SCHOOL DESCRIPTION
Teaching and learning is at the core of TMA. We create opportunities for our teachers to work collaboratively and share evidence-informed practice, as existing beliefs are challenged and extended. This ethos generates a collective responsibility for students’ learning and this, for me, will best describe the organically-evolving TMA way. We focus on and develop the greatest source of variance that can make the difference, our ‘teachers’. We ensure that this greatest influence on student achievement and well-being is optimized to having not only positive effects on the learners, but exceptional ones. We direct attention to higher quality teaching and higher expectations so that students can meet appropriate challenges. Active, engaging, visual, auditory, experiential and reflective learning opportunities where colleagues see themselves as life-long learners, linking new knowledge and skills to their existing set, builds our teachers’ capacities. We listen ‘actively’ to our teachers to facilitate them into finding out what is important by exploring their skills, aptitudes and aspirations to achieve target goals. Teachers observing teachers engaged in best practice challenge their assumptions and act as a sounding board. They experience an organic evolution as they start to experience new levels of understanding and performance. A supportive, empathetic and encouraging environment at TMA enables teachers to confidently try out a range of ideas and methods of working before deeming them doable or not. Teams are encouraged to engage in reflective cycles, analysing, critically evaluating, identifying limitations, finding and providing evidence of, seeking a range of relevant information, presenting ideas, presenting arguments and engaging in academic conversations giving references to published work and prevailing models in the world.
Effective teaching and learning at TMA is accompanied by robust ‘assessment for learning’ and ‘assessment of learning’ strategies. Optimal classroom climates for learning exist, where error is welcomed, where student questioning is high, where engagement is the norm, and where students are active and effective learners. We promote classroom environments where teachers are more adept at monitoring student progress and where they actively assess students’ level of understanding by providing useful feedback. We focus on student-teacher relationships where teachers respect students as learners and demonstrate care and commitment for them. This kind of a nurturing bond, in my view, enables teachers to identify and recognize possible barriers to learning and the teachers and the students, in unison, then seek ways to overcome these barriers. In addition to standardized tests and exams, we focus on building teachers’ capacity to engage students in learning and developing in their students’ self-regulation, involvement in mastery learning, enhanced self-efficacy, and self-esteem as learners. To ensure achievement for every student, we track students who are at risk academically and adjust instructional strategies to better meet these students’ needs. Teachers focus on student’s current performance level on skills, identify achievement goals that the student needs to reach by the end of the year, and establish the rate of progress the student must make to meet those goals. This tracking of students’ progress across sections and identifying and subsequently working upon areas of concern ensures work in the right direction.
Digital learning is imperative for us as we believe that technology empowers students to have an element of control over the pace, time, place and path of learning. Our focus is on providing our students with an enriched digital literacy experience. Developing a vision for what a digitally literate school looks like underpins our developmental strategies and processes. Our digital goals are led by questions about how our learners will thrive in a networked social context, how we address our learners’ expectations about the digital environment and forms of digital learning in which they will be engaged. Our focus is also on digital citizenship that enables our students to abide by the norms of appropriate, responsible behavior with regard to technology use.
Enrichment clubs and societies have an important role to play in enriching the curriculum at TMA. For us, being at school is not just about what students do within classrooms, it is about acquiring the skills to go into society, it is about widening horizons, it is about building their self-esteem and self-confidence and showing students they can be a pianist or a scientist. Extensive sports and co-curricular activities at TMA ensure our students get the chance to succeed in different areas, and they then take this success and use it to overcome barriers in the subjects they find difficult. It enables them to see the viability and importance of having a growth mind-set in life
