Category: Boys' Education

Studious staff: New research by Scots teachers in outdoor learning, motivation in sport, and the pedagogy of jazz

20/5/2022

We often talk about curiosity as a virtue to cultivate in young people. We want them to explore, to wonder, to question. And rightly so. But as we learnt from our 2017 Clark Fellow, Professor David Smith, ‘curiositas’, understood in the great classical and Christian traditions, isn’t a virtue at all. It’s a vice. It’s our natural desire to know, turned into a self-focused pursuit of knowledge, to sound smart, to win the day. What you really want is ‘studiositas’, the virtue of paying attention, of asking questions with a love for understanding, and debating ideas with a love for people. (And that’s what we all mean by curiosity in the end, isn’t it?)

Schools should be places where kids learn, yes, but also where we all pursue ‘higher learning’ — where, whatever our age or experience, we seek to become better students, to become intellectually virtuous. In last week’s newsletter we shared the research of Dr Caroline Basckin, Preparatory School Learning Enrichment Teacher, in advancing teachers’ understanding of literacy for students with disabilities. This week we highlight three teachers who are moving knowledge forward through their research degrees, and modeling ‘studiositas’ for our boys.

Mr Jeff Mann, Coordinator of Student Experience, is completing his PhD at Western Sydney University exploring the benefits of outdoor learning experiences for mid-adolescent boys. Hear more about his journey in this short video. Mr Mann recently published a systematic review of research into outdoor learning in the journal Frontiers in Public Health. He led a global team of researchers, including well-known educator Pasi Sahlberg, to screen over 17,000 journal articles and fully read 150 targeted papers to identify what the research says in this field. You can read his article, ‘Getting Out of the Classroom and Into Nature: A Systematic Review of Nature-Specific Outdoor Learning on School Children's Learning and Development’, by clicking here.

Mr Brent Wilsmore, Preparatory School Sportsmaster, is undertaking a PhD at Wollongong University investigating how school sport programs affect students’ motivation, performance and well-being. Despite the ubiquity of school sport, this is, surprisingly, a largely unstudied area. This research promises to better understand and shape the experience of thousands of students, well beyond Scots. Mr Wilsmore is soon to commence his study of all boys from Years 3 to 12 at the College, using Ryan and Deci’s Self-Determination Theory to explore boys’ sense of autonomy, mastery and relatedness in their sporting activities.

Mr Eric Hutchens, who joined us in Term 1 as a Senior School Music Teacher, recently undertook and passed the oral examination of his Master of Philosophy Thesis at UNSW. This requires researchers to discuss their thesis with their examiners, responding to critiques and demonstrating their mastery of the topic. Mr Hutchens’s research thesis was entitled ‘Unaccompanied Double Bass in Jazz Composition and Performance: A Case Study of Three Works by John Patitucci'. He looked at the influences on influential jazz composer Patitucci, deduced from transcribing and analysing many of his works. Mr Hutchens also drew conclusions about how music teachers can think pedagogically about their work with students.

Congratulations to these and other staff seeking to advance knowledge and model for our students the virtue of studiositas!

Dr Hugh Chilton
Director of Research and Professional Learning

Higher learning: Dr Caroline Basckin’s PhD on evidence-based practice in teaching literacy

13/5/2022

When The Scots College was founded in 1893, the Moderator of the Presbyterian Church in New South Wales, the Right Reverend James Smith White, said that its teachers would be those who had ‘won the highest honours in the university’, were well-acquainted with teaching boys, and viewed teaching as ‘a work of faith, a labour of love, and a patience of hope’. That calling to ‘higher learning continues to be seen every day in the inspiring work of staff across the College who show up every day to give boys the finest preparation for life.

This week we honour the achievement of one of our long-serving staff, Preparatory School Learning Enrichment Teacher Dr Caroline Basckin, who has just won ‘the highest honour’ in the university by being awarded her PhD from the University of New South Wales.

Dr Basckin’s doctoral dissertation was entitled ‘Literacy instruction for students with disability: An analysis of teachers’ knowledge, beliefs, and use of evidence-based practices’. In her research with Year 3 teachers across 8 Sydney independent schools, Caroline explored what teachers did to teach literacy to students with disabilities and how they described the basis for their practice. She was struck by the amount of evidence-based practice she observed, matched with a low level of knowledge about that evidence base. Teachers also felt ill-equipped to understand the complex needs of students, and lacking in time to collaboratively plan for well-differentiated teaching.

She provided three recommendations to school leaders:

Ongoing high-quality professional development grounded in the current academic research
Develop an online database or library of EBP resources
Training and support for teachers and learning support staff to develop and deliver effective co-teaching models in literacy instruction

Dr Basckin has published several articles from her research, including as lead author on a systematic review of teacher beliefs about evidence-based practice in the prestigious International Journal of Educational Research.

Please feel free to contact Dr Basckin to find out more about her research findings.

We look forward to drawing on Dr Basckin’s experience and research as we continue to prepare for the John Cunningham Student Centre, bringing together all the support boys need to develop into fine young men.

Congratulations again to Dr Basckin on this significant achievement!

Dr Hugh Chilton
Director of Research and Professional Learning

Exploring the impact of technology on boys' learning relationships

3/5/2022

The COVID-19 pandemic has heightened the importance of technology in all our lives, not least in how we learn. While online classes still continue for some boys in isolation, it’s easy to forget just how important Zoom, Stile and Schoolbox were for all boys, teachers and families for much of the past two years. The question we must now ask ourselves is how we can best use technology to support boys’ learning, how it can be an aid rather than a hindrance in fostering great relationships with their peers and teachers.

This week all parents and carers of boys in Years 5 to 12 received an invitation to participate in a research study we are conducting with the International Boys’ Schools Coalition (IBSC). This major study aims to help boys' schools including Scots better understand the impact of technology choices on boys' learning and the quality of relationships in classes.

We have been closely involved in the development of the study since its inception in 2019 through the IBSC Research Committee, which our Principal Dr Ian PM Lambert chairs and on which Dr Caitlin Munday and Dr Hugh Chilton serve. The project commenced with a literature review by University College London’s Knowledge Lab in 2020-21 (see a podcast and webinar discussing the findings).

This study connects to research conducted by our own staff. Mr Nicholas Tester, Director of Strings, has been part of the IBSC’s rigorous action practitioner research program across 2020 and 2021, supported by Mr Jeff Mann, Coordinator of Student Experience. Mr Tester’s project is entitled 'Sir, not another piece of technology!' An examination of whether the use of e-portfolios in classroom music facilitates Year 8 boys to construct their own learning pathways'. He will present his findings at the IBSC Annual Conference in Dallas in June.

In 2021 Mrs Penny Ryder, Preparatory School Master Teacher, and I worked with a group of Year 5 boys to explore how their peers use technology. The boys developed a survey in conjunction with boys in the United States and Canada, and presented their findings to one another — by Zoom, of course! Read more about that project here.

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

Shaping moral character: What stories are our boys living?

8/2/2022

In his landmark 1981 book, After Virtue, philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre describes two people, separated by centuries, looking up at the night sky:

‘The twentieth-century observer looks into the night sky and sees stars and planets; some earlier observers saw instead chinks in a sphere through which the light beyond could be observed. What each observer takes himself or herself to perceive is identified and has to be identified by theory-laden concepts.’

This is not a comment on advances in science or the merits of the empirical method. Rather, MacIntyre’s point is that the way we perceive the world and act in it is inextricably bound up in the theories we have about how the world works. Or to put it another way, how we think and what we do depends on the ‘big story’ we carry around in our heads.

And this really matters. For, as MacIntyre argues, “I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’”

That was the question put to our staff as we began 2022 with our Term 1 All-Staff Professional learning Day on Thursday 27 January. We continued in our journey over the last few years to see how we might put our Brave Hearts Bold Minds philosophy of education into practice and become experts in ‘teaching for character’. This year year we focus on the ‘moral character’ qualities we aim to form in our boys: Our Faith and Tradition which inspire truth, honour, loyalty and commitment. Helping boys reflect on their understanding of right and wrong, of their place in the world, and their calling within it, starts with surfacing the stories that they (and we) believe about the world.

To help us do that, we were joined by Dr Justine Toh, Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Public Christianity and author of the new book Achievement Addiction. Dr Toh engaged staff in a crash course in cultural criticism, sketching out four powerful stories that shape our culture and considering their appeal and their shortcomings. First, there’s ‘the meritocratic story’, which says that you are what you achieve — so be sure to try harder. There’s the ‘infinite browsing story’, where as in Netflix, so in life, we keep our options open but are plagued by FOMO — the fear of missing out. Then there’s ‘the technocratic story’, where everything can be 'solved', except, of course, it can’t! And last, there’s the Christian story of people created in the image of God with infinite dignity and special purpose, a story which challenges the reductive view of the human condition so often presented to us.

Dr Toh challenged our staff to consider the ways in which we reinforce various stories about the world as we talk with our students. Making a high ATAR the de facto goal of learning in the senior years can teach boys that success is about hard work, and not also a result of the blessings of their birth and opportunities, leading them to look down on those who ‘didn’t make it’. In undertaking group work, we can spell out how to relate well to those who we don’t necessarily like, and so tell a story about how relationships across differences are more valuable than tribalism. In encouraging boys to immerse themselves in the humanities and creative arts (even if they tend to be more drawn to mathematics and the sciences), we can help them see that life is more about asking good questions than trying to find neat solutions.

Opportunities to teach character are everywhere. The great challenge that lies before us as teachers, and much more as parents, is to get beneath the surface of boys’ behaviours to the beliefs that drive them. And it starts with asking that question of ourselves. What story am I living?

In coming weeks I look forward to sharing more about how we are helping our staff understand and practice expert character education at Scots, that our boys will go on to live ‘a better story’.

Dr Hugh Chilton
Director of Research and Professional Learning

Experts share advice at ScotsIdeas on helping children to deal with stress and uncertainty

9/9/2021

ScotsIdeas - Helping Children Deal with Stress and Uncertainty from Scots TV - The Scots College on Vimeo.

On Tuesday evening we were delighted to have hundreds of parents and teachers from Scots and the wider community join us for a special ScotsIdeas conversation, ‘Helping Children to Deal with Stress and Uncertainty’.

Guest panelists included well-known psychologist and author Andrew Fuller, ‘Digital Nutrition’ pioneer and clinical psychologist Jocelyn Brewer, and Wellington College (UK) Deputy Head David Walker. They addressed a wide range of topics based on questions from attendees, including using technology well, engaging with frustrating behaviour, building relationships while remote, and supporting children to talk through their anxieties and aspirations.

Key take-away messages included:

Be curious, not furious. It’s easy to respond to frustration with more frustration. Take a step back back and recognise your own emotional and physical state.
When boys express frustration in poor behaviour, ask ‘What’s happening?’ Use the HALTS acronym to ask: Are you... Hungry? Angry? Lonely? Tired? Stressed?
Use this unique time to talk with your children about what kind of world we want to create for the other side of the pandemic. Engage them in thinking about making a meaningful contribution to the world, and stimulate projects to support this.
This is a pandemic, not a productivity contest. Don’t stress about students falling behind during the pandemic. Stimulate executive functioning skills like memory and self-regulation by building good daily and weekly rituals and routines as a family.
Take an interest in your son's gaming habits, by having a go yourself!
When wearing different hats as a parent (parent, teacher, coach), it’s important to frame this for children. ‘Now it’s time for learning’, ‘Now it’s mummy time. Shall we go for a walk?’

We are looking forward to continuing to work with Andrew Fuller through our partnership with Skodel, a unique wellbeing platform developed by Scots Old Boys Julian Fagan and Ian Fagan. In Term 4 we will be introducing the wellbeing check-in tool with our staff and Senior School students, and expanding our care coaching into 2022.

For more information about ScotsIdeas please click here.

Shaping the conversation about boys, relationships and schooling

16/6/2021

It’s not an easy time to be a boy, and some would say it’s not an easy time being an educator of boys. With questions regularly asked about the relative merits of single-sex versus co-education, and a culture challenging the traditional binary view of biological sex and gender, it can be easy to lose confidence in the particular work of educating boys. Committed as we are to the substantial research-based and observed benefits of single-sex schooling, at Scots we seek to constantly challenge ourselves to collaborate with others in refining — even reinventing — boys’ education.

Last Wednesday, staff from across the College had the opportunity to join educators from boys’ schools around the world for the 2021 International Boys’ Schools Coalition (IBSC) Annual Conference. Bringing together over 280 boys’ schools from 19 countries, the IBSC provides a diverse and active network for sharing and shaping best practice in boys’ education. Scots has for several years been a key member of the IBSC, hosting conferences, shaping major research projects, and partaking in professional learning activities. Dr Lambert currently serves as Vice-Chair of the IBSC, leading the Australasia region, and chairs the Research Committee, of which Dr Caitlin Munday and I are also members.

This year’s Annual Conference was held virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Australasia region was invited to host the first of four successive online sessions. I had the privilege of hosting a panel conversation on ‘Boys and Relationships’ featuring Dr Rob Loe (CEO, Relationships Foundation), Professor Nancy Hill (developmental psychologist, Harvard University) and Maree Crabbe (co-founder and Director of the Australian violence prevention project, It's time we talked). In a wide-ranging and fascinating discussion, we explored key questions such as:

What exactly are relationships and why are they so important?
What are the key research-based ingredients for flourishing relationships?
But how do young people learn what it means to relate well together?
Is there anything particular about that learning journey for boys?
How is pornography and a sexualised culture distorting how boys learn about healthy relationships?
What sort of messages should we be taking to our parents about helping their sons grow into great relational men?

Scots staff also contributed four presentations to the conference, including:

The Applied Entrepreneurship Program: Boys' New Pathways to the Future of Work (David Todd, Andrew Potter, Dr Ian Lambert)
The Real Impact of Experiential Education: Practical Insights from Major Research in Boys' Education (Dr Hugh Chilton with Dr Mathew Pfeiffer, MMG Education)
Future-Ready Boys' Schools: IBSC Research and Innovation (Dr Ian Lambert, Dr Caitlin Munday, Dr Hugh Chilton, with the IBSC Research Committee)
Becoming a Strong 21st Century School of Character (Dr Ian Lambert, with CIRCLE Education)

Beyond the Annual Conference, we were delighted to play our part in the release of a major report with University College London on boys and technology. In December 2020, the IBSC Research Committee contracted with Professor of Learner Centred Design Rose Luckin, of UCL Knowledge Lab in London, to explore Building Learning Relationships Through the Use of Technology. The goal is to design a program of future research that aims to explore how new and emerging technologies are impacting pedagogy, relationships (especially pupil-teacher, but also pupil-pupil), and the areas of overlap between these two.

This report covers the following themes:

Presence and how to create presence in virtual learning environments;
Connections and what it means to know in relationships;
Belonging and bringing together in community and classroom cultures;
Identity and how identity impacts agency and efficacy in learning—and in relationships; and
Learning environments, including home.

We look forward to helping shape the next phase of this significant global research.

For more about the International Boys’ Schools Coalition, please click here.

Dr Hugh Chilton
Director of Research and Professional Learning

Scots’ Year 5 boys explore technology & relationships with international peers

19/5/2021

It's no secret that technology can be a major help or hindrance to the relationships and wellbeing of young people. A growing body of literature points to the strong correlation between device usage (particularly for social media) and declining mental health in young people. Yet amidst all the messages boys receive about the problems of inappropriate or overuse of digital technology, they can often feel ‘talked at’ rather than listened to. The COVID-19 pandemic has only accelerated the need to think in a nuanced way about how our boys’ lives are being shaped by their digital world.

Partnering with fellow research-invested schools in the International Boys' Schools Coalition (IBSC) Year 5 Scots boys have been planning a research project to understand how technology shapes social and emotional wellbeing of their peers. This project is an off-shoot of a larger study the IBSC Research Committee is designing with University College London’s Knowledge Lab and the Relationships Foundation.

The five Year 5 boys have been working closely with Mrs Penny Ryder and me to help shape up this collaborative global study. They recently enjoyed their first Zoom meeting with boys and teachers at the partner schools: St Christopher's School in Virginia, US, Fairfield Country Day School in Connecticut, US, and Crescent School in Toronto, Canada. Over the next week, they will be surveying their peers to find out how they use technology to connect with one another, and consider the advantages and disadvantages that digital relationships bring. Along the way, they're learning the skills of research and inquiry, and looking forward to presenting their work to the other schools and their peers later this term.

Movers and shakers at ScotsIdeas ask how we can redesign education for a post-COVID world

26/11/2020

ScotsIdeas/IBE Online Forum | Redesigning Education and Society for a Post-COVID World | 18 Nov 2020 from Scots TV - The Scots College on Vimeo.

'Control based approaches are bad for the future. If we really want to encourage excellent teaching, teachers who are committed and passionate and prepared to have the emotional capacity to engage with their students in relationships to get the best learning from them, we need to free teachers from process-driven bureaucracy. We need to trust them despite the fact they'll sometimes make mistakes.'

So said Gigi Foster, Professor of Economics, UNSW, at our latest ScotsIdeas forum on 'Redesigning Education and Society for a Post-COVID World'. This evening, hosted in partnership with the College's Institute of Business and Economics, brought together a diverse panel of leading thinkers and practitioners in education to ask how we might make the most of the disruption brought about by 2020 in changing the way we educate.

Panelists included:

Honorary Professor Mike Conway, Founder and CEO of XVenture, University of Wollongong, emotional agility and mental coach for the Socceroos and former managing director of The Wiggles.
Professor Gigi Foster, Professor of Economics UNSW, host of ABC Radio National's 'The Economists', and 2019 Young Economist of the Year.
Mr James Oliver ('09), Research Director, Strategic Projects, NSW Department of Education.
Dr Ian PM Lambert, Principal of The Scots College

If you had missed it, I encourage you to watch the recording and delve into the compelling conversations and topics discussed, along with all other ScotsIdeas events here.

Dr Ian PM Lambert shared these reflections in his weekly newsletter:

“If we teach today's students as we taught yesterday's, we rob them of tomorrow.” John Dewey

This statement over a century ago by the great American philosopher, psychologist and educational reformer, John Dewey, has never been more true. Casting a stark reflection on Australia’s current education system. For the past 20 years, the ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach in our curriculum is now failing our students to prepare for the unexpected in their future.

For this year in particular, no one could have predicted its events and how it has led to the profound change in the way we operate, think and relate to one another. It has given society and Scots a reality check, reinforcing why we continue to forge ahead with our Reinventing Education strategy.

Education is not just about preparing for an ATAR or being ‘work-ready’. If one was to take a single learning away from 2020, it has taught us the need to be agile, adaptable and resilient in the face of challenges. This is a core of what education is. Many take for granted that being agile, adaptable and resilient just happens, but at Scots we believe, and have proven that, it can be taught.

On Wednesday evening at our latest ScotsIdeas event, I was joined by a group of experts in economics, coaching and education to deliberate on the topic ‘Redesigning Education and Society for a Post-COVID World’. The panel of experts discussed the global trends as a result of the pandemic and what in their opinion schools should be doing to better position students on how to tackle an uncertain society after school.

We look forward to sharing our exciting program of 2021 ScotsIdeas events soon.

Dr Hugh Chilton
Director of Research and Professional Learning

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