Welcome to my first blog as Head of Sixth Form at St Mary’s! Through this blog I aim to share with you much of what the girls do here in the Sixth Form and outline some of the educational thinking behind what we try to cultivate in our thriving Sixth Form community.
The St Mary’s community is not confined to current students but also includes our network of alumnae. The diversity of our alumnae’s achievements and the careers which they have gone on to have reinforced our belief that St Mary’s students play an important role in broader society. Old Girls often share their wisdom and experiences with our students at a range of events including the Calne Girls Association Lecture Programme. Yesterday an old Calne girl, Anna Seymour, came to speak to the Fifth and Sixth Form girls about her career in the science industry; she is currently the Global Director at PeproTech, a company that specialises in the manufacture of Cytokine products for the life science and cell therapy markets, helping to combat auto-immune diseases, such as cancers, AIDS, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. In an inspiring talk packed full of interesting stories and salient advice I found myself being struck by one particular comment, ‘Girls, never be afraid of making mistakes. Let me tell you, I am absolutely brilliant at making mistakes.’ For the rest of the day I reflected on the honesty of this comment; it was evident that she believed that she was successful because of the mistakes she had made along the way, not in spite of them. Mistakes afford us the opportunity to evaluate what has happened and to identify a better way of doing things. They may also prompt us into thinking about the desired outcome and cause us to question what we are doing and why we are doing it.
As educators, we have a responsibility to ensure that we create a safe environment in which students do not fear failure but rather accept that it is an inevitable part of their learning journey. However, we also have to ensure that our students achieve their potential within an educational framework that measures success on a set of externally-identified criteria and in our case this criteria is determined by the A Level examination boards. To this end we have to ensure that we carefully manage the balance between providing opportunities for making mistakes and ensuring success at the end of a student’s time in Sixth Form. I personally believe that we have got this balance right and it subsequently allows our Sixth Formers to develop confidence, independence, flexibility of thought and most importantly resilience or ‘bounce-backability’. These skills will not only help the girls to achieve highly in their examinations and access their chosen Higher Education courses but will also prepare them for life beyond St Mary’s. The importance of developing such ‘life skills’ was made clear by a thoughtful INSET given to the staff by Guy Claxton at the start of this academic year on the concept of Building Learning Power TM. Claxton recognises that we need to educate children in the necessary skills to be able to deal with uncertainty and difficulty with a calm confidence because, upon leaving school, this is what our students will face.
Whilst writing this I was reminded of the thinking of Carol Dweck from Stanford University regarding the concept of mindsets and I think that this is a simple way of outlining what we aim to do on a daily basis here in the Sixth Form. Some people believe that intelligence and abilities are fixed, yet others believe that both are things that can be developed. In essence this means that those who believe that they can increase their own intelligence end up doing so. Here, at St Mary’s, we absolutely believe in the latter school of thought and this underpins all that we do. For us, it is about providing our students with a different perspective – it is about a growth mindset. Often in life you hear people saying ‘I’m not very scientific’ or ‘Geography really isn’t my thing’ but we want to challenge our students to think differently; we want them to believe that they are capable of achieving whatever they set out to achieve. And this links back to the issue of mistakes; those with a fixed mindset, when faced with a setback, will link the failure to their own abilities and may then withdraw or lose motivation in an attempt to protect themselves from it happening again. In contrast, those with a growth mindset will think about alternative ways in which they can approach the task in hand to move beyond it; they choose to challenge themselves and learn from what went wrong.
When I think of how we foster a growth mindset in the Sixth Form at St Mary’s I can see that we do it in a whole variety of ways and in a whole array of spheres; too many to outline here but I will choose a few to support what I have said. Firstly, we actively encourage girls to take responsible risks with their learning. This may be in the form of standing up in front of the whole school and leading a Chapel Service or simply encouraging them to tackle the hardest essay question on a practice paper to stretch them. Secondly, we encourage our students to try things that they have never done before and with an extensive extra-curricular programme there are great opportunities to do just this. Thirdly, when feeding back on a girl’s progress we focus on the learning process and not the outcome –how did they get to the point they are currently at? What strategies can they use to improve? Finally, I also think that a single-sex environment helps our girls embrace mistakes more readily because there is a shared sense of us all wanting the very best for each other. As females we are sensitive to feedback and criticism but that also means we can understand it from the other side resulting in us handling mistakes constructively and with care. This is something that is evident every day in my boarding House where I see a diverse bunch of young women, all with unique characters and aspirations, working together in a positive and supportive way to achieve their goals.
Miss Lianne Aherne
Head of Sixth Form
