Strategic Direction 2025+
Community Information & Engagement
I want to thank parents for the great engagement we have experienced this term during various sessions we have organised to discuss our new strategy. The size of the gatherings, and the quality of questions and observations, have inspired me to write to the whole community.
I also want to share the communications that were carefully planned to meet different community needs at different times.
-
Materials which have been shared since the summer include:
-
Cypress Magazine (1,691 online views + 9,398 social media views + 500 print copies for current and prospective)
-
Website content (725 visits from 542 visitors)
-
Printed booklet (1,000 copies for current and prospective families)
-
Interview video with students (5,796 social media views)
-
Overview video (117 website views)
-
Short form video (4,419 social media views + shared at Open Houses with prospective families)
-
Social media reel (4,326 views)
-
On campus posters and screen content
-
-
Community event and discussion opportunities this fall have included:
-
Presentation by Homa Tavangar from the Big Questions Institute to parents (75 attendees) and faculty/staff
-
Presentation by Professor Po Shen Loh, math professor at Carnegie Mellon University, to parents (115 attendees), faculty/staff as well as classroom and teacher engagement
-
Open Door sessions with me, introducing the new direction (65 attendees over 3 in person sessions - including 1 with Manardin translation - and 1 virtual)
-
Coffee with Craig sessions, for follow up discussion on this and other topics (30 attendees over two sessions). These will continue, with registration available here.
-
In the new year, there will be a series of in-depth Open Door sessions, hosted by various members of the leadership team. I hope you will register for topics that particularly interest you:
-
January 28th: Excellence in Teaching
Mike Moore, Assistant Head of School & Rupi Samra-Gynane, Deputy Head of School -
February 24th: The Importance of Belonging
Olaolu Adeleye, Director of Equity, Justice & Belonging -
April 1st: Systems Transformation
Kailan Leung, Senior School Vice Principal -
April 22nd: AI in Education & Beyond
Fareed Teja, Director of Learning Technology -
May 11th: Innovative Fundraising, Recruitment & Retention
Elizabeth Calderon, SVP Advancement & Nadine Pettman, Executive Director of Development & Engagement
To summarise the feedback so far, these are the three areas that have stood out as common themes:
-
World Class Teaching and Learning - what does this mean in detail?
-
Systems Thinking - what is it and why is it so important as a strategic priority?
-
AI - we are embracing the opportunities, but what is our plan related to the impact on universities and the world of work outside Mulgrave?
In addressing areas 1 and 2, a ‘hot off the press’ update relates to the recent evening parent session we had with Dr Jenny Gillett, who was visiting us from IB headquarters in The Hague. Dr Gillett is in charge of all new IB innovations as they seek to adapt education to fit the needs of 2025 and beyond. In that capacity, she is overseeing the four schools globally that are launching the Systems Transformation Pathway (a new Grade 11 and 12 course). At the session, our current students talked about their experience so far along with a presentation from our Senior School VP, Kailan Leung, about the course details. Dr Gillett gave us a report from the other schools in the UK, Singapore, and Toronto, and shared extremely positive and reassuring university destination data from the first graduating cohort in the UK.
We confirmed with Dr Gillett our ambitions to backwards map systems thinking as a necessary toolkit for all students and our Grade 11 students discussed their first experience of going into a Grade 3 class to share their thinking with our Junior School students doing project work on sustainability. Our strategic intent to integrate systems thinking across the curriculum was praised and validated by our visiting expert.
Dr Gillett also shared that the assessment methodology for the Systems Transformation course provides a template for reliable and scalable summative assessment that can resist AI duplication, if managed carefully. The course culminates in a six hour, day long case study exercise that represents the best of future facing assessment and real world application. We believe it is robust and challenging, but ultimately rewarding. It is certainly more relevant than the traditional two hour examination experience that rewards a far narrower set of skills and application. This experience provides a strategic example of how assessment can retain the characteristics that universities require to fully evaluate student performance and ground our students in the real world skills and dispositions they will need in an age of AI where memory recall and pure knowledge retention will inevitably disappear.
This leads me to share the learnings we gained from hosting our AI expert for a day of interaction, Professor Poh Shen Loh from Carnegie Mellon University in the USA. His message was clear: AI disruption will affect every element of traditional education and work routines. We have to face the fact that AI will dominate all domains of learning, including the social and emotional. His suggestion to schools and students in the face of this reality is to double down on the question of what it means to be human and the even more importantly, consideration of purpose in life. To be blunt, he told students that AI is not currently ‘consciously’ invested in considerations of life or death or the meaning of life, so we have an opportunity to amplify ‘human-ness’ in the face of the increasing boundary expansion of thinking machines. Therefore, in response, education should focus on character, values, purpose, relational capacity and stimulating curiosity. He recommends that all students be exposed to the skills, communication, and confidence building found in ‘improv classes’. When the future means that university and professional credentialing will become less and less relevant, every human needs to develop their own genuine networks of friends and connections based on a real thirst to ‘authentically relate’, build community, and work together on a purposeful goal. He believes future employers will want young people who are genuinely interested in helping others and genuinely curious about knowledge and life. In a world where AI will complete an increasing number of tasks, the humans entrusted to manage this very same technology will have to be deeply genuine, mission aligned, and values driven individuals committed to helping others. That way, the dialogue between human and machine will be fruitful and reciprocal.
Any individual who has been ‘trained’ to merely be transactional, in other words, to chase grades and reputational university places as a means to secure a limited definition of success and prosperity, will ultimately fall short.
On that front, Professor Loh’s network expertise report on the system of university education was rather bleak. Universities are in the worst position to address AI because academics work in singular subject silos, are tasked to prioritise securing research grants with few institutional incentives to work across disciplines to address the completely new learning needs of 18-25 year olds. His suggestion to parents was to encourage their children to make friends with young people around the world and develop their own genuine networks because having a friend at Harvard in the future will be way more important than actually going to Harvard. In essence, universities that survive will become more about places to connect with others and develop your network and less about securing professional, employable credentials. In my own conversation with him backstage, we both saw the huge advantage in network growth and making connections via a gap year of global travel. Food for thought…
In summary, this is my manifesto for education in the face of AI. Schools should:
-
Cultivate authentic student curiosity and a love of learning.
-
Be more explicit in addressing human purpose, meaning, and our relational responsibilities intrinsically embedded within the natural world.
-
Increase service opportunities so students can flex their ‘compassion muscles’
-
Create regular learning experiences that develop interpersonal confidence, such as theatres sports, improv, socratic dialogues, debates and other mechanisms that ensure every student develops interpersonal confidence, not just those with extrovert personalities
I appreciate your thoughts - please feel free to add a comment here.