Newton College
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Areas for sharing
- Instructional coaching
8 master teachers have been trained to be instructional coaches.
Every teacher goes through a two-week coaching cycle with the following steps:
1. Coachee sends a lesson plan to coach who observes him/her using a teaching rubric.
2. Coach and coachee have a meeting at which they discuss the lesson observed and in what key area to focus improvement.
3. Step 1 is repeated within 5 days.
4. Step 2 is repeated within 5 days.
5. Step 1 is repeated within 10 days.
6. After the third lesson observation the coach evaluates the progress made since the first observation and places the coachee on certain points of the teaching rubric.
Teachers go through this cycle once every two years. If they need intensive support, they go through this cycle more often. - Planning and delivery of the IB PYP
Clearly structured collaborative planning promotes constant evaluation and development of the written curriculum. Units have become more relevant, engaging and action-focused.
There is more latitude to the curriculum and students have more scope to follow their own line of inquiry.
The delivery of the curriculum strongly promotes inquiry, teamwork and thinking skills; students are guided towards constructing their own meaning.
Constant formative assessment promotes reflection and summative assessment focuses on understanding, skills and Learner Profile attributes. - Ethical guides
Our school values (Respect, Integrity, Commitment and Empathy) have been expanded into 10 specific conducts that reflect each of the values. So, we have the conducts expected of staff (Staff Ethical Guide), of parents (Parents Ethical Guide) and of students (Student Ethical Guide). The Staff and Parent guides were formulated two years ago with the active participation of staff and parents The Student guide was formulated by the Student Council and this year will be reviewed by staff before it is launched.
Our aim is for staff, parents and students to have a clear, common language with regard to values and for the model conducts that reflect the four school values to be highlighted.
Areas for development
- The use of data to provide international learning benchmarks: To analyse work climate, to evaluate processes and systems (e.g. sanctions and rewards)
- The effective use of a school information and management system to improve administrative efficiency: For example, we'd like to see SIMS or other systems that are being used effectively
- A conduct system that does not rely on rewards and sanctions: Where acceptable behaviour is nurtured by other means, where teachers are as much concerned about the emotional and social growth of their students as about their academic progress
Potential collaborative projects
- Teacher interchanges: Whereby a teacher may visit another school for about a week and learn about the school's strengths or its alternative processes and systems which could make us more efficient
- IB student interchanges with schools running a northern hemisphere calendar: So that our students could spend 4 weeks of their summer holiday (i.e. January and February) continuing their IB studies at the partner school
- Annual Friendship Olympiad: A school with which we could have an annual Friendship Olympiad in the major sports (football, basketball, volleyball, swimming, chess, etc). Each school would have teams of 20 girls and 20 boys who would represent them in all the sports (i.e. they would need to be good in at least two activities). The students could spend some of the day touring Lima, in classes with our students, training, etc. All the matches would be played after school so that there would be more spectators.
One year we would host the students, the following year they would host us. An appropriate age group would be 15-16 (i.e. pre-IB)