The power of collaboration
This week I reconnected with another Principal currently working in another well known International School in Hong Kong to plan a long overdue network meeting with fellow Secondary School Principals. Since 2019 our meetings have been sporadic and mainly online, attendance being hugely disrupted due to daily emergencies and the resulting meetings that came about due to the whole COVID situation. So it is heartening to think that around 20 of us will meet to share ideas and opportunities to help each other out before the Christmas break comes around.
It got me thinking about the place of collaboration in a forward thinking & modern curriculum. Having been the first IB school to offer the Diploma for over 30 years now, we have seen the benefits of practices such as the Science Group 4 project that brings students into a situation of learning how to work together in a high stakes situation. The CAS programme also encourages groups of people to work towards a common cause for the good of others, and the recently introduced Approaches To Learning (ATLs) has collaboration as one of the 10 skills that are planned into the delivery of each subject. When we were considering how to improve our curriculum offering for years 7 – 9, the International Middle Years Curriculum (IMYC) stood out in that one of the key findings of the neuroscientific research that underpins the learning processes is the desire for the typical teenager to work alongside, and be influenced by, their peers.
The Secondary school staff are fantastic at collaborating to improve practice in the school, be it through unit planning in their specific subjects or working with two collegues in their Professional Learning Groups to research and focus on becoming better at one aspect of their teaching practice. A recent piece of research from Evidence Based Education, partners of Cambridge International Assessment, has as one of it’s finding that “collaboration and sharing is more efficient than each individual replicating.” This true in all walks of life, and I also agree with another statement from the same report that identifies the claim that “Collaboration builds social bonds….promoting affiliation, helping behavious and organisational commitment.”
So what can your child(ren) do to build their social bonds, benefit from sharing with others? This is happeneing in the classrooms, but is it also happening away from the day to day life at FIS?
