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From The News DESSC - Issue 5
THE 6Cs : DEVELOPING CHARACTER
These might be just some of the phrases that you hear from your child throughout the years, as they grow, evolve and adapt both their mindset and understanding of the wider world around them, whilst exploring which career they wish to eventually pursue. With high aspirations at DESS, we always encourage our children to DREAM BIG and AIM HIGH, however, with a competitive job market, a forever evolving fast-paced modern world, in addition to potential new and exciting careers that do not even yet exist, we are faced with one question: how will we ensure to fully equip each and every one of our students with the necessary skills to be fully future-ready?
Future Ready
With a holistic approach towards education, we have always been fully committed to developing and nurturing the whole child. Whilst we place the utmost importance on academics and ensuring each child succeeds in their individual attainment and progress journey, we equally pride ourselves on providing our DESS children with invaluable learning skills that we know and believe to be so crucial in building their character, grit and resilience.
As a result, ‘The 6Cs: Developing Character’ was launched across the school, from FS1 to Year 6, and was kickstarted with our DESS promise to our children, The 6Cs Manifesto, outlining our commitment to developing each child holistically.
Our 6Cs ‘why?’
Having returned to face-to-face learning and with eventual removal of COVID-19 protocols, as a school, we identified the need to prioritise our focus on learning skills that would allow our DESS children to flourish.
The 6Cs learning skills identified (Communication, Collaboration, Critical Thinking, Creativity, Curiosity and Compassion) have often been deemed as ‘soft skills’; essentially those interpersonal attributes that shape and define our character. Historically, mainstream perception has often meant that ‘soft’ skills have had a negative connotation of being related to a ‘weakness’, however, given our DESS commitments in recent years to wellbeing and neurological research, as well as interweaving and embedding initiatives into our curriculum, such as whole-school mindfulness, Zones of Regulation and Growth Mindset, we understand that paradoxically these skills can be the hardest ones to master! Even more remarkedly, soft skills are the number one skills sought and celebrated by international employers today, more so than academic achievement and success. Of course, it is vital that when undertaking a job role or embarking on a new career path, we require the knowledge and technical prowess to make an impact, but it is imperative that we provide our children with strategies to communicate effectively, build harmonious relationships with others and to think ‘outside the box’!
Our 6Cs ‘how?’
Our first step towards this has been our swift return to our cherished flexible learning spaces, allowing for ease of varied teaching and learning styles, further development of character strengths, as well as catering for additional support needs. Next up, we created teacher toolkits, as a staff body, alongside our Teaching and Learning Team, that would enable us to deliver 6Cs opportunities in almost every lesson across the school. Thirdly, our children’s involvement was key, and thus our 6Cs Logo Competition ensued!
With our children’s creative and invaluable input at the forefront, they were encouraged to create innovative designs to represent each ‘C’. Once submitted, the winning entries were announced with much anticipation and excitement at our end of Academic Year Assembly. Over the summer, our children’s designs were given to a local Creative Agency, who then combined and transformed the winning ideas into the final 6Cs Logos that we see today.
Learning Journeys & Beyond
By exposing our children to opportunities where they can experiment, rehearse and hone these essential 6Cs learning skills, our eventual goal is that they will be able to confidently navigate, not only their learning journeys at DESS and DESC, but also every facet of their lives, from further education, to eventual chosen career paths, build positive relationships and recognise their own capabilities and those of others, as well as master and cope with life’s challenges.
Nurturing these 6Cs skills from an early age, our children will have the opportunity to thrive and flourish in any avenue that they choose to take their lives, whether that be the Astronaut, Pilot, Olympiad or Lawyer, we want them to have the strategies and tools to not only be an academic success, but be well rounded, confident individuals, who can demonstrate effective communication and collaboration skills, provide creative and innovative ideas through critical thinking and curious minds, all whilst demonstrating compassion for themselves and others. An overly ambitious task? Perhaps! But one that we are certainly not afraid to strive for, as every one of our children deserves the very best that we have, not to ‘give’ them, but to provide them with their own tools and strategies to explore and discover the world for themselves!
The greatest gift we can give you, DESS, is the gift of opportunities; now go grab them with open minds!
Article by Yvonne Sewnauth & Victoria Atkinson, Assistant Headteachers, DESS
