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HIS 2017 Graduation Principal Address Congratulations to you, the Class of 2017. As you come to the end of this important stage of your lives, this part that you may have thought would never end, we hope that you are feeling confident about the challenges that you will face over the coming years. Now that your schooling has ended, you are confronted with the harsh reality that you will now be treated by society, in many ways, as adults. This takes some adjustment. You have to review your own place in the world. After the stress of the final DP exams, when your world may have seemed to shrink into a recurring loop of study, stress and exam, the feeling of freedom and relief that you had expected when the…

[caption id="attachment_1194" align="alignnone" width="750"] Going further with your conversations. These two questions are posed to an Early Childhood 3&4 year-old class at HIS.[/caption] Our brains seek patterns. It’s the way we make sense of our world and it is also the way we learn. Conversational patterns are an important part of our world, particularly as they govern the nature of our interactions.  As we learn language initially from our earliest interactions, the ongoing conversations between parents and young children have a strong impact on not only our language development but of our view of the world and our place in it. We know that children of parents who speak to them a lot develop larger vocabularies. This seems like common sense. However, as Bari Walsh from Harvard Graduate School of…

The question about what makes a great teacher is an interesting one, particularly as we don't really know the answer. It is also an important one as much research suggests that the individual teacher is the single most important factor related to impacting learning in the classroom (For example, see Hattie, Visible Learning, 2009). As an IB school, experience teaching in an IB program is an advantage of course for teachers joining our school, along with their breadth of experience, however one of the most important qualities that a teacher can bring to HIS is a genuine interest in the student as a person, as an individual. This is also one of the most important qualities our students look for as you can see in the comments in the video above.…