On Friday, 24 May 2019 our school hosted its first International Festival of Education. More than 50 presenters shared a wide range of ideas about pedagogy, technology, arts, gender, sport and new research in education. Presenters came from Spain, United Kingdom, France, Switzerland, Afghanistan, Czech Republic and Belgium. Session participants were a mixture of Le Rosey staff, students, and external visitors. There was a palpable festival atmosphere, including ten parallel high-tec venues, outdoor food stalls, glorious weather and live musical performances by students.
The Festival was a nod in the direction of the EduFest at Wellington College, which I attended in June 2018 (for a summary of my experience there, visit this blog entry). Our opening keynote speaker was Sir Anthony Seldon, former headmaster of Wellington College—his participation was a way of confirming the importance and validity of the entire event. We also had a ResearchEd strand, with several of the key researcher/presenters I had heard at Wellington: Tom Bennet, Professor Paul Kirschner, Pedro De Bruyckere and David Didau.
However, there were a number of features that were unique to our Festival:
- Students were part of the event in many ways. First of all, our older students (16-17 year olds) attended a number of the general sessions together with adults. This led to several presenters making comments that would directly speak to students’ interests and experiences. Secondly, additional workshops and activities (the Rubbish Science, Sport Analytik, Hyper-Relist Art and The Omelette Challenge) were all organised especially to appeal to some of our younger students. Thirdly, student were “ambassadors”, greeting all presenters and external visitors, and directing them to the different venues. Fourthly, students were the tech crew, and each festival venue had two students there to ensure that sound, lighting, and temperature were all as requested by the speaker. Last but not least, students provided musical entertainment throughout the day at different venues, showcasing their talent and enhancing the festival atmosphere.
- There was a clear focus on International Education. Research and best practices were not discussed in terms of Ofsted reports, UK exam results and the Department for Education initiatives. PISA data was referenced, as well as research from Japan, Canada, Belgium and other countries. In fact, our conference, as our school, was bilingual, with keynote sessions offered in simultaneous translation and a range of options in both English and French language.
- @WomenEd Panels and sessions allowed attendees to focus on educating girls in developing countries, supporting them to participate in athletics, and how to grow gender diversity in leadership.
In this first entry on the Festival, I want to reflect on Tom Bennett‘s talk, “Creating a culture: What does evidence tell us about getting the best from our students?”, which focused on the importance of explicitly teaching students the behaviours you want to see. He invited us to consider which are the behaviours that will help students flourish, to articulate those clearly, and to provide students with the opportunity to learn and practise them. “Self-regulation takes effort” he explained, so there will always be slip ups and opportunities to fine-tune behaviours, but first of all the classroom culture (I would argue the school culture) needs to be established with very clear guidelines. Bennett offers three recommendations:
- Use social norms to set the trend in the classroom. Most students will conform to clear guidelines, and then they can help support the expectations.
- Develop clear routines. Routines help train students on how to respond to different situations, in light of the behaviour expectations.
- Give regular formal/informal feedback, such as a system of rewards and penalties. Students need to understand there are clear consequences for infractions.
The reason this session struck me was because it speaks to our school’s effort to develop a strong culture around attitude and effort. We have written a rubric that clearly outlines the values (attitude, academic habits, organisation, respect, courage) that we seek to enocurage, and we have explicitly described the behaviours we wish to see within each of those areas. We have aligned our system of rewards to this assessment, and we are moving to using this tool as a springboard for a healthy discussion with students. This means we are getting something right. However, what we need now is to work on applying this rubric more consistently across the teaching staff. The rubric is a tool for assessing student behaviour— but it doesn’t hold an objective truth. Given that any rubric must be interpreted to be applied, our effort as a school must include a strong campaign for how it is meant to be used, including some type of internal moderation. That way, we will all work towards developing a culture where behaviour expectations are clear and students have the means to respond positively to them.