Dear Parents,
Last week we suspended one of our secondary school teachers because she used hateful language in a private social media post. Since then, we have received many requests from parents for action and further information. Thank you for understanding that human and legal constraints limit what we can say to you at the moment.
I would like, instead, to communicate what we are doing as a school to support students emotionally and intellectually as they come to terms with questions of diversity, equity, inclusion, hate speech, social media use and the nature of personal and institutional authority. The value of human skills and critical thinking has always been clear and these are objectives which we work on with our students and staff from the moment they arrive at H-FARM. Today, we feel the importance of these competences with new urgency.
First, we have reviewed security measures on campus by consulting with professionals in this area. Safety is our first concern.
Secondly, it is important to us that our students all feel psychologically and physically safe. Our team of mentors, counsellors and teachers remain available to your children.
Third, it is important that we communicate in ways which support the psychological and physical safety of the community. We have held assemblies for all secondary students emphasising the importance of standing up to racism and the importance of doing so in a principled and compassionate manner. More productive discussions can and have taken place at the classroom level across dozens of classes. These will continue to happen. Our partner in restorative justice training, Dominic Barter, has met in small groups with students and teachers who have expressed a desire to restore confidence and trust. He spent three days with us this week and we are grateful for his support as well as the dedication of our counsellor and the whole team of staff and teachers who do everything they can to support our students.
Our educational curriculum to support international-mindedness and open-minded critical thinking is robust from the PYP up to the DP and we will continue to refine and build on these lessons and our institutional policies and guidelines.
Let’s stick together and come out of this as a more inclusive, principled and loving community.
We are one in our mission to educate our children. Let’s continue to support this mission and each other.
We are one in our mission to educate our children. Let’s continue to support this mission and each other.
Warm regards,
Conan de Wilde
P.S. For those of you who have asked more specific questions about our H-Skills programme (school-wide) here are some of the objectives:
- Self-identity, unicity and diversity, qualities and skills, personal resources
- Relationships: healthy and unhealthy relationships, importance of emotions and feeling, love and self-care
- Communication: effective communication, non violent communication, listening and talking skills, non verbal communication
- Self-identity: who am I? How do I perceive myself? Unicity and diversity
- Resources and strengths: positive (cognitive, physical and emotional) qualities, negative aspects, how to use at best our own qualities, how to put them at service of the group/community
- Conflicts: what is a conflict, conflicting styles, conflict management tools, conflict transformation, negotiation
- Communication: verbal and non-verbal communication, effective communication, non violent communication, apologising
- Mistakes: the importance of making mistakes, learning from mistakes, analysing mistakes
- Relationships: healthy and unhealthy relationships, setting boundaries, red and green flags in relationships, consents
- Emotions: what is EI?, emotions and their names, emotional regulation, the cycle emotion-thoughts-actions, importance of expressing emotions and feelings
- Self confidence: my value, milestones of my life, the importance of self-esteem, practical tools to increase self-esteem
- Stress management: “good and bad stress”, triggers, stress mechanism, the stress bucket to increase energy and decrease pressure, resilience, grounding techniques.
The following sessions have also been taking place under the guidance of Fiammetta Gioia and upon student or teacher request
- individual counselling sessions,
- behavioural coaching sessions,
- crisis intervention
- conflict mediation
- formal observations in and outside class