changing the lives and educational experiences of children in third world countries, whilst we debate whether or not to allow students to use tablet computers and smartphones in our schools. This linked with the inspirational work of Ushahidi in transforming the lives of Kenyans by developing the innovative Brik modem, presented to us by Juliana Rotich. We saw how it is not always appropriate to transplant practice from one part of the world to another, and how solutions and innovations work best when they are tailored to the specific needs of the country or city where a school is located.

Living a Larger Life

The idea that what works in one context may not work in another was further developed by Matthew Taylor, from RSA, in his challenging seminar Giving International Schools the Power to Create. Education is not engineering, he insisted; education is constructed in a social context.

By highlighting the role of teachers in enabling future generations to live lives which are fulfilling, happy and productive, he challenged us to reflect on what makes a good international school. The consensus was: more than one language present in the school; a curriculum based on one of the international models, wholly or partly; cultural sensitivity and teaching staff from more than one country.

Learning- the space/time continuum

Given that learning takes place in a physical environment, the International School of Brussels designed their 21^st Century curriculum by starting with a new building. Felim Bolster, Head of High School at ISB, took us on a virtual tour of a school where the walls are transparent, and where the boundaries between teachers have truly become invisible. In a hands-on, practical session, we were invited to design a timetable based on the open spaces and flexible learning spaces. The development of a school is an evolutionary continuum with the following features:

Commonality: clarity and consensus in approaches to learning and teaching /Community: learning is social, that schools are communities, and that a sense of belonging is important /Collaboration: everyone needs time and space to work in individual ways and collaborative ways for different purposes /Visibility: de-privatising our practice; seeing learning happening all around us /Agility: flexible purpose-driven learning necessitates flexible, purpose-driven learning spaces/ Connections to nature: students benefit from being in close proximity to nature/Mobility: movement, both into new spaces and through the use of flexible, adjustable furniture increases oxygen flow and makes concentration easier/Sustainability: innovative producers, informed consumers and responsible conservers.

How to Change a School Culture

By reminding us to be kind, and challenging us to look at trust, forgiveness, integrity, hope, and compassion, John Hendry, and truly inspiration voice in Australian education, reminded us that our humanity is what defines us. As Director of Student Welfare in one of the biggest boarding schools in the southern hemisphere, John shared his views about forgiveness, mistake management and restorative justice. He has a message for all teachers: Don’t try to teach it if you don’t practice it. In everything you do, you are a role model.

Peace

As educators, we shared a few minutes of silent contemplation in memory of the students who died in their university in Kenya; we pondered the role of international schools as agents of peace throughout the world, and we were reminded that almost exactly 100 years ago, the region where we held this conference was ravaged by the horrors of war. It was apposite that this was not remembered by a documentary, or an official news report from the time, but by a poem: In Flanders Fields. Through creativity, we can speak to all of humanity, across all of time.

Creativity in Action

In addition to inspirational speaker from the world of education, we also got to listen to Jay Schuster, who works for Pixar, and has, amongst his many credits, the creation of Wall-E. He took us through the entire design process- four years! He reminded us that hard work and perseverance are the cornerstones of creative success. We saw him as a boy, and he shared some of his childhood artwork with us, reminding us that we have, in our schools, future designers, creators, thinkers and innovators.

Education is the key.