WASHK | Headmaster：What Does Holistic Education Mean?

Howard Tuckett

WASHK Headmaster

? 39 years' experience as an educational leader

??23 years of Headship at UK Prep Schools

??Mentor to 14 Prep School Heads in the United Learning Group

??ISI School Inspector

??Governor of 2 schools

??Primary specialist - teacher, housemaster, sports coach and Headmaster

A holistic education simply means that we focus on educating the whole child.?If we wish a child to do well in academic subjects, we must provide for their broader education as well.?We have a much greater chance of a child doing well academically if every other aspect of their development is challenged and grown at the same time.

In other words, a holistic curriculum is an enriched curriculum, which allows a child to learn and develop life skills, self-confidence and the ability to work successfully with others, in addition to acquiring a full academic education.

Other suggested areas of study to include in an enriched, holistic curriculum include:

Tip 1: Music

The correlation between and music is well documented.?The development of a knowledge of read music, supports a child’s mathematical abilities.?The differences between notes in an octave are nothing more than fractions in action. Many children who have been hesitant in formal mathematics lessons have found through music an alternative outlet for expressing their mathematical ability.

Music is unique in that it allows a child to work in isolation and collaboratively.?As a solo singer or instrumentalist, the child must work within their own personal scaffold. As a choral singer or a group instrumentalist, the child needs to learn to work as part of a unison. Both scenarios are great learning grounds in academic development.

Tip 2: Physical Education

Physical education is a standard requirement for all children. Thankfully, this fact has been recognised in all kinds of educational philosophies across cultures throughout the ages. The problem often arises though where competitive sport becomes confused with PE.?PE is for every child to strengthen their bodies, quicken their reactions, develop skills and on a more personal plane, develop those internal requirements for a successful life, self-confidence and resilience.

Like music,?physical education offers pupils the opportunity to develop purely personal strengths and abilities and very obviously to learn to work as a team,?across a full range of games and activities that are shared across the PE curriculum.

Tip 3: Art

Art is another multi-faceted core subject of the enriched holistic curriculum. On one level it is simply a practical activity, sometimes sneered at as being ‘wasted time’ in school.?More so than Music or PE, Art tends to be more about the individual child’s enrichment, although expert teachers can always find plenty of scope for teamwork for pupils in any number of projects.

Art is about learning practical creative skills, and for those for whom this finds a resonance, these skills can become life tools, leading to careers in many potential creative roles.?For others it provides a pastime that may never be appreciated in public but that provides years of healthy mental support over a lifetime ahead.

Apart from practical art skills though, any good Art curriculum will include ‘History of Art’ aspects as well. Children will study the work of famous artists and learn the skills they employed to create their famous masterpieces, they will also learn what was going on in the world at the time of that artist that led them to create the pieces that they did.?Art is a reflection of its time and by studying it, our children provide themselves with a rich supporting text to their formal history studies.

Tip 4: Speech and Drama

I wonder how many of us in the first few weeks of being newly employed in our early twenties, wished we had taken a course in public speaking when we were called upon to make our first work-place presentation to clients or our managers.?Speech and Drama, as a taught subject is all about providing formal training in self confidence in the face of others.

By learning to stand up and speak clearly, to time a joke, to use emotion in telling a story, to enrich our vocabulary to enhance the understanding of others as we speak,?are all skills learned in this vital subject and are equally all skills that are critical in so many adult work-place scenarios.

Much of working life is about communication.?Speech and Drama allows every child, whether they are socially confident or not, to learn how to be.?As a child grows in confidence in the face of their peers, how much more likely are they to be in grasping the challenges of academic learning and having the confidence to take on seemingly impossible concepts and study challenges.

Very few pupils who learn Speech and Drama actually go onto become professional actors,?but all who go through this training will be better prepared to take on the challenges of academia and business life.

Tip 5: STEM or iSTEAM

Whichever acronym you use, the combination of ICT, Science, Mathematics and Engineering into one discrete subject has been one of the educational breakthroughs of the last twenty years. Of course many teachers have been using this combination informally for years, with equally great success.?The holistic breadth added to a general curriculum by STEM is all about problem solving and the boost to confidence and problem-solving skills that this gives rise to for a developing child.?The myriad ways that talented teachers find to challenge and provoke interest amongst their pupils within this framework is simply bewildering and makes STEM a very exciting enrichment subject.

The essence of good STEM teaching is to set a scenario/problem and let children tinker in order to find a solution, and then to improve on the original and develop the solution even further.?

We are now all aware that so many of the tech giants in our lives, started out with this philosophy of tinkering – of never being satisfied and wondering ‘what if ...’?

Materials for use should vary widely from top-end technical or robotic coding equipment, right along the line to what I would call paper-cup technology.?A child could derive as much problem solving satisfaction from programming a drone to fly a complicated flight route, as they do from building a bridge of drinking straws and tape to bear the weight of a house brick.?The challenge and the tools are simply that, the means to solve the problem. The beauty of the enrichment values of STEM are about find a way through the problem.

If you add the complexity of teamwork to this subject you increase its value considerably.?By solving all these challenges collaboratively, children are learning in an environment as close to a real adult workplace scenario as they are likely to get and will be that much better prepared to succeed when they get there.

By taking such a breadth of subjects and employing them as part of an enriched, holistic curriculum, we give our children an even greater chance of succeeding with their studies in the more mainline academic fields.?

All successful study is about the attitude you bring to the challenge of the study. A confident, enquiring mind is well placed to take on significant academic challenges and to succeed.?By training children’s attitudes and mind-sets via these broader enrichment subjects we provide a balance of rigorous academia, supported by positive enthusiasm for the challenge in each of our youngsters as they prepare themselves for their adult careers.??