Torch - Spring 2017

Senior School students organize lunchtime STEM panels to highlight the various careers available in science, technology, engineering and math.

school, luck has nothing to do with it. Our strategic plan Havergal 2020: Our Vision is Limitless guides us in connecting every girl to her dreams, favourite activities, learning and community. It’s no accident that our broad educational strategies tap into what matters most to students as they advance through the years: creativity and curiosity for our youngest learners, growing independence for our Middle School girls and an expanding community network for our Senior School students, who increasingly take their active thinking out into the world beyond Havergal. These strategies build student engagement by accentuating what students care about at each stage of development. We’ll leave you with this thought: a 2006 High School Survey of Student Engagement explains why students tune out in class:

75 per cent said the material wasn’t interesting, 39 per cent said it wasn’t relevant and 32 per cent said it wasn’t challenging enough. 2 This is an American survey of public schools, so the numbers don’t apply to our context, but the survey does reveal what students need in order to feel engaged. Our role at Havergal is to take those needs seriously at all levels and in all areas of school life. That’s why we have such a strong emphasis on inquiry and thinking (challenge), connections to the real world (authenticity) and students’ own interests (relevance). Whether our girls are collecting leaves to study lines and surfaces, asking questions about what history reveals and hides or engineering a solution for a shifting slope, their engagement in the task is evident. And those tasks are designed, of course, by teachers who fill our girls with excitement about the future.

2 http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED495758.pdf

SPRING 2017 • TORCH 15