Over the course of these five reflective pieces we have aspired to recount the journey our school has taken over the past five years. A journey of aspiration towards becoming what our strategy described as a Learning, Innovating & Leading school.
In the first piece we described the choice we made to focus on becoming a school built for continuous improvement: a school that learns.
In the second and third pieces we laid out some arguments for what that learning should look like, first for teachers and then for students. We also sought to acknowledge attempts we have made at elevating teaching and learning at our school to those aspirations. These efforts have been successful in fits and starts but we are still far from achieving the transformation we aspire to. Together, these pieces so far tell the story of how we’ve become clearer about what we aspire to, and clearer on what has not worked.
Before we turn our attention to the future and begin to chart our path forward, it is useful to first take stock of the present. First, we should recognize that the world has undergone some important changes since our school first started welcoming students 15 year ago. Most saliently the intersection of technology, learning and childhood development has progressed rapidly. In some ways these changes are empowering and accelerating learning. At the same time, evidence is mounting about the relationship between declining child mental health and the tech-enabled onslaught on attention and agency. Schools must respond to this shifting reality.
Second, our school was founded on a clear mission, and that mission persists. While learning is valuable in its own right, as is community, we seek to put both forces in service of a larger aim: leadership in service of the African continent. This brings our task for school improvement into sharper relief. We seek to become a school that learns. More specifically, we seek to become a school that learns, together, in service of African leadership.
With this in mind, a synthesis of our beliefs about the school emerges:
We view schools as intentional communities: students and staffulty gather as learners; learning is pursued for its own sake and in service of aims greater than ourselves. We view community as both the vehicle for and outcome of shared learning. We foreground an audacious mission, shared values and founding beliefs in the construction of our rhythms, rituals and routines.
Many selective residential institutions exist across the continent and around the world. The model of investing a great deal in a small group of people is not new. However, many such schools in the African context have historically served the aim of reproducing existing relations of power, ALA aims to disrupt these relations.
The next iteration of our school will be guided by the following principles, synthesized from the past five years of iteration and guided by knowledge in the field:
Deep Understanding (Quality of Understanding)
We believe that deep, powerful, learning comes from deep, extended focus. Deep learning requires procedural fluency and conceptual understanding. This means time to engage in rich, and richly challenging tasks, individually and in groups. We believe that fewer, better designed, more coherent tasks should guide on-going self-guided practice and reflection. We believe in drafting and taking the time to get things right before moving on.
To this end, we believe that the most powerful learning technologies have existed for millenia: reading, writing and discussion. These are keystone practices that must be protected, fostered and leveraged. While schools must keep apace with the rich supplementary resources made available by technology, we must protect against the onslaught on our attention. Ban phones?
Teachers, Learners, Scholars (Quality of Learning)
We believe that schools should be communities of scholarship. Everyone is learning to learn. All learners are agentic, with appropriate voice and choice in their learning journey. Teachers are students of at least two disciplines: their subject and teaching. Teachers must have time in the school day and school week to engage in this scholarship. Simultaneously, students are working to acquire disciplinary knowledge (conceptual and procedural) across the curriculum, but also to acquire the skills, habits and mindsets of scholarship. To be a scholar is to be guided by the rigor of our disciplines, to become collective producers of knowledge.
Moreover,we believe that learning should be challenging. A good challenge stretches us into the zone of proximal development; a bad challenge is either too challenging (and thus dispiriting) or not challenging enough (and thus unhelpful). All learners in a community ought to be challenged appropriately, with time to gather feedback, reflect and consolidate their learning. Moreover, when we view learning in this way, we recognize that learning to learn is also learning to cultivate resilience (mental, emotional, physical). We recognize, further, that one role of a learning community is to reduce or remove unnecessary and unproductive obstacles. Learning requires vulnerability, which in turn feeds on trust and belonging. We can be uncomfortable, we can take risks, but we should not feel unsafe.
Work as Wellbeing (Quality of Life)
We believe that good health and wellbeing in all their dimensions are intertwined with good work. Exercise, sleep and a healthy diet are keystones of physical health. Planning, reflection, growth and positive relationships are keystones of mental health. A sense of productive contribution to humanity, purpose, is a keystone of fulfilment (spiritual health?). When we lower the bar, or reduce the challenge, we risk stymying the resilience and meaningful empowerment (dare we say liberation?) which produces healthy people.
The next evolution of ALA’s learning program will leverage the lessons of the first 15 years and mine the landscape of current and near-future education insights. At the same time, ALA will remain grounded in a commitment to its audacious mission, curious culture and aspiration toward lifelong learning.
Much of this thinking is not new. Parallels can be found at great schools and centres of learning across the ages. We should be heartened by this affirmation. We also recognize that versions of these aspirations have been articulated at ALA since the outset and yet their manifestations have failed to take deep root.
There are two key levers for making this next design process successful: time & culture. We must reallocate time to enable the deep thinking which drives the learning we care about (for students and teachers alike); and we must instil the culture (in particular the habits!) which drives the engine of behaviour.
New initiatives have already begun to take shape which we hope will bring these aspirations to fruition. In this academic year we have been be testing new approaches to the calendar and timetable which reduce contact hours and allocate time towards independent and collaborative work. We are also revisiting our approach to teaching reading and writing in our Seminal Readings program, implementing more workshop-model approaches. For these changes to be successful, teachers will need to learn to teach differently and students will need time and explicit guidance to learn how to learn. The success of these initiatives will depend on a rejuvenation of our culture. A culture which must be built on a foundation of shared values, core habits, collective accountability and intrinsic motivation.
Want to learn more about academics at ALA? Read more here or watch the video below!
