Our Values
To succeed at anything, we must know what success in that thing looks like. The best way to fail is to forget what you are actually trying to achieve. In last week’s Thistle Talk I wrote about the school’s mission statement. We want students who become ‘thriving global citizens’.
Any sensible set of aims takes into account. Countries fighting wars rarely try to win at any cost: with one notable exception, nuclear powers do not drop their bombs, even when the going gets tough. They might succeed in defeating their enemy but the cost of success is not worth paying.
I once visited a school whose mission was ‘to achieve the best A Level results in the country.’ The cost of their success in this was to put a great deal of stress on students and their families, and a high university dropout rate when those students proved unable to sustain their performance. No doubt there were many other negative effects that were less easy to measure.
It is essential to have a mission, but just as important to have a set of values that both guide what success looks like and moderates how it is achieved. At ISA we have adopted the International Baccalaureate’s Learner Profile. We already offer their diploma programme and are moving towards adopting IB in our middle school. More importantly, the IB is the first educational system with multicultural students in mind; the first to have a vision of citizenship that doesn’t stop in our region or our nation. And since the 1960s its evolution has been guided by committed educators, free from political interference.
There are ten learner profile traits, and we have adopted them as the values of our school. Some help students become more effective learners, others more effective citizens. Please click on the link and take time to see what they are - we shall be referring to them more and more through the year.
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