Categorie: Viața școlii

Our new Director of Learning Darren Hugill has more than 29 years of experience teaching and leading schools around the world. In this interview, he talks about his personal learning journey and also about his plans for his 3-year mission as Avenor’s leader of teaching and learning.

“I grew up in Burnley, a town north of Manchester in the UK, and I was taught by some inspirational teachers, and some not so good. My primary education was traditional but laid the foundations for lifelong learning. Our Headmistress believed in us as young people, she went the extra mile to ensure that each one of us got a good education. My first Secondary School exposed me to the Sciences and I was taught by a really awe-inspiring classroom practitioner, my Chemistry teacher whose classroom practice I believe lives on in me even to this day. My love for science was ignited and I even developed my own lab in my cellar.

I started work when I was 16, at a bank while I did my A Levels (16 to 18 years old) at the same time. I then got a grant to go to university – I went to Leicester following in the footsteps of my Chemistry teacher – I also worked while at university as a telecom engineer and quality control chemist.

I was the first person in my family to go to university. After my degree, I did my diploma in education and that is when I realised that I had actually found something that I wanted to do.”

First teaching experiences

“I remember vividly my first placement as a student-teacher, teaching an A level Chemistry class, only for one term; I had a mentor, I was doing projects, it was what I was born to do, I think.

The first job I applied for was on the Isle of Man. I was part of a great school for two years and I learned the craft of being a chemistry teacher. I then moved to the USA to probably one of the most prestigious schools on the East Coast. I loved the job – I taught Chemistry and Maths in the International Baccalaureate (IB) system. After two years, I moved to Spain in a very good school as a Chemistry teacher. I assumed it was an English speaking place, but when I got there, in my first class, I didn’t speak a word of Spanish and the class didn’t speak of word of English. That was a very quick language learning experience.

I started feeling that I was drifting from international school to international school and I decided to go back to the UK. Having been a Christian since I was at university, an opportunity arose in a Church school near my home town. I stayed there a number of years eventually becoming the Deputy Head of the Sixth Form, I then moved to be promoted to Head of Science in another school. I was there for 12 years and I became its Headteacher. When I arrived at the school, the results were low and it became my mission to improve them. By the time I finished there, the school got up in the 90% (according to exam results – the percentage of students achieving grades between A* and C). In changing that, the government then identified me and 21 other people in the country as very successful Headteachers and made us work in other schools to help them. I became a national leader and a consultant Headteacher, which basically means I was only spending very little time in my own school; I focused on other schools rather than my own.

I realised that events overtook me and I wasn’t present when they needed really strong leadership. That was one of the biggest lessons that I’ve learned in life. Even when you think that you’ve established a system that can cope without you, you must always keep your finger of the pulse.

I was running my own business for three years and I was doing some consulting with schools, but I regretted leaving the classroom. So in August of 2015, I went international again, to see the world a little bit. I decided I had enough of responsibility and that what I wanted to do was just to be a Chemistry teacher again. I applied for three jobs, in Saudi Arabia, China and Kazakhstan. I got all three jobs within two days and decided to go to Kazakhstan.

I was told that my students are the brightest and the best but when I arrived there, I realised that my students were in fact teachers. I was told: ‘You are going to, first of all, teach them how to teach. You are going to teach them what makes a good lesson’.

I had two wonderful years there and hope that I made a real difference. In Kazakhstan existed a trilingual education system, and I had a part to play in the evolution of it. I had maybe about six months of building up trust with people and modelling best practices. So I went into the classrooms, and I learned some Russian and Kazakh, and I would see what they were doing and giving them constructive feedback. These people are now my friends as well as colleagues.”

Lessons Learned

 “Leadership skills develop through a combination of training and experience, I undertook my Principals qualification in the UK, and Advanced courses in Educational Management, these gave me a theoretical understanding of leadership, but real development I now believe comes from experiential learning, and in particular learning from success and mistakes. Educational leadership I have found is fraught with difficulties, on one hand you sometimes need to lead the radical transformation of a situation quickly, and at other times perhaps influence cultural change over a longer period of time. I have learnt that we as leaders need to apply different skills-sets depending on the situation. I have also learned that humans are not systems that respond always in the anticipated way, and dare I say that leading learning is quite unique in that every student has different needs and aspirations, as does every teacher and every school. I have learnt from sometimes difficult situations that it is best to take the ‘considered’ view, and ultimately to always do what is ‘in the best interests of students’.

You have to look backward and ask what your legacy is in a place. I think that when I left my last principal-ship, the school was incredibly successful, the systems were perfect, the students were achieving. I was a systems manager back then. When I went to Kazakhstan, I became an influencer. I look back on that experience and I can’t say that I left perfect systems in place in Kazakhstan, but I left better people – better leaders, better teachers – and they were not relying on policy and practice to make them better, but on themselves.”

Arriving at Avenor

“When I came at Avenor, I felt that the people had energy; they had the propensity to want to move forward. Everybody at Avenor is invested in their own areas, and it was difficult to see the big picture. What the team needed was a sense of unification. I knew that I am good at this and at making those connections.

My plan here, at Avenor, is to empower people. You do need systems and policy here – policy enables people to operate safely because they know what the boundaries are. But they also need to believe in themselves. The most significant thing I told the staff so far was at a staff meeting early on when we were talking about communication. I asked, “who are the best communicators in the world?” They talked about journalists, they talked about news readers. “No, no, no, the greatest communicators in the world are teachers”. Teachers should be able to communicate with every level of society, every single child, every single parent. I think in a society, besides doctors, probably the most important people are teachers because they influence the lives of children and children are the future. Teachers have got to start believing that they are the greatest influencers in the world, alongside parents.

I am at Avenor College for a short period of time to have an impact on the 400 students that you have here, but I can’t impact them directly. Where it is possible for me to impact is through the teachers and through the administration, in two ways. One is to empower the teachers to believe in themselves and to become better teachers, which will positively encourage students. The other is to empower and enable the managers of this school to become greater, to focus on what the core purpose of the school is: to make sure that the students of today are tomorrow’s leaders.

Avenor is 10 years into its journey. It is walking, maybe even running; the next step is to fly and to move from a good school to a great school. I hope to be part of that journey.”

Pedagogia mondială, din ultimii 20 de ani mai cu seamă, vorbește despre competențe ca țel final al actului învățării. Pe bună dreptate. La ce bun cunoștințe, informații, definiții, terminologie de specialitate, dacă toate sau aproape toate nu duc la formarea unor competențe generale și specifice? Nimic mai de bun simț. Această deplasare de la „să știi” la „să știi să faci” spre a „să știi cum să fii” a însemnat revoluționarea din temelii a diferitelor sisteme educaționale, din care, cu toate stângăciile și inconsecvențele, nu putea lipsi și sistemul de învățământ autohton.

Iată însă că treptat, parșiv, pe neobservatelea, și nu numai în lumea extrem de competitivă a învățământului românesc, ci și la case mai mari, americănești, englezești, chiar nordice, s-a insinuat și a devenit lege (nescrisă) evaluarea instituțiilor de învățământ și a absolvenților acestora practic numai după rezultate. În teorie, vorbim despre pedagogia fericirii, a învățării prin descoperire, a plăcerii cu care venim și rămânem la școală. În practică, facem și desfacem topuri ale școlilor performante, ale universităților de prestigiu, cred că și ale grădinițelor care promit candidați la Harvard cu liste de așteptare înainte chiar ca nașterea viitorului elev să fie planificată. Trăim într-o lume paradoxală, nu-i așa?

Avenor College își face de zece ani drum în această lume paradoxală. Pentru că noi chiar credem și punem în practică învățământul direcționat spre competențe, învățarea de plăcere și de drag, investigația și descoperirea ca pași esențiali în formarea viitorului adult. Iată însă că, de când ne-au absolvit clasa a 8-a primele promoții și multe familii au început să-și croiască aspirații spre Avenor, la orice tip de clasă, situația rezultatelor revine consecvent în discuțiile de admitere: „V-am urmărit. Sunteți de fiecare dată în top 10 școli din București. Ne interesează fericirea copilului nostru, dar nu vă ascundem că ne interesează și rezultatele la capătul unui ciclu de fericire neîntreruptă”.

Mi se pare un punct de vedere foarte onest, fără niciun fel de ipocrizie. Situația nu se limitează la urmărirea strictă a rezultatelor elevilor noștri la evaluarea națională, ci este completată de monitorizarea anuală a rezultatelor la examinarea internațională  Cambridge Checkpoint, pe baza cărora se face admiterea la Avenor International High School.

Competențe sau rezultate?  Anul acesta, toți absolvenții noștri de clasa a 8-a au obținut rezultate excepționale, fie la examinarea Cambridge Checkpoint – 5.8 la Maths și 5.9 la English din punctajul maxim 6.0 -, fie la Evaluarea națională: 10 la Limba română, 9.85 la Matematică. Competențe, deci rezultate!

International Cambridge trainers Charlie Gilderdale and Fleur McLennan took teachers from Avenor College and other international schools in an intense and revealing learning journey this weekend. Our school was the host of a two-day Cambridge Professional Development workshop on Active Learning and Assessment for Learning. Teachers were involved in a series of presentations, discussions, and exercises designed to help them identify, define and develop active learning in the classrooms.

You can find out what active learning is and why it is more and more important in the modern world from an interview with one of the trainers, Fleur McLennan.

What is Active Learning?

Active Learning is a concept that involves the students being more engaged with their own work because they not only understand what is needed to improve but also why this is an important process. This works very well in terms of continuing their education and going into universities where largely they will be left to themselves to make sense of their own education. We need to start putting that into practice now because too often we spoon-feed them information which they give back to us in the exams, but that’s not what is needed in the modern world.

Active learning is the process that engages creativity, it gets autonomy happening, it makes students more aware that they are active participants in the classrooms, not just an empty vessel to be filled up.

Is it a new educational concept?

In its earlier phases, it started to manifest in 1990. But, as an actual research-based educational theory, it is relatively new, it started around 1998, but now we need big pushes across the world because it is what is demanded of everyone coming into the working system after they leave university.

Across the world, top universities have noticed that they have graduates coming in who can’t sustain the level of interest or academic ability because they have always been spoon-fed. The universities have been crying out for high schools and primary schools to send them students who are more engaged and more autonomous and critical thinkers. It is also reflected in admissions policies for many universities now, which aren’t based on exam grades, they are based on face to face interviews.

Are there specific principles for teaching active learning?

I think that all teachers are masters of their craft and essentially this is not changing the way they teach, it is tweaking the way they teach. It is just looking at the way you would present them in a different way.

For example, instead of looking at the way we construct meaning, we could teach genre, narrative voice, tense, use of punctuation, vocabulary for weeks, and weeks, and weeks, and it would be quite boring. But one piece of poetry with an open question teaches all five of these things simultaneously and the pieces of information are then put together and the students come out of it with a working understanding of how to approach those five things by not only engaging with the material first but also using their knowledge in order to see why the punctuation has been used.

Instead of the teacher standing at the front and telling them why punctuation is there, they are working out why it is there. And then they are able to establish a constructed and shared meaning about why punctuation, for example, is important. And what the rules are behind it and how it can be used and manipulated to create different effects.

What is the feedback you’ve got so far from these series of workshops on active learning?

They are very positive, we’ve got a lot of praise for the amount of energy we put in because it does take a lot of brain power and always everyone is very tired at the end of it. But because it is not asking them to do something extra, is just tweaking what they already do, it is received very well. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be told by someone: “you’re doing everything fine, but just do this as well”. So, this is not an “add-on”, it is an “instead of” and it is nice because it can fit in seamlessly: small changes make transformational change.  

Back in 2009, when Avenor College was still a very small community, the management team met with all students’ parents and asked them what are their expectations from the school. “And absolutely everyone said that they want their children to be happy”, Andreia Mitrea, co-founder and managing partner at Avenor College recalls.

That moment was the trigger for what became a commitment from the school’s management team: creating wellbeing in the school. The first step was to address emotional intelligence as a tool for personal development.

Emotional intelligence (EI) is defined as the ability to recognize, understand and manage our own emotions and the emotions of others. This means being aware that emotions can influence behaviour and learning how to manage them.

Research shows that emotional intelligence (EI) is a better predictor of success and performance than IQ. According to some studies, people that are better at recognizing emotions can handle better the politics in organizations and the interpersonal aspects of work life. Other surveys show a strong connection between EI and creativity.

“In order for teachers to address this issue with their students, it is essential that they are aware of it. And it is maybe more important for them to be very good models, because children tend to imitate adults in this area of personal development”, Andreia Mitrea explains.

The connection between EI and learning is still controversial, even more so in Romania where it is grounded in the school’s tradition to have objectives related only to IQ. But as years passed by, Avenor’ management team realised that the area of emotional intelligence is equally important and started to target it directly.

The first major step was organising an emotional intelligence workshop for the entire Avenor College team (teaching and non-teaching staff) in the induction period at the beginning of the 2015-2016 academic year. Every member of the team received a DISC profile and took part in a full-day workshop to help them understand the results of this personality test used to recognise and understand behavioural differences between individuals.

“My impression is that (this exercise) helped take down masks, free ourselves of fears – that we are misunderstood or maybe that our behaviour is not appropriate – and showed us there are at least 4 different behaviour patterns and that they are all OK”, Andreia Mitrea recalls. “I think we each found a framework that allowed us to feel better understood by others, a safe environment where we could become more open. It was more about being curious about each other, about the differences in behaviour, without any judgment; just getting to know ourselves and seeing the others through a new filter.”

At the beginning of this year a new personal development workshop was organised for the entire team, also based on the DISC profile, followed by a more personalised approach. “We started to create a framework that would allow each member of our team to develop or learn in the direction he or she is personally interested in”, Andreia Mitrea explains.

Following the feedback from the 2016 summer workshop, the management organised several different courses and sent out invitations to the entire Avenor team. “Wellbeing is about discovering ways in which you can feel good, by addressing also your emotions, your soul and your body. We encourage people to take care of all these aspects.”

Some members of the team attended the emotional self-awareness workshops; others were more interested in the yoga courses. A workshop on transformative communication is scheduled for the end of January 2017 and many others will follow.

Participation to these workshops is voluntary because personal development can only come from a personal desire. Not everyone is open to this idea, maybe also due to the fact that in the Romanian culture fear of failure is significant, which makes it more difficult for people to become vulnerable, accept their mistakes and learn from them. But Avenor’s management team believes that with perseverance and patience the personal development programme will gain ground. The next step is to try to make it even more personalised, based on individual needs of teachers and other members of the staff.

This text was initially published in The International Admissions Bulletin, March 2017 issue.

Sesiunea programului de parenting „Școala de acasă” din această săptămână a fost despre cadouri – cele pe care părinții le fac copiilor, dar și cele pe care fiecare dintre noi le dăruiește sau le primește. Discuția moderată de Simona Gureșu, consultat, specialist în comunicare și părinte în comunitatea Avenor, a pornit de la daruri și a ajuns până la semnificațiile și motivațiile personale, uneori greu de deslușit, ale lui „a dărui” și „a primi”.

„Cel mai mare cadou pe care-l putem face copiilor noștri este să fim fericiți”, a spus Simona Gureșu.

La finalul discuțiilor, Simona Gureșu le-a făcut cadou părinților din comunitatea Avenor un text care sintetizează perfect mesajul workshopului:

 

A dărui reprezintă pentru cei mai mulţi dintre noi o datorie, o onoare, o bucurie. Pentru că dincolo de orice îndoială, întotdeauna a da ne crează imaginea de buni, generoşi, dezirabili celorlalţi. Acel a dărui care nu este condiţionat de aşteptarea de a primi ceva înapoi, acel a dărui prin care îl apreciez pe celălalt în raport cu el însuşi şi nu cu ceilalţi, acel a dărui în care pur şi simplu te pui la dispoziţia celuilalt. Acel a dărui în care renunţi la o parte din tine pentru celălalt. Acel a dărui fără troc emoţional, acel a dărui care creează spaţiu pentru a se naşte o posibilitate. O posibilitate de recunoştinţă.

A primi este adevărata provocare. E provocarea de a te deschide necunoscutului, de a te lasă influenţat, de a accepta schimbarea. În ceea ce mă priveşte, am învăţat târziu taină lui a primi. Pentru că a primi mi-a activat fricile: frică de a fi descalificată, de a fi dependentă sau îndatorată, dar şi nevoile: nevoia de recunoaştere, de aprobare şi de a menţine o distanţă optimă cu exteriorul.

Acum îmi asum riscul de a fi influenţată, deci de a mă schimbă. Acum pot să las să vină către mine lucrurile bune, fără a le minimiza. Acum pot să primesc cu recunoştinţă.

Pentru că recunoştinţă nu face parte din registrul lui „trebuie”. Recunoştinţa face parte din registrul lui „poate fi”. Şi asta pentru că recunoştinţa e o trăire profundă, plină de posibilităţi de creştere sufletească.

Recunoştinţă este acel spaţiu minunat care se creează între doi oameni, atunci când bucuria de a primi ceva bun pentru mine este împărtăşită cu cel de la care l-am primit. Şi atunci, în mine se naşte un gând de bine referitor la tine, cel care ai făcut ceva pentru mine. Şi gândul ăsta bun, împărtăşit, îţi dă ţie posibilitatea de a naşte un gând bun pentru mine, cel de la care am primit. Şi în spaţiul acesta minunat care se naşte între noi poate creşte ceva frumos. Dincolo de obligaţii, dincolo de a fi sau nu îndreptăţit să dai sau să primeşti, recunoştinţa naşte o posibilitate. E un spaţiu în care se poate naşte comunicarea, încrederea, iubirea. E un spaţiu în care se poate naşte buna trăire între doi oameni. Pentru că atunci când dăruim fără a condiţiona darul, atunci creăm de fapt posibilitatea de a duce darul mai departe şi a crea o lume mai bună.

Lumea copiilor noştri.