Learning in the new world

By Andy Gordon – Deputy Principal, Head of Junior School

We hope that you are loving the ease of our communication through Nexus notifications and the window into your child’s learning, whether in Secondary School, or through your child’s Journal, accessed through Nexus (via a browser), in Toddle, in the Junior School. Viewing your child’s learning is designed to be modern, interactive and communicative, so that you are engaged with the activities of your child’s learning environment. The frequent posts, samples of student learning and assessment data are an integral part of our communication and reporting processes.

We live in exciting and challenging times. Our united goal, both as parents and educators, is to best prepare our children for their future. In the absence of a crystal ball, we have to do our best to pay attention to the cultural and operational shifts, making adjustments to our own experiences as necessitated by the changes we see. I recently read this quote in an article in The Guardian:

In the future, if you want a job, you must be as unlike a machine as possible: creative, critical and socially skilled… Children learn best when teaching aligns with their natural exuberance, energy and curiosity. (The Guardian 15/2/2017).

Young people will need collaboration skills, creativity, the ability to solve problems, to deconstruct and construct information, based on growing understanding of how the brain works and how the world works.

So much of life is also dependent on one’s emotional intelligence, and it is paramount that we pay attention to our children’s development of resilience and grit. It was wonderful to hear Oliver Johnstone, one of our 2021 graduates, speak at our Foundation Concert. He spoke of making the most of life and looking for the opportunities when life doesn’t go as planned. It was a very powerful message. It reminded me of the fact that we develop students who are not only academically successful, but are also creative, resilient, strong and grounded.

We believe strongly in growing our students to be successful in all areas of life. I encourage you to spend time in the PYP Learner Profile in the Junior School, or the Secondary School Learner Traits. These are powerful and life-building components of learning at Radford College.

We are a school that believes strongly in the constructivist theories of learning. We believe that children learn best through experience and reflection on experience. We want you to sense the excitement and know the learning that your child is engaged in. We are developing learners, not for the world which we were educated for, but for the world in which they are and will be living.

The Guardian article finished with the following statement:

There is no single system for teaching children well, but the best ones have this in common: they open up rich worlds that children can explore in their own ways...