Brave Hearts, Bold Minds
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How are we reinventing boys' learning?

31/3/2022

 
In last week’s article we shared a few of the reasons why the current education system may not be best suited to preparing boys for life after school, and why schools like Scots need to continue to reinvent the educational experience. This week we ask ourselves: how have we been helping our staff to reinvent education within the College and best prepare our boys for the future?

Philosophy in action
As with all good design, we start with understanding where we are and where we want to go. When we’ve thought about what’s different in educating for boys in our context, we’ve drawn on our distinctive philosophy of education, ‘Brave Hearts, Bold Minds’. Central to this is the motif of a ‘quest’, a challenge, a calling for boys to go on a journey of realising the potential that lies within and replicating the good they encounter without. As they move through the school, their experience is framed by key themes like Mastery, Adventure and Courage and Conviction. One of the keys to a successful curriculum for boys is ‘coherence’ – does this make sense as a story that’s worth pursuing, or is this just a game that I have to play?

We’ve then worked extensively and inductively with our staff to flesh out what sort of graduate outcomes we want to see at each stage of this journey. What exactly should we look to see by way of ‘Adventure’ for a Year 9 boy? What, then, should we decide to emphasise in our curriculum and pedagogy to give coherence around those big themes? Doing this helps us avoid presenting schooling to boys as primarily about subjects and disciplines and grades, but more about pursuing noble ideas and virtues. This has been made visible to staff in our unique Brave Hearts Bold Minds Staff Guide, an interactive website showing what we are aiming to achieve with boys across each of our graduate qualities and each phase of a boy’s journey from Cubs all the way through to Year 12, as well as research-informed advice on how to best make this happen in the classroom (and in the rehearsal room and on the playing field, for that matter). And this year we launched the Scots Design Cycle, helping staff apply a design thinking mindset to the way they translate those outcomes into rigorous and engaging learning experiences.

The engine room for this great work by so many staff is The Scots College Research Office, established in 2012 by the Principal, Dr Ian PM Lambert. We aim to support our leaders and teachers to reinvent education through our Brave Hearts, Bold Minds philosophy, and do so not just for Scots, but for ‘the common weal’ — the good of all. Here are three examples of this in action.

Teaching for Character Program
Since 2019 all our staff have been engaged in what we call the Teaching for Character Program as our main professional learning activity across the College. This trains and equips teachers in their teams to redesign an aspect of their teaching to more deliberately cultivate character as defined in our graduate profile. Designed to be an action research cycle, it has seen some exciting developments in both what boys learn and how teachers frame their learning around character formation. For example, in 2021 the Drama and Media team in the Senior School redesigned their unit on ‘Understanding Comedy’ to help boys think about how humour (one of our ‘Leadership Through Teams’ civic character qualities) can be used to build up and bring together, rather than to cut down and divide. In 2020 the Learning Enrichment team in the Preparatory School worked with boys to develop their own language around a ‘growth mindset’ (reflecting our performance character quality of ‘The Quest for Excellence through Personal Growth’). Watch Preparatory School Teacher Holly Davison and students describe their journey. Hear Sam Anderson, Head of Christian Studies, reflect on the ‘buzz’ that his team experienced as they wrestled with the purpose and form of their teaching to better achieve our purpose as Scots educators.

Innovation and Design Co-Curricular Program
In 2020 we designed and piloted a year-long co-curricular course for Year 10 boys focused on design and innovation. Boys worked with internal staff and visiting academics to learn the design thinking process and tackle a series of real problems, such as waste reduction, or assessment redesign for student engagement. The program was carefully designed and evaluated to see how well it achieved its outcomes. One of the best learnings was that when we create curricula from scratch, outside the normal timetable box, students and teachers can see the normal curriculum with fresh eyes and bring new ways of thinking to it.

Applied Entrepreneurship Program
Perhaps our most interesting experiment in curriculum redesign has been the creation of a whole new parallel program for our Year 11 and 12 students. Established in 2017, the Applied Entrepreneurship Program seeks to shape the student experience around the changing nature of work. With perhaps 17 different jobs and 5 careers, they need ‘a new work mindset’ (Foundation for Young Australians, 2017).

Rather than think in subjects, it focuses on five key charges derived from the literature on what future graduates need – leadership, strategy, analysis, influence and problem-solving. While students do receive a normal higher school certificate, they also obtain a range of industry-oriented micro-credentials and experiences that they’d never get in a normal curriculum. They learn not in classes and subjects but in three modes – the Workshop blended classroom, the Scots Lab where they prototype new ventures, and a self-paced My Mastery online learning program. And through a personalised approach, they’re graduating with a much better sense of their identity, aspirations and abilities, as well as work and university pathways into future industries. Just last week Year 12 student Kahu Millen secured an internship in the office of Member for Wentworth Mr Dave Sharma MP, furthering Kahu’s fascination with politics.

ScotsX
Inspired by the work of our staff and the provocations of the many experts we’ve worked with over the years including Professor Yong Zhang, we are in the process of designing ScotsX. This significant new venture will provide a small group of Middle Years boys with a truly reinvented schooling experience — a new ‘operating system’ for a new era — designed to significantly accelerate their academic and character development and show that rigour and creativity go together. Stay tuned for more information about this exciting opportunity launching in 2023.

Should you be interested in finding out more about these and other projects, please contact us.

Dr Hugh Chilton
Director of Research and Professional Learning

What sort of learning will boys need for the future?

24/3/2022

 
At The Scots College, we want to give boys ‘the finest preparation for life’. The big question we need to ask ourselves is ‘just what will life look like for them’? Our concern has been to make sure that boys are prepared not for the world into which their teachers and parents emerged after school, but the world as it is and will be in this century and the next. In this article, we sketch out some of the challenges facing the education system by the changing nature of work. The following short video from the team behind the award-winning book and documentary Most Likely to Succeed, puts into relief some of the significant changes underway that will affect all of us, and especially our boys.


Education has been the domain of a wealthy minority through most of history. However mass education was first instituted in the early 19th century. New South Wales opened its first public school in 1848, and introduced compulsory primary education in 1880. The industrial revolution was in full swing by then, and employment for many people involved repetitive tasks in a large scale organisation. Educating ‘work-ready’ citizens, in that context, included skills and values such as: compliance with authority, accuracy and efficiency, following instructions, dependability, and knowing your place in the larger collective. 

Since the nineteenth century, social, technological and workplace dynamics have changed beyond recognition. And as trite as it is to say, things are accelerating at an unprecedented pace. However, the general ‘operating system’ of schooling, built on an industrial era paradigm, has not changed to keep pace. The industrial model of education is no longer fit for purpose. Recent Australian research analysing 4 million job advertisements confirms that contemporary organisations are just as interested in social and emotional ‘soft’ skills for their prospective employees. These enterprise skills are said to be transferable between careers, and include: problem solving, communications, financial literacy, critical thinking, creativity, teamwork, digital literacy and presentation skills. While the General Capabilities in syllabi do prescribe many of these outcomes, they are generally applied in schools as an after-thought, a box-ticking exercise. Learning is not designed to achieve these outcomes, and thus it’s no surprise that these outcomes aren’t met. 

This past week has seen the release of the Commonwealth’s ‘National Microcredentials Framework’, the long-awaited guide to defining microcredentials across higher education, vocational education and industry. Developed by a panel of university, industry and vocational education leaders around Australia in partnership with PWC, it maps out a common definition of these new ways of accrediting small chunks of learning — as small as one hour. Skill acquisition is a lifelong process, and requires a much more agile model than the current system affords.

The World Economic Forum’s 2020 report, ‘Schools of the Future: Defining New Models of Education for the Fourth Industrial Revolution’, summarised the need for change thus:

“As globalization and rapid advancements in technology continue to transform civic space and the world of work, education systems have grown increasingly disconnected from the realities and needs of global economies and societies. Education models must adapt to equip children with the skills to create a more inclusive, cohesive and productive world.”

In a 2018 address, Andreas Schleicher, OECD Special Advisor on Education, put it more starkly: 

“when we could still assume that what we learn in school will last for a lifetime, teaching content knowledge and routine cognitive skills was rightly at the centre of education. Today, the world no longer rewards us just for what we know –’ Google knows everything’ – but for what we can do with what we know”. 

For boys, there is an added impetus to make learning more ‘real-world’. After concerns in the late 20th century of declining boys’ motivation for school in Australia, a government-funded review recommended that state and federal education systems should lead the international education community to develop ‘real world’ curriculum policies which value extra-curricula knowledge and learning experiences that will better engage boys.

There have, of course, been significant steps in recent years to make schooling more engaging and more personalised. Schools now focus on student wellbeing not just academic achievement, offer a dizzying array of extra-curricular activities and enrichment opportunities, and have a much stronger sense of how individual students are performing thanks to richer data and common standards. All of that is good and reflective of a noble desire to improve education for every student. Teachers and school leaders are working harder than ever to meet the learning needs (and many other needs!) of young people. And governments and parents are pouring more money into Australian schooling than ever before.

But unfortunately it’s not making enough of a difference. Policymakers concede that we are not making good progress on measures such as PISA, NAPLAN, and rates of student engagement and multi-dimensional wellbeing. International experts agree that our model of education has been slow to change. Much of the significant innovation in learning is taking place on the edges of or beyond the system, in alternative and micro-schools, online providers and platforms, and — most interestingly — as students ‘hack’ the system and design their own learning pathways.

The question all this raises is, ‘Will our children be ready for the world of work and life into which they are moving?’ Looking at the current educational pathway almost all children walk, the answer is not looking good.

If education in the 21st century needs to incorporate knowledge, skills and character development in order to prepare young people to be successful workers and flourishing citizens, what styles of teaching and learning will best achieve these aims? The dominant model of knowledge transmission by the teacher (as the ‘sage on the stage’) is argued to be less useful for future education than the role of facilitator (as the ‘guide on the side’) or even as strategic disruptor (as the ‘meddler in the middle’).

Various methods of student-centred pedagogy have been suggested, including: co-created learning, project based learning, personalisable education, inquiry learning, experiential education, product-oriented learning. Whilst each of these approaches are easily charicatured (think bean bags and chaos!), there is a strong and growing body of rigorous research and design around these pedagogical approaches. Some common factors amongst them:
  • Students are given some choice in the shape, content or timing of their learning.
  • Students need to work together collaboratively.
  • Learning has an open-ended design, requiring students to solve a problem or create an idea or product. 

These pedagogies require some upskilling of teachers who are trained in the traditional model, and some ‘unlearning’ of established attitudes and habits on the part of students and parents. Of course, this does not mean that traditional direct instruction is no longer a useful pedagogy. To borrow an analogy from a trades context, teachers need to expand their pedagogical toolbox rather than replacing it with an entirely new one. I recently visited a boys’ school in Western Sydney that has successfully transitioned its whole approach towards a rigorous project-based and applied learning model across Years 7-12, and seen its NAPLAN and HSC results improve such that it is one of the top-performing non-selective schools in the state.

In next week’s newsletter we plan to share the ways in which we have been experimenting and learning with our staff and students about successful approaches to new forms of learning for boys.

Mr Jeff Mann
Coordinator of Student Experience

Dr Hugh Chilton
Director of Research and Professional Learning ​



Announcing the Character Leaders in Education National Symposium 2022

10/3/2022

 
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In partnership with The Scots College, The University of Notre Dame Australia and a School for tomorrow., we are excited to announce the Character Leaders in Education National Symposium 2022.

Building on years of research and engagement with schools around Australia and globally, the Symposium will bring Principals and leaders of character education in conversation with world-class researchers, including Harvard's Nancy Hill (President of the Society for Research in Child Development), and philosopher Professor Christian Miller (one of the world’s most prolific character education researchers).

Featuring more than 9 masterclasses, an exclusive symposium dinner, and profiles of leading character education work in Australian schools, this is a unique opportunity to think and network at the cutting edge of research and practice in human formation and explore being part of some exciting projects.

With 60 places available, and tickets selling quickly, register now to avoid missing out!

26-27 May 2022
Sydney, Australia

Find out more and register now at www.characterleaders.net

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