Growing Globally at International School of Budapest

  • 18 Jun 2021 3:47 PM
Growing Globally at International School of Budapest
Article by Dhanya Seshan, Vice-Principal Middle School, Cambridge Coordinator and Exams Officer at ISB. 

Recent times have seen a profound shift in the philosophy of education, where the focus is on holistic education and development of soft skills.

This outlook on education has been a product of several years of observation and a review of the traditional teaching and learning methods, where we impart knowledge and expect our children to imbibe and regurgitate it in an exam.

What Cambridge Global Perspectives does is the exact opposite- it gives our students at ISB the tools to learn- to inquire, to investigate, to question, to analyse and to evaluate.

These skills enable them to be lifelong learners and prepares them for a world which is growing smaller and increasingly connected due to modern technologies.

Cambridge Global Perspectives is a programme for learners from ages 5 to 19 and is an inherent part of the Cambridge curriculum at ISB.

This innovative and stimulating skills-based programme places academic study in a practical, real-world context. It gives students aged 5 to 19 years the opportunity to develop the skills that they need to be successful at school and university as well as in their future careers.

The programme taps into the way today’s students enjoy learning, including group work, seminars, projects and working with other students around the world. The emphasis is on developing students’ ability to think critically about a range of global issues where there is always more than one point of view.

Source: cambridgeinternational.org

We embrace these methodologies at ISB with ease due to our already existing Competences and Value-based learning system.

Students are taught English in real world context, where they learn the language at a native level, rather than preparing for a language-based exam.

Without putting too much pressure on the individual child, the Global Perspectives Curriculum helps develop the students’ soft skills- presentation, public speaking, leadership, collaboration etc. while also teaching them the language.

This also matches with our unique system of Content and Language Integrated Learning, where our teachers teach English while delivering the targeted content, instead of teaching the content for the language.

The outcome of these lessons is some form of expression of the students’ skills through presentation or performance. Global issues are grouped together in multiple ways where the teacher, as the facilitator, can opt to deliver it focusing on the Topics or on Skills and each Stage has a Challenge built into the curriculum.

Teachers lead the learners through a series of skills, using multiple techniques, exhorting them to think, research and analyse, ultimately getting students to evaluate the uncovered information and present it.

Assessment is also well rounded and gauges the students’ understanding of the topics, skills exhibited and the ability to reflect, collaborate and communicate. Some of the examples if the topics delivered are ‘If I were a world leader’, Understanding belief’, ‘The right to learn’ and many more.

The Cambridge Global Perspectives Curriculum helps ISB deliver a curriculum targeted at the whole child, enabling them to understand and analyse global issues in a supported and enjoyable manner.

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