ISWA Academic Policy

The ISWA Academic Policy for Diploma draws significantly from the ISWA Academic Policy, but also concerns itself with matters that are pertinent only to students enrolled in the Diploma Programme. The policy has been created and ratified by the entire Diploma Faculty at the school and is therefore a working document and a benchmark for common expectation and practice. The policy is freely available to parents and students, both of whom are fully briefed on the parameters of the policy before they commence the Diploma Program at ISWA. Whilst the policy draws in some part to published IBO expectations and guidelines, it remains a school-specific document, and, as such, reflects practice that is specific to our Diploma Programme.

The ISWA Academic Philosophy

The academic policy that governs the Diploma program at the International School of Western Australia is driven by a common philosophy of education that we, as faculty, believe is embedded in our written curricula and our daily teaching practice. Indeed, we feel that our academic policy is a direct reflection of our school mission statement

“Our community aims to empower individuals to think creatively, value diversity, pursue a passion for learning and contribute positively to society.”

We believe that this philosophy needs to be observable; on a day to day basis, in the way that we deliver lessons, the way that we construct assignments, the way that we evaluate tasks and by the very nature that we encourage students to demonstrate their understanding of material to hand. We commit ourselves to a model of education that addresses the whole learner, that seeks to develop life-long learners and that does not limit its mandate to the transfer of mere content. The following sub-sets address what we recognize as the key components of that define and enunciate our common academic and educational philosophy.

Process-driven and Child-centered Learning

We acknowledge that meaningful education requires that our students actively engage with their courses. This means that our primary focus is on ensuring students are directed to actively engage with tasks and to recognize that they will often play key roles in the development of educational goals, the preparation of research, the organization of task teams and the presentations of outcomes. Our educational model requires that students actively plan reflect and goal set. This may mean that they play an active role in identifying reasonable assessment outcomes that best measures their understanding; that they regularly reflect on their progress with learning areas, but also across the course itself. It means that we, the faculty, commit to designing tasks that: ensure educational goals can be reached in stages, and that students will have opportunities to plan, to reflect, to goal set. It also means that we commit to designing and delivering curricula in a manner that focuses on the process above other educational considerations.

The Learner Profile

The Diploma curricula, is a holistic educational model that seeks to address more than each student’s academic ability alone. To this end, we are committed to the goal of developing the ten qualities of the learner profile: (Communicators, Risk-takers, Open-minded, Knowledgeable, Balanced, Thinkers, Principled, Reflective, Inquirers and Caring) We do not feel that these are qualities that we can address fully without actually embedding them into our very curricula. For that reason, we have scheduled the ten qualities across all of our courses, ensuring that coursework and assessments actively develop these qualities in our students. Additionally, we seek to foster these qualities throughout our CAS program and within the very mission statement that defines our schools very purpose.

Formative and Summative Evaluation

As an educational team, we recognize that evaluation is a learning tool that should be used to enable the teacher and the students to determine the extent to which mastery has been attained. For this reason, we commit ourselves to maintaining an ongoing balance between formative and summative evaluation tasks, ensuring therefore that students are encouraged to reflect on their understanding and mastery while they are still engaged with work in process. We also seek to use formative evaluation as a measure of the effectiveness, or otherwise of our own delivery. As a faculty we will create opportunities for students to progress towards mastery via a number of stages and steps. We will use these stages to help students to reflect on their own progress and understanding, but also to set goals that they may use to guide them through to the end of each discrete stage of the task at hand. We recognize that there needs to be a full and natural relationship, for each task, between the final evaluation and the formative assessments and self reflections that brought each student to that point.

Responsibilities of the Teacher

We recognize that the we can’t expect success from our program and our students without committing ourselves to a unified code of delivery. With this in mind, we the faculty at ISWA commit ourselves to: allowing students to develop their understanding in a processed manner, providing students with clear requirements and criteria by which they may prepare for them, providing students with opportunities to receive both formative as well as summative evaluation, providing students with prompt and useful written and oral feedback, allowing students opportunities to explore similarities and differences between our disciplines and others in the program, and providing parents with applicable and meaningful feedback on the progress of their children.

Responsibilities of the Student

We recognize that success in the Diploma program comes more often to those who apply themselves fully than to it does to those who rely on aptitude alone. With this in mind, we require that all of our Diploma candidates commit to: preparing fully for lessons and tasks, keeping track of work on progress, making full use of non-contact time, reflecting fully on tasks undertaken, setting meaningful course goals, seeking assistance, committing to task teams, and ensuring that they complete all work in a manner that is fitting with the best of their personal ability.

Reflection

Each student in our course needs to commit themselves to the process of fully reflecting on tasks at hand. This can be undertaken verbally, through journals, via checklists and goal-setting. Regardless of how it is undertaken, it is each student’s responsibility to ensure that his or her reflection is meaningful and that it is possible, at some later stage, to recognize evidence of the achievement of earlier-stated goals. This commitment to reflection is a fundamental quality that defines diploma students throughout the world and must therefore be demonstrated beyond the academic domain. There must, for example be ample demonstration of this in each of our student’s CAS portfolios. Fittingly, the best evidence of each student’s commitment to reflection will be the very last task that you will undertake in this program, the submission of your electronic portfolio.

Homework and Organizational Skills

Organizational skills are key to success in the Diploma Program, and ultimately, the responsibility for this rests with each diploma candidate. This means that each student is personally responsible for: committing themselves to the completion of a regular amount of homework in the same place and same time. (we recommend 2hrs per night for Gr 11’s and 3hrs for Gr12’s), making good use of internet ( the time that you spend on task is the time that you are actually undertaking homework), keeping track of dates for submissions, and keeping track of his or her progress in each of their courses. The school commits itself to: managing the course in a way that lessens your personal anxiety, providing support to students who are at risk and to providing you with the means and the skills you need to help you organize yourself.

Academic Honesty

As a school we recognize that plagiarism and cheating are unfair practices that are both antithetical to the philosophy of our program. For this reason we commit to a zero-tolerance policy for students who are found guilty of willfully cheating. We do so, because we recognize that academic dishonesty is what people undertake when they divorce themselves from learning. As a faculty, we commit ourselves to a model of teaching that allows us to observe the development of ideas and the tasks that they grow into, and we recognize that it is our responsibility to mentor and guide students in such a manner that they will always value the independence of the work that they themselves have undertaken and completed.

Reporting

We recognize that reporting progress can be undertaken in a many different ways, and commit ourselves to providing students and parent with meaningful formative and summative feedback in a variety of different manners. We commit ourselves to this because we recognize that students and parents need to be able to make meaningful use of the advice given, and that this advice itself has an educational function that relates directly to each students improvement throughout the course.

Life-long Learners

Finally, we commit ourselves to acknowledging that the ultimate goal of education is to instil in students the ability to become effective life-long learners. For this reason, we seek to create curiosity, independence and a willingness to take risks among our students. Indeed, our commitment to this is so great that we will create ways by which to measure it in our students. Id you are a Diploma student at ISWA, it means that you will be required to do a whole lot more than to simply pay lip-service to the responsibility that we give to you, the responsibility to genuinely and independently engage with what we place before you. Eventually, our success as a school will be measured more by what you do when you leave us than what you score while you are here

pdf - Academic Policies for Diploma at The International School of Western Australia