Interview
Q:
At Keystone, students are required to board
starting from Grade 9. What are the advantages
of using the IB programme in the context of a boarding
school?
A:
Using the IB in a boarding context is really good way
of getting value out of the programmes. I can think of
two things in particular. In the MYP, there is a element called
Approaches to Learning that will be extended very soon to
all of the IB programmes, including the DP. The Approaches
to Learning program categorizes different kinds of learning
skills that students need, both academic and life skills, such as
organization, collaboration, and self-management skills. It is
looking at skills that relate to the whole person.
Keystone’s boarding program is the perfect environment for
students to explicitly develop life skills in a big way. Because
relationships between staff and students will naturally form in
the boarding setting, there will be many opportunities for staff
to work together with students to identify, practice and develop
their skills such as resilience, and resourcefulness. Students will
have to learn collaboration skills; they will need to learn how
to get along with people, work together with people in teams,
and resolve conflicts. We cannot assume that students will pick
these skills up themselves. So we will look at these skills quite
openly with our students. There is the expectation that students
will have a strong sense of community in our boarding setting,
so students will also have many opportunities to take on service
initiatives within the Keystone or local communities, or use the
facilities to engage in looking at health issues or sports programs,
even things like research skills, more practical academic skills.
Students, through boarding, will have access to the library and all
of the facilities at Keystone to develop these skills.
Q:
Test scores and university acceptance rates,
especially those to elite schools, are major
standards used to measure the success of a high
school teacher in China. Chinese parents also strongly
value these two indicators. As Head of High School for
Keystone Academy, will you use these two standards
to measure the success of the teaching staff?
A:
It is the fundamental responsibility of any school to make
sure that student learning is as good as it can possibly be.
Assessment takes a lot of different forms, but all of it is aimed at
how much the student is actually learning. How good are they are
at whatever that learning is? So all test scores are really important.
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The Keystone Magazine
“There is also the expectation that
students will have a strong sense
of community in our boarding
setting.”
It is very easy to go to test scores at the end of the program
and start to look at those, but it is too late then; you cannot go
back and change them. What one has to do is to look at student
achievement much earlier. As a school, we must always look at
how we can get these students to learn best. The IB programme
is very much focused on assessment for learning, which means
using assessment to inform planning so that students can then
learn better in the future.
Teachers have to be very skilled in looking at assessment and
delivering and then analyzing how students do. They should
be able to explain how they have looked at the evidence of their
assessments of student learning and how they are using that
evidence to then inform them of what they will do with the
students so that they can move on and do better next time. The
school is accountable for ensuring that all teachers know how and
are going through this process. If we do this effectively all of the
way through we end up with students who perform as well as they
possibly can in whatever exams they take.
Gillian Ashworth speaking to the Leadership Team
about her publication