Developing a Shared Understanding of High-Quality Learning (SUHQL)

If you are a regular Oryx reader and take an active interest in the school’s development, you will be aware that WIS is currently in the re-accreditation phase with the New England Association of Schools and Colleges (NEASC). The main driver of this accreditation is teaching and learning – the NEASC ACE protocol – where the school examines 10 Learning Principles and rates itself in each one of them on a scale from “not yet evident” to “what if”. 

As part of this work with the 10 Learning Principles, we are also reviewing our understanding of what high-quality learning looks like. This is meant to be a collaborative process. At the WPN coffee morning, we already got some input from parents who attended the coffee morning and at the staff workday today, staff will reflect on this and come up with a proposed SUHQL. This will then be shared with students and parents again for their input. 

Let your voice count and give your input so that this can be a SHARED understanding of what high-quality learning should look like in a WIS context!

Our MYP Coordinator, Mr. von Wrede-Jervise is sharing with us his reflection on what this SUHQL should look like for WIS. Take a few minutes to engage with these thoughts and feel free to add yours by sending them to M. Reiff (mreiff@wis.edu.na).

 In recent times schools have been wrestling with what their purpose should be. Given the prevalence of exams, one of those visions is about getting behind the science of memory. They raise the flag for Cognitive Load Theory combined with Direct Instruction, in which learning is equated to recall potential. It sells the narrative that learning is about a series of facts that must be slipped past working memory and repeatedly recalled for their own end. 

In this paradigm exams are perfect tools for testing the recollection of these snippets of information. The purpose is to rank good memorisers from bad ones and send the good ones for a repeat of this process at higher education so we can pay them more. At this point they are compliant to the system and extractive in their very outlook. 

I teach very didactically. I cannot raise objection to the notion of Direct Instruction. However, I embed everything I teach in story. Knowledge should never, in my opinion, be diced into tiny pieces for test success. That doesn't make for healthy citizens. 

We learn because every student needs to find their place in the stories told. They need to hear stories in the hope that they rise up and decide to be one of those that wants to participate in the story and go make a difference. 

I will advocate for Direct Instruction but not as a butcher selling preprocessed meat but rather as an elder who holds counsel around the village fire and inspires the next generation of his/her tribe to rise up and make a difference. 

That's a vision for education I can get behind and it is one that WIS is standing for: "Learning is a process in which students discover their place in a shared story."

It's short but it says a lot in the unspoken spaces – it implies many things that I think we all believe in. It ties to our new school motto "Be yourself," but couches that sentiment in a collective framework – implying social (and wider) responsibility and action based on relationships.

It is also deeply embedded in research. Do Stories Actually Help Students Learn? Well, yes, according to the research, by about 50% more. Dan Willingham loves them. Why? Because our brains privilege this type of information. 

Most compelling to me Mary Helen Immordino Yang argues, "Adolescents on the path to higher levels of academic achievement and self-actualisation showed cognitive and emotional dispositions toward both concrete and abstract meaning-making in their narratives. They constructed a compelling story for themselves that integrates information about the individual situations, facts, actions, and emotions that seem most salient, and then effortfully deliberated on this story by connecting to larger patterns, systems, beliefs, or values they have been exposed to that seem pertinent. 

The result is a narrative that explains the here-and-now in terms of a bigger, deeper, personally relevant, and intellectually satisfying understanding."

Here at WIS we want students to both be themselves and remain connected enough to the stories around them that they will stand up and be changemakers in the world around them. And heaven knows we need those people right now.

Margarete Reiff

High School Principal/Deputy Director & Career Guidance Counsellor