The Heartbeat of Lebone.
by Gerda VAN WYNGAARDT
When I
started at Lebone I was confused, it was a new experience, completely unknown to
me and I felt like an outsider. Within 4 days time I felt more at home and a
part of the school. Every day we had meetings with Mr Thomas and Mr Prins, and
they encouraged us to interact more rather than just to observe our classes and
to capture everything in our journals. Also not just to observe everything in
our classes, but to observe everything happening at Lebone as a whole (teachers,
students, and the system) critically. Mr Prins captured my attention with a
metaphor of the iceberg, one can look at it from a distance and wonder or you
can get geared up and start a journey towards it to find the invisible. A great
metaphor to be used in the writing of this essay where my main question is:
“What creates the heartbeat of a School?” for example Lebone.
We
start to look at the teachers at Lebone. They are motivated and have this
positive air around them, and this gets carried over to the students, making
them more motivated and eager to learn and do well in their academics. The
interaction between the students and the teachers is magnificent; all the
learners greet me every morning on my way up to Mr. Thomas office. Then you get into the office and all the staff
members are so friendly and welcome you to the school wanting to hear how you
are and what your weekend was like. Personally I experienced that the teachers
are striving to do better and to enrich the students. They aim to make a
difference every day, to do the best they can and then even better and
beyond. If we look at the iceberg metaphor
again then I can compare the teachers as the gear they need to get to the
iceberg, by providing them with the correct knowledge and skills they will need
when reaching this iceberg, and to be able to see the invincible, being their
possible future success.
The
students are still young and lively, you can see in their eyes they want to be
part of the journey towards the iceberg, or at least I would say 80% of them.
In every school you have those ones that just attend school and go forward,
they are on this journey and when the iceberg is reached then they will just
stay stuck on the boat looking from nearby.
Then you have the exceptional students for example during one of the
periods in Mr. O’Donoghues class, they discussed their possible year projects
for grade 12, after class this one girl stayed back and went to Mr. O’Donoghues
to discussing her project, she had already worked out and planned for where she
is going with it and what she was aiming for. Most of the others were just
sitting there and you could see they had no idea what they wanted to do for
this project. This girl is already on her journey towards the iceberg. Almé
told us about personal development of some of the student from previous years
till now, they are growing up and starting to become the persons they are going
to be when they are all grown, they are creating their values they want in life.
In
Lebone there are a lot of opportunities for the students, they’ve started this
year with a GEAR(Grow Explore Achieve React) program that includes all the
cultural activities and lots more diversity like community service groups,
marimbas, sign language and many more they can get involved with.
Looking
at Lebone’s system, meaning the way the school is run on a day-to-day base. The
school is very academically orientated. Although there are a lot of
extracurricular activities balancing the school, academics is the main purpose
of the school. The system of the school if we go back to the iceberg metaphor,
I would describe as the guidelines for this journey, giving them rules,
structure and advice to reach the iceberg. They have CC periods, where they
give students the time to go to their different teachers to help them sort out
any problems; this I personally think is a great idea, but then I heard that it
is not that efficient because students don’t use the time they are given to do
what they should, instead they just relax and take that time off. A solution for this could be to get forms
that have to be signed everyday during CC period.
The
school is working hard to be more innovative, they designed this app which the
student s parents can download and in this manner the school can send out all
their letters and post homework and test dates on it. This is a good manner to
be connected with the parents and the success rate in other schools sounds very
good. Now it is just for Lebone to start it and get it out to the parents. This app could be seen as a guideline for
their journey towards the iceberg, involving their parents to support them all
the way.
Another
question that came up during our meeting sessions was if the school, meaning
the students, connect with each other, for example does the upper school and
lower school get in touch with each other. During a tutor session one of the
things they discussed was that they were going to reach out to the lower school
as their community service. That means that the upper school is making a plan
to interact with the lower school, but I do not think that it should be a
community service project, rather create a buddy system where the upper school
students get a lower school student to be personally involved with and as a
community project reach out to the nearby community.
To get back to the main question: What creates
the heartbeat of Lebone? My answer would have to be: the interaction between
the teachers, students and system, cause if you leave one of them out then it’s
like taking an organ out of a human body, it will either still work but not as
sufficient as it should or it would die and collapse. Although there is lots of time spent
planning, all the plans don’t always get followed through as they should, for
example CC period and the GEAR program, because there are still a lot of
students that are not participating in any of these activities, for example, I
asked one of the boys what he does for cultural period and he said: “No mam, I
only play rugby.” We attended an enrichment
period that was also not very sufficient in my eyes, because the students don’t
really listen they just liked watching a video clip played for them and after
that they didn’t really care what the main reason for the meeting was.
After
my observation at Lebone thus far, I would say Lebone is a well-planned school with a mission that states: “To develop creative and
imaginative thinkers. Skilled individuals, able to investigate and act on
opportunities with a vision and passion to serve the nation and ever broadening
community.” They are well away on their journey towards the iceberg.
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