Pupils
Drawing out unique potential
Gareth Turnbull-Jones describes the process of building a culture of student wellbeing through Cognitive Coaching and outdoor education At the beginning of 2013, I heard about an opportunity to be part of a start-up school called Halcyon London International School. The school would be the only not for profit, co-educational and exclusively International Baccalaureate (IB) school in central London. The prospect was exciting and not the type of opportunity that often comes around. The key to my interest was in the mission of the school, which is ‘to provide an exceptional education that draws out the unique potential of each student’ (Halcyon, 2019a). In particular, the ‘unique potential’ aspect stood out to me. It left me with the question ‘how can a school ensure it provides the opportunity for its students to reach their unique potential?’ When Halcyon opened to students in September 2013, there were just 33 students ranging from year seven to ten. The small number of students was key to meeting our mission. We developed a number of structures to support their wellbeing, of which one was to provide a vertical form group structure that we called Advisories. This provided an opportunity for students from different grades to interact with each other, which was especially important with small class sizes. The structure enabled students to make more social connections and feel welcomed in the school. Another element of the programme was to dedicate one hour a week to personal learning. During this time, students could work on any project they wished, thus providing an opportunity for individualised learning and the development of autonomous skills. Students utilised this time for a diverse range of activities, from working on mosaics to learning their mother tongue language, from developing apps to learning to juggle. As Halcyon grew, it became clear that more formal and research informed structures needed to be applied to maintain the individuality of the student experience. After two years, the school created a Senior Leadership position in student wellbeing. When I began as Student Wellbeing Leader, I spent the first year exploring research, visiting and observing model practices and analysing ideas from within our community. A few key elements from this research informed the development of a wellbeing policy. These included Cognitive Coaching training, school visits, the work of Kurt Hahn and The Outward Bound Trust Training as a cognitive coach and learning about the research associated with improving the efficacy of organisations (Costa and Garmston, 2015; Edwards, 2018) helped to provide the backbone to the policy. It was clear that in order to support a young person’s wellbeing, one must create an environment and culture that develops the skills to enable them to be self-
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Summer 2019
directed learners and critical thinkers. The practice of Cognitive Coaching can support this by developing active listening and meditative questioning skills. Through visiting other schools, it became evident that one-to-one relationships would allow Halcyon to have the framework to cognitively coach the students through their learning and social development and provide each student with their own personal staff advocate. One of the final pieces of developing the wellbeing policy connected to the outdoors. Whilst studying for an MA in International Education, I became an advocate of the work of Kurt Hahn. To gain a full understanding of his work, you should read Schools across Frontiers (Peterson, 2003), but, briefly, Hahn believed that education should be holistic, that people should not stand by in the face of injustice, and that people should pursue their passion. Hahn was influential in driving these ideals in education. With others, he founded several organisations that promote these beliefs, two of which were already being used at Halcyon - the International Baccalaureate and The Outward Bound Trust. The next steps would be to create with the Trust a continuum of outdoor learning that would support the structures used within the school. The aim of this outdoor programme would be to develop key affective skills (emotional management, perseverance, resilience, mindfulness and motivation) that would be important for developing selfdirection and supporting the wellbeing of students. After a year of exploration, a student wellbeing policy was put into place. The policy is wide-ranging (figure 1.) and by putting wellbeing at the heart of what we do it helps to frame conversations and decisions in all aspects of school life.
Figure 1. The multiple-facets covered within Halcyon’s Student Wellbeing Policy (Halcyon, 2019b)
