The focus of Grade 11 and 12 is around building academic rigour with respect to board exams and building critical college readiness skills. We aim to help each student gain admissions into the top two colleges of choice in India or abroad. Thus, critical process are followed not just to ensure good scores in grade 12 board exams but also help students identify their career and college options and help them gain admissions.
Tracking Performance and planning Intervention
Teaching is a constructive process and not a treatment wherein the final result achieved at the end is the key. During the process of teaching, teachers take into account children’s initial ideas which indicate to them children’s level of understanding. Thus, teachers are able to reflect while in the act of teaching about how to improvise on their teaching intervention plan. Therefore, during any given project or concept module, evidences of children’s learning (what they write, do, or say) are also collectively reflected upon by teachers during subject-specific faculty meetings which accounts for effective teacher-intervention in facilitating student mastery of a given concept.
Apart from this, the School has also developed a systematic process of Formative Assessments that promotes documentation of student learning, both qualitatively and quantitatively. Therefore, during any given project or concept module, evidences of children’s learning (what they write, do, or say) are also collectively reflected upon by teachers during subject-specific faculty meetings which accounts for effective teacher-intervention in facilitating student mastery of a given concept. The documentation of children’s formative assessment data allows teachers to make focussed intervention plans for further whole-class teaching, small group teaching, or individualised precision teaching for specific students on the basis of the analysis of assessment data.
Thereafter, towards the end of each concept or learning trajectory, a planned comprehensive Summative Assessment is taken up which stimulates reliable data-based decisions to evaluate the mastery of student learning per concept or skill.
Using Assessments and Data to Differentiate Instructions
The aim of teaching is to enable children to become protagonists in their own learning. Thus, assessment in neither merely of their learning nor also for their learning, alone; it is also done with the children to foster autonomy, independence and success in their learning. On the basis of a module or project-specific learning outcomes, teachers and children develop the criteria of self-assessment while learning a given concept or skill. Thus, the criteria-specific quantified data generated as a result of the various assessments enables them to collectively reflect upon the next steps very specifically. Beginning from whole class teaching which is pre-emptive in nature, to data-based decisions which are specifically preparatory in nature, to providing higher-level challenges to the advanced learners, data based evaluation of assessment data allows differentiation of instruction to take place, and not just remediation or filling in of learning deficits.
Further, data generated from skill-based and concept assessments conducted annually by organisations such as Jodo Gyan, and Asset across Junior and Middle School provide the School with critical points for evaluating the curriculum at large and lesson plans in particular.
GOAL SETTING WORKSHOPS
All students go through a series of goal setting workshops focussed on discovering their life’s values and purpose, career choices and more importantly discovering their goals for grade 12 and beyond. The process begins in class IX and helps students identify their strengths and limitations and the areas of improvement. Students learn to deal with their fears and develop courage to set their goals high. Students also articulate their targets for the next two years and these targets are reinforced and calibrated all through the year through follow up workshops and small group sessions.
ONE-ON-ONE MENTORING
We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied to a single garment of destiny. Mentoring enables us to participate in the essential but unfinished drama of reinventing community, while reaffirming that there is an important role for each of us in it. — Marc Freedman
In The Heritage School, in an academic focus mentoring structure, the teacher creates a setting and structure that brings academic issues to center stage and provides a natural context for mentoring to take place. Mentors are encouraged to assist their mentee with their academic goals, homework, and general support in school, guide families in development of individualized goals and learning plans to best support them through their academic challenges and successes.
Likewise in a socially focused mentoring structure, the social mentor or teacher creates a structure that brings social issues, interrelationships and conflict issues and its resolution to center stage with the primary focus to stimulate opportunities for social success in future, promote positive peer relationships and inculcate effective socialization skills. Mentors work with their mentees on breaking down social goals into smaller pieces and taking the steps necessary to complete each goal, reinforcing every small success while co-creating and shaping the next social skill to master. The mentoring system is built on a premise that many at-risk students may have no role model, no mentor, or worse a negative role model and may require constant handholding, consistent structure and effective strategies to develop the cognitive and social skills required for academic and social success.
One to one Mentoring, still nascent in its process, is currently limited to a teacher student relationship and the course of its success is tracked with impressive results in both social and academic domains.
Student Counselling
Student counseling focuses on the emotional, intellectual, physical, occupational and social development of students. The emphasis is on the students’ self-awareness, skill building, mental health and well being to foster success in meeting their academic goals and in life. The services are preventative and educational in nature and emanates from a developmental perspective. Counselors assist individuals with expressing emotions, solving personal problems, and understanding oneself better. Workshops and group counseling on life skill development, strengthening emergent positive work habits, handling peer relationships and adolescent issues are taken up on periodic basis by specialists and eminent psychologists. Individual counseling on mental health issues involves understanding stress, depression and anxiety as well as concerns about academic progress, daily living, adjustment to senior school and relationships with others. The one to one interaction is a walk in process and appointment can be obtained based on parents’/ teachers’ referral and on a student’s request.
Counseling in The Heritage School is a great opportunity to talk about issues that are of concern to students with trained and experienced Counselors who have the expertise to help them develop skills and view situations in ways that may enable them to be more effective in managing life’s challenges down the road.
PARENT COUNSELLING
To love one’s children is to be in complete communication with them:
It is to see that they have the right kind of education that will help them to be sensitive, intelligent and integrated”
– J Krishnamurti
Children learn by watching and by role modeling. Unless parents learn the life lessons first, they can’t possibly model them for their children. Counseling demonstrates the need to coach adults (as parents)on how to work on their own issues and expectations in addition to recommending them ways to deal with their children’s issues. Individual sessions pertaining to resolving immediate family conflicts, handling crisis, correcting improper communication styles, identifying possible stressors and developing effective response to intervention is sensitively handled by the School Counselor and referred to Specialists where required.
Parenting sessions, taken up by specialists, on the other hand are group interactions wherein parents of students of the same grade reflect on the purpose of education, share healthy parenting practices, understand the developmental growth and the resultant physiological and psychological changes in children, discuss cultural and societal expectations and their role as a community in fulfilling them. General parenting skills and strategies are also shared by teachers, who are experienced, trained and have a good understanding of the child in discussion, during PTA meetings. Guiding parents in unfolding course and career choices and make conscious choices as a family unit are undertaken by the guidance counselor, teachers and specialists in the senior grades.
Individual and group parent counseling takes place periodically. Individual Counseling and recording of the Developmental Profile in the very first year of admission is the beginning of all interactions wherein the general profile of the home environment is understood, the parenting style and expectations of the parents comprehended while the parents are made aware of the School System and learning process in School. Academic and Parenting Workshops with the parents of the economically weaker section students is conducted, along with the general population and individually, to equip then with the required guidance while they understand their rights, role and responsibility as parents. The workshops are tailor made to their needs so that they feel valued and accepted in the School and understood what an Inclusive School setup looks like.
