Keynote highlights were Dr Helen Street on wellbeing, mental health, diversity, discrimination, belonging, autonomy, agency – “the pursuit of wellbeing in schools is not working”.

Michael McQueen on the future of education and his comments on Virtual Reality and the Metaverse – “Best practice doesn’t stay best practice for long.”

There was an excellent student voice panel on the importance of curricula decolonisation, connection, open-mindedness, respect of pronouns, and belonging. “Young people must be taught open mindedness, to resist echo chambers and to listen to the voices outside those echo chambers.” (Char Palmer, Woodleigh School student).

I attended a couple of MYP workshops facilitated by Nat Erbes. Tension between structure and flexibility has swung too far towards structure, need to make the curriculum work for us, the MYP is a flexible framework, learner experience at the centre, encourage innovation, incorporate pedagogical/adolescent development research, from a single model to a framework that supports multiple approaches, moving from service learning to community engagement, design for coherence.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My favourite workshop was with Ted Cowan and Rebecca Smith from UWC Singapore on Approaches to Wellbeing. They spoke about belonging and shared vision, psychological culture and relationship culture. I particularly appreciated their reference to engaging and enhancing student voice and hearing about the relationship mapping project with Harvard’s Making Caring Common.

Olli Pekka-Heinonen, IB Director General closed the conference stating, “We are in-between worlds. The practices and mental models of the old world create an existential crisis. We don’t have the words for it or see it properly yet.”