Torch - Spring/Summer 2020

Message from the Heads of Schools

Boarding School students develop independence and decision-making skills living and studying abroad.

The same culture of compassion and understanding in our Boarding program spurs our older students to take action. Family meetings and workshops help girls from very different cultural backgrounds learn how to advocate for themselves, practise empathy and share decision making, among many other life skills that support autonomy and agency. Our Boarding Prefect represents the interests and issues raised by her peers when she attends Boarding staff meetings and then works with both adults and her fellow students to design responses and solutions. Boarding is a special place in the school where our girls learn how to direct their lives and shape their community for the better. Agency boosters are also visible throughout the rest of the school. In Middle School Guidance classes, our girls learn how to set and meet realistic and timely goals in response to their first report card, developing the cognitive skills needed to direct their own lives. They also learn effective communication and self-advocacy skills, critical for acting with purpose, which they practise through role-play. Once in the Senior School, evidence abounds of girls responding actively to their circumstances. Recently, one group of students designed a climate pledge agreement, stipulating specific actions to take, which

the entire class signed. Another group, seeing the need for students to push their thinking further, started a diversity committee. They established “brave spaces” in the school where girls can have real and uncomfortable conversations about race, culture, gender and sexuality. Seeing a gap, students take action to fill it. The Practice of Co-Agency Schools that encourage student agency are grounded in co-agency, which is when students and teachers are co-creators in the teaching and learning process. Our students know that at Havergal, school doesn’t happen to you—it happens with you. Each girl is an active participant, in partnership with her teachers, coaches and advisors, in constructing her education. That ability to shape her experience, practised in great and small ways every day, teaches her how to act with purpose throughout her life. It takes more than academic knowledge and skills to advance the state of cancer treatment, tackle our climate emergency or achieve gender equality in the world (see next page). It takes young women who believe in their ability to effect change and know how to do it.

16  HAVERGAL COLLEGE