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LAHC
Sharing expertise for school improvement

Hiram Bingham School

Hiram Bingham
  1. Study trips within Peru as part of our MYP transdisciplinary work: We take complete year groups for 3 or 4 days to different part of Peru and students work on connected maths/geography/history/art, etc projects plus in all cases a social service element
  2. The Diploma programme in general: We have 20 years' experience teaching the Diploma and have always approached this as an inclusive programme for ALL of the year group and in which ALL (or almost all) of the year group take the full Diploma. We have an average of 80% of the entire year group gaining the Diploma
  3. Our social service programmes: These are an obligatory part of the normal curriculum for all students from Grade 6 onwards. I would not claim that every student who leaves our school has a highly developed social conscience, but I would say that the majority do and many carry this into their post school lives
  1. Educating parents: We find that parents are becoming more and more of a problem - they don't provide limits on the behaviour of their children, overprotect them, never accept their children might be in the wrong about something, etc. I think it's a worldwide problem so what are colleagues doing? We offer lots of workshops, but then the parents we most need to attend are precisely those who don't come!
  2. Design (product, technology) across the whole school: This is an area where we have almost no experience and would greatly appreciate advice on how to get started and what pitfalls to avoid
  3. Integrating the house system: How to make a house system part of the day to day fabric of a school, rather than a way of organising intermittent competitions?
  1. Teacher exchanges (short, eg ten days, are easiest to organise, but something longer is not impossible)
  2. Sports exchanges: For example in basketball or volleyball and which include home hosting to make it more of a cultural and becoming an independent experience, rather than just staying in a hotel with classmates and not having much contact with the host country children
  3. Something connected with online learning: I don't have this very clear in my head, but I think we could make more use of the academic strengths of teachers from our schools in helping each other in our academic areas for development, by providing at least a few online classes