Inspire, Evolve, Endeavour
Once upon a time, teaching and teachers weren’t cool. “Those who can’t, teach” went the phrase, a humorous slight labelled at those in a profession where they read the pages of books instead of writing them, chalked up numbers on boards instead of inputting them through a computer code in a high-tech lab. Teachers were stuffy, middle aged, dreary and dull. They taught directly from a dog eared textbook, read out their assemblies from tomes entitled “Book of Assemblies” each containing a moral tale for you to absorb, rather than interact with, as you sat on the linoleum floor of the hall.
But those days are in the past, confined to realms of history like the Imperial System (that’s right, in pockets, this teaching does still exist). When we look at our teachers, we no longer want them to simply impart knowledge from the pages of textbooks, sitting and talking for hours on end, marking with their red pens, we need them to inspire, to excite, prompt and engage the students.
In a single year they’re going to be spending as much time with the children in their class as their parents do. And, if we are shaped as much by nurture as we are by nature, then you quickly understand how imperative it is to have role models in the classroom, people that not only teach and enable children to learn skills and knowledge, but have them yearning to go beyond that, to achieve, to expand, to ‘reach for the stars’.
In order to do this, it’s about a willingness to be involved, to be a presence in all aspects of school life. We do not want teachers sitting behind their desk in the classroom and they don’t - we have teachers participating in running races alongside the children, taking them to the theatre so they share an experience and can speak and discuss what has occurred in the moment. We have yearly residentials, with teachers competing against children on the go-kart track, paddling down the rivers of Yekaterinburg on rafts, slaloming down the local ski slopes and drifting across the ice rinks.
Inside the classroom, when it comes to promoting writing and the reasons to produce it, what’s more exciting; reading a random text or having the teacher conjure something that involves the class, that breathes life into it. I have your attention. Here is what I can do, now go and do it better.
We have teachers who are authors, who have created costumes for performances at the Marinsky, who have finished in the top three of Russian wide beauty and talent competitions, who speak three languages, played professional football, and competed on China’s Project Runway. We employ teachers who are not just outstanding educators in the classroom, but exciting and interesting outside of it too. They bring this energy, creativity and charisma to the school and it engages the students. Our students become part of lessons that have been made to inspire them - Pop Art t-shirts with an Ancient Egyptian twist won’t be found in the pages of a textbook. Building boats from scratch with the help of the 3D printer to set sail down the Neva won’t be undertaken by the lazy and unimaginative. You come to school to be invigorated, to leave at the end of the day excited at the learning and yearning for more. As a school we set out our values to Inspire, Evolve and Endeavour. The only way students will achieve this is when our staff leads by example.
