Vivat! The Head’s Blog

Because of chronic tendonitis in my thigh, my squash games are now restricted to a few games every year with alumni. Seattle happens to be one of the venues of these semi-annual squash games. Bob Kelley, class of 1965, is the host for this event, and as I write this I can feel a few of the muscles I don’t normally use starting to tighten up. It actually feels good, believe it or not.

Last night we had our Seattle Alumni reception, with a warm array of alumni going back to 1955. I have mentioned our Seattle alumni before – different vintages from the sixties, seventies, eighties and nineties all have their particular loyalty which is heart-warming. Other visits we make during the year occur in places as far apart as Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Toronto, Montreal, New York, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Portland, San Francisco, and a few more places.

Next week, my wife, Joan and I go off to Asia. Next Friday at this time we will be travelling from Tokyo to Hong Kong. After Hong Kong, we will visit Taipei and Seoul, all in the interest of keeping the links with our extended family warm and healthy. It is the fifteenth trip to Asia for this purpose. In all these places we will visit current families and alumni, and in each of them, as in Seattle, we encounter special people, a special welcome.

More next week.

Next week we will be interviewing for the new position of Director of Learning. The position had its genesis in a single, simple idea: to meet the needs of all learners. I have observed before that in the bad old days an assumption prevailed that if we could teach the “best and brightest” to excel, then the rest of the students would be swept along by their example and the momentum of their success. The reality is that while these other students fared reasonably well, we missed giving them the opportunity to discover how they might become the best and brightest themselves, each in his or her particular way. We simply didn’t have the knowledge or tools to identify very well how different students learned – which was “differently” in a myriad of ways – and so we did our best, frankly. Recent research and educational practice has now opened up opportunities for all our students to fulfill their promise.

The new position of Director of Learning, driven by this goal of meeting the needs of all learners, had two separate sources. The Management Team was responsible implementing the recommendations in the Strategic Plan of 2005 that we make priorities out of differentiated instruction, more sophisticated and useful assessment and evaluation, and a collaborative learning environment. These priorities stemmed from solid current research about brain-based learning, a body of research that presented new findings about how students learn.

The other source of the idea came from a committee that was struck to consider a “Learning Centre” at SMUS. More and more in recent years we have offered learning support for students with learning differences, including “gifted” students. We built a team of Learning Resource teachers responsible for this support. The purpose of the committee was to look at the team’s work, to make sure it was as effective as possible, and then to see if that work could be extended to more students. At the outset of the committee’s discussions, we anticipated the creation of a “Learning Centre” that would be a physical place, which would be the nexus of our learning resource activity and student support, and which would spread its nurturing influence wherever it was needed. The end result was quite different, however. In the end, we came to the conclusion that the benefits of brain-based learning, differentiated instruction, assessment and evaluation for learning, and related practices were clearly good not just for identified students, but for all students. Therefore, we didn’t need to create a separate “Learning Centre”; what we needed to understand was that the entire school was the “Learning Centre”. The Director of Learning, who will have expertise in these areas, is to oversee the work of the continued evolution of our classroom practices. It is an exciting prospect.

In keeping with past practice for such appointments, the interview team will consist of a combination of staff, Management Team, parents and Board members. These different perspectives ensure a broad range of eyes who will look at the candidates, and affirm in the community that the process is transparent and professional. The team consists of Susan MacDonald, Senior School English teacher; Nicky Newsome, Junior School primary teacher; Xavier Abrioux, Director of Middle School; Kathy Roth, Director of Senior School; John Liggett, Director of Academics; Patti McIntyre Gray, Middle School parent and parent of two graduates; Linda Bodine, Middle and Senior School parent; and David Edwards, Board member and Middle School parent (all three of these parents have children who started in kindergarten, in case a feeling exists that the Junior School is under-represented!).

It is always illuminating when the butterfly that emerges from the chrysalis turns out to be a creature quite different from our expectations. We thought we knew her well.

Margaret Skinner teaches Mathematics in the Senior School. Her students think of her as demanding and exacting, perhaps impatient with them if they ever settle for less than their best. She was recognized by Cornell University several years ago, in a special ceremony there, as an outstanding teacher for her influence on one of our grads who became one of that university’s top students. Margaret is also an accomplished pianist. She plays the music for Senior Chapel; she has performed with the Victoria Symphony Orchestra; and although it may not have been the pinnacle of her musical career, a few years ago she accompanied the staff chorus in its rendition of Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus. When she won a Headmaster’s Professional Development Award for Teaching Excellence several years ago she chose to spend the money on organ lessons- the organ being an instrument most of us would have said she had already mastered.

You get the picture, I am sure: a very accomplished practitioner in those two related fields, Music and Mathematics, with a bent that one would definitely call “highbrow.”

This weekend is Valentine’s Day. It has become a bit of a tradition to mark the occasion with a staff performance. This year Margaret has assembled an impressive and comprehensive collection of staff, in fact the largest group ever. As usual, we signed up secure in the expectation that her musical choice would add a bit of tone to our proceedings, and possibly even elevate us in the eyes of students who may not always put their teachers on pedestals. The consequence of our blind faith is “Achy Breaky Heart”, a song most of us had never heard before, although we had heard of it - and now that we have learned it, we aren’t sure of our capacity to rescue it from oblivion, although we are giving it a good try. Only the future can tell. For the past week and a half about fifty staff have been learning the line-dance moves, the music and the words (the term “lyrics” here would be a misnomer). By the end of our rehearsal today, we seemed ready for the footlights - or at least for Monday’s performance at Senior School Assembly.

So: there is a corner in Margaret’s music library we never knew about: Country and Western, the land where dogs are true but men and women aren’t, and a man’s best friend is his truck. And for those of you who might feel generous, there is a hole in her library that Margaret is eager to fill but shy about advertising: the collected works of Billy Ray Cyrus.

We are currently looking to hire someone for a new position at the school, Director of Learning. A brief description of the position can be found here.

Over 25 years ago, I was at a conference where Howard Gardner first revealed his work on Multiple Intelligences. Gardner’s research altered how we view intelligence, shedding the old scaly skin of a definition of intelligence that consisted of mathematical and verbal ability. Seven types of intelligence exist, said Gardner (now eight, and, he speculates, possibly a ninth). He was originally a neuropsychologist, and his original area of study was brain-damage. He discovered that neutralizing different parts of the brain voided different mental processes; further study extrapolated these different parts of the brain into various operations that constituted intelligence. So people are intelligent in more ways than used to be thought. It has changed our understanding of the way students learn, and therefore has changed the way we teach.

Multiple Intelligences is the tip of the iceberg, you could say. Learning styles, identification of learning differences, perceptual differences, all constitute additions to our knowledge about how students learn. Likewise various other bits of scientific research. Experts say we have learned more in the past 25 years about how the brain functions than was known in the previous history of humanity. They are also fond of saying that even so, this field of study is in its infancy.

At our school, and in others, all this activity has had consequences. Our school’s ethos has long had faith in providing a whole range of opportunities to tug from students the energetic or the reluctant flower of their talents. So this direction is less a new departure than it is simply an evolution of this confirmed strength of our school. It is also consistent with our belief that it is important always to provide the best possible learning experience. Medicine, business, science all make use of the best research and practices; so should teaching and learning. The teacher who stood at the front expected everyone in the class to learn according to the way he or she taught has been supplanted by the teacher who detects and responds to the differences among the learners in the room. We believe that all learners possess differences in how they learn; we believe that assessment practices should be a means to increase learning rather than simply to test it – or worse, catch out mistakes or pockets of ignorance. A classroom today only rarely - if ever - functions in tidy rows. The classroom today rarely – if ever – asks the entire class to recite the same set of phrases. The classroom today doesn’t hold up the best and the brightest as the model for everyone else to emulate; it asks each student to find the spark and the means to fulfill his or her promise.

In the version of the School’s Strategic Plan that we adopted in 2005, we identified a number of key priorities in our approach to learning: differentiated instruction, more sophisticated and constructive assessment and evaluation practices, and a focus on a collaborative learning environment. We believe that every student has – or could have - a learning profile that helps the student, the parent and the teacher understand strengths and weaknesses so that the process of learning becomes more effective, more satisfying and more fulfilling. We have discovered that some students who in the bad old days would have been labelled slow, or difficult, or inattentive, are in fact quite bright, needing simply different approaches, some techniques suited to their strengths, intelligence, or learning style. We have discovered, furthermore, as would be expected, that students who fare quite well in most circumstances also have learning differences which, if identified and addressed, lead to improved performance. And we have discovered that the students who formerly might have been considered the best and the brightest also have their learning differences, and just like every other learner benefit from the adaptations made possible by better understanding how their brains operate. Everyone wins.

We have focused on this work for the past five years through the expertise and knowledge of our own staff, by means of staff visits to institutes such as All Kinds of Minds, and through substantial visits from experts in the field. Our staff is now invited elsewhere to share the results of our experience. We have come to the point where the progress we have made has reached a watershed: to implement the benefits of the research and exemplary practices schoolwide, and to oversee this process in a more orderly way, we can’t do it part time, but should bring on board someone whose area of expertise is this expanding domain of research and practices. Our ambition is to meet the needs of all learners, to bring forth from our students the great potential that is theirs.

Paul O'Brien with the Six String Nation Guitar, backed up by the Senior String Orchestra

The breadth, depth and quality of the evening was apparent with each ensemble. The highlight was a piece written by one of our parents, Paul O’Brien, and arranged by our Senior School music department head, Donna Williams, that put together the choir, the Senior String Orchestra and Paul O’Brien himself on vocals, in a tribute to Jowi Taylor. Jowi Taylor visited the school in the fall and revisited the school this week, bringing his tale of assembling Canadian culture in a single guitar crafted from pieces as disparate as a chunk of the Bluenose, a splinter of Wayne Gretzky’s hockey stick, whale bone, a slab of the Golden Spruce and dozens of other shreds of Canadian geography and history. The effort and inspiration necessary to make this performance a success are remarkable, and it was a moment not to be missed. Bravo!