EM You often encourage students to move out of their comfort zone. Your Extreme Reading competition organised by librarian Rachel Knight, for example, led to some students in your words being ‘quite daredevil’, from reading while rockclimbing to picking up a book under a waterfall.
learn from the mistake and move on, rather than dwell on it. I’m a mathematician and I believe that if you teach the subject in a very didactic way it’s not interesting and it’s not remembered. However, if a problem is approached from other angles and different methods are applied to learning and applying
How do you make sure things stay within your control?
it, maths is remembered. I recently joined one of our Year 11 maths lessons where the girls were devising a song to remember some algebraic terms. It worked; they were having a great time and could recall all the terms and tell me what they were. This isn’t something that is used in every lesson but occasionally doing something that is completely off the wall makes a huge difference to how a subject is remembered.
JD We constantly encourage girls to push their boundaries but they rapidly learn what is really not within their capabilities and crucially what constitutes acceptable behaviour. We are guiding them through all the complexities of teenage life and if they haven’t learnt these things alongside all the other things we teach them we have failed in our task! We also keep our school rules to a minimum. We want the girls to do the right thing because it is the ‘right thing’ and not because a rulebook says so. We have turned the usual school discipline around and said that we trust the students unless they prove otherwise; I have found that they respond to this approach really well. The same goes for when we ask them to leave their comfort zones. Empowerment is the key to helping the girls develop. EM Empowerment seems to be key in all walks of School life. For instance, I notice that your Head of Maths, Louise Orton, believes that ‘Challenge, risk taking and independent thinking should lie at the heart of maths teaching for girls’. How do you take risks with maths? Is this how you achieve such great results in the subject? JD Taking risks is all about having a go and not getting hung up on the wrong answer. We believe that students should try something and if it’s wrong they should Education Magazine
This approach is one of the reasons we get such good results – but there is also the support for students who are struggling. Any student can drop into the maths department at any time as it’s open house and the support they need is there. This puts the responsibility on the student to seek help if they need it, which is important as they then feel that they are in control of their learning process. EM Sooner or later parents are going to judge the school by results achieved in public exams. You have fabulous results year on year including those for the Baccalaureate. How much do you put these down to the ‘can-do’ attitude that you instil in the girls? JD It’s a huge part of the reason we get such good results, but it’s not the whole reason. We work hard and play hard at Sherborne Girls and I think that’s really important when it comes to results. We have structured lessons and really good teaching, and in addition to the academic work we have all the extra-curricular activities such as 15
the Duke of Edinburgh award scheme that contribute enormously to the confidence of the students and the results we achieve. EM What about its long-term effects? When old girls return to the school, sometimes many years later, have they retained this cando attitude?
JD The old girls I have met still have it - they are quite a feisty bunch of individuals too, which is lovely! The feedback we get from the girls who have gone on to university is also very positive. We prepare them academically for the rigours of university, but it’s the feedback on how well they cope with independent life and being their own person that is so rewarding. I do think it comes down to the inner confidence that we instil in them. I have also applied this across the school. Last year I challenged the school to be bold. I wanted them to try to think and act outside the box. They took risks -one even wrote to Claire Young, an Apprentice finalist, asking for work experience, which she got. All year the girls were throwing the challenge back at me as a reason for trying something. The teaching staff also took this up and talked about being bold in the classroom, on the sports field and as part of the Duke of Edinburgh scheme. It was a revelation and really showed the ‘can-do’ attitude that exists at Sherborne Girls. This year our theme is ‘Looking outwards’, so we are challenging the girls to get used to taking opportunities so that the world can be their oyster. EM Thank you for talking to Education Magazine. For more information visit www.sherborne.com