From the Principal
Principles into Practice
On Thursday and Friday of last week I had the great pleasure of welcoming our IB Primary Years Programme Verification Team to Arlington.
This visit was the culmination of months of intensive preparation undertaken by our outstanding teachers, supported and inspired by Cressida Batterham-Wilson and Natalie Jensen in their respective roles. I relished the opportunity to have Cressida, Natalie and each member of the teaching staff acknowledged for the depth of thought and commitment they bring to their collaboration and the quality of learning that is taking place in their classrooms and across the whole school program.
The School is required to ensure that every aspect of its professional practice is documented and articulated. Classrooms are scrutinised to observe how ‘visible’ the learning is for children, teaching plans, assessment practices and how the program fits together across the year levels and the subject areas.
At the end of the visit both members of the verifying team reaffirmed the extraordinary quality of relationships between members of the teaching and leadership teams and between the teachers and children. Trust, respect and warmth underpin this culture and, in turn, give rise to the curiosity, imagination and confidence which characterise Preshil children.
The unique environment at Arlington, with the welcoming homestead-style of rooms, the rambling gardens, cubbies and the endless invitations to children to explore, climb and build are all deliberate aspects of the School’s enduring approach to authentic learning.
What surprised and delighted me was the enthusiasm our verifiers expressed for one of the School’s key documents. The ‘Arlington Curriculum Handbook’ is an enormous tome of some 185 pages, which was written and collated in 2008 at a time in Preshil’s development when it was feared that the School could lose some of the unique learning practices that had defined it as truly progressive. This document set out to identify the key beliefs about learning, the School’s values and enshrined cultural events with the intention of clearly describing how each of these elements was represented in the day-to-day teaching and learning.
The handbook is a remarkable achievement in itself. What is particularly satisfying for us, as we approach 2020, is how strongly it aligns with the approach to the PYP we have built at Arlington. Recognising this alignment allows everyone at Arlington to take heart that the determination we have shared, over the last decade, to preserve our unique heritage and to find contemporary ways of expressing these powerfully held beliefs - in the face of ever-encroaching compliance, standardisation and competition - has been successful and acknowledged.
This week, as we watch again in awe as our treasured Anthology Week unfurls its magic on another group of young writers, we can take heart that Arlington has found a powerful and protective partner in the International Baccalaureate Primary Years Programme.
Marilyn Smith
Principal