Dear Parents and Students
It was another eventful week. After spending the weekend and first part of the week in Switzerland at the annual conference for Principals and Senior Leaders from across the world with Nord Anglia Education, I returned to school to watch some fantastic learning during No Pens Day, Wednesday. Please read Mr Nick’s article for more information.
The focus of the conference was on educating our students for the future. This involved impressive presentations from representatives from Apple and other experts involved with implementing a modern curriculum in the classroom.
As most of you will know, the partnership Nord Anglia has with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has recently been introduced to NAISAK, which is extremely exciting. MIT sent Justin Reich who was a keynote speaker. I found him to be inspirational. He had many practical ideas and suggestions about how to develop an inter-disciplinary curriculum that ensures students have the skills and knowledge they need to gain admissions to top universities like MIT and for life beyond school. A central mantra to his presentation was ‘innovation through iteration’, which is sound advice for our curricular developments at NAISAK. In both the Primary and Secondary Schools, we have made several improvements to our course offering, which are allowing us to better realise the vision we launched last December. This has taken a considerable amount of planning, implementing and will involve reflecting on how we can further improve the way we deliver our Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics (STEAM) provision across the school. In Primary, we are also offering an integrated curriculum, which has taken a topic-based approach that will allow for students to make connections across the subjects. In Secondary, we are looking forward to welcoming an expert from Fieldwork Education on Saturday, who will work with us as we deliver our first unit from the International Middle Years Curriculum (IMYC) in the second part of term 1.
Yours faithfully
Dave Pontich
Principal