George Walker’s weblog

Wherever disaster strikes – man-made or natural – there is a good chance that the IBO, with schools in 121 different countries, will be touched by it.  Alas, for some of our schools, disaster is simply daily business as usual, and I will never forget the letter I received from the IB coordinator of a West Bank school describing how his students had zig-zagged their way to their IB examinations that year in order to avoid sporadic gunfire.  It reminded me of the experience of my older brother, sixty years earlier, regularly taking refuge in the nearest safe house when the air raid sirens caught him on his way to primary school where we lived just north of London.  Nothing seems to change.

For other schools disaster comes out of a cloudless blue sky and the tsunami catastrophe was such an example.  But here the normal situation was reversed because no IB World School was directly affected.  Instead, our schools throughout the world offered immediate help – in cash and perhaps more importantly in kind.  As I write more than 150 partnerships have been established between IB World Schools in 26 different countries and schools in the tsunami-affected areas of Indonesia and Sri Lanka.  If these partnerships are sustained and developed they could be the start of a really significant new development for the IBO.

It is usually the regional office that receives the first news of disaster and this was true for hurricane Katrina.  Ralph Cline, head of school services in our New York office was quick to react, offering immediate help.  But the immediate need is never clear, and in any case most of our schools in the worst affected areas were out of communication.  The same was true following the tsunami, and again following the Bali bombings in 2002 which killed several IB teachers who had arrived early on the island in order to attend the IB Asia-Pacific regional conference.  The kind of help that we can offer follows some time after the waters have receded, the worst damage has been repaired and some kind of infrastructure restored.  Nonetheless, I believe schools are sustained through periods of tragedy by the knowledge that others are thinking of them and empathizing with them.  I remember a terrible case of an avalanche engulfing students skiing in Canada, wondering if I could possibly have matched the exemplary behaviour of its head coping in such circumstances.

Understandably, one of the first questions following any serious dislocation to a school’s routine is “what about the effect on our student’s education and especially on their IB Diploma Programme examinations?”  And here, although the strong temptation is to give reassurances that no one need worry and that all will be well, we do have to be careful.  A procedure has been established to handle these cases but it is never easy to compare the impact on a student’s performance of an earthquake that shut the school a year earlier with a car crash that killed the student’s best friend on the day the examinations started.  Sadly, tragically, all these things happen, and many, many more.  Our consistent advice, tough though it always sounds at the time, is to try to get the student to sit the exam, however upset they may be.  In the absence of some evidence from external assessment and a sufficient percentage of total marks, it is very unlikely that we shall be able to award a grade.

On the occasion when a candidate has completed all assessments, but has been affected by unforeseen circumstances, we can apply a compensating factor and one of my abiding memories of the IBO – because I have attended all the final award committee meetings that review these cases – is of the thought, care, compassion and agonising that goes into these decisions.

George Walker

One of my most satisfying tasks as director general is to sign the letter that confirms a school’s authorization to teach one of the IB programmes. I can usually only guess at the hard work – all those phone calls, meetings, workshops, reports and visits – that lies behind the letter and the supporting material that Celia, my PA, puts on my desk, but I do know what excitement its arrival in the school will cause and with what pride the official certificate will be framed and prominently displayed.

A couple of weeks ago I signed something new: the first authorization of the shorter Middle Years Programme (MYP) option, in this case a three-year programme for a school in Zagreb. I did so with a mixture of satisfaction (heaven knows, we have been working long enough to create greater MYP flexibility) and some disappointment because, as Luz Maria Gutierrez (the MYP manager in the IB region of Africa, Europe and the Middle East), explained to me, the school had previously been in partnership with a senior high school in order to offer the full five-year MYP. Now the partnership was breaking up and each school was going its own way.

I wonder what that partnership meant (the schools are some distance apart) and what actually happened on a Monday morning that improved the quality of education in both schools. Indeed, I wonder what any ‘partnership’ between two or more schools really means in practice beyond a general feeling of mutual solidarity. The Zagreb partnership had arisen out of necessity, as a way of putting together the necessary five years of the MYP but the IBO has also deliberately encouraged a number of partnerships. In Finland, for example, an experienced IB World School in Oulu has successfully helped to teach IB Diploma Programme students on-line in a partner school in Rovaniemi, far to the north (the partner school has since been fully authorized itself). In Kenya, five IB World Schools in Nairobi have organized a series of professional development workshops for the teachers in ten partnered state schools (this project has been supported by The Goldman Sachs Foundation). I am also aware of examples within sub-regional associations of IB World Schools informally mentoring partners in the process of authorization.

The schools-to-schools project has launched a series of new partnerships (more than 150 in 26 countries as I write) between IB World Schools and schools in Indonesia and Sri Lanka that were affected by the tsunami disaster and I believe we should follow their progress carefully. What do we expect from a partnership and what obligations does it bring: exchanges? Shared resources? Joint teaching? On-line links? We really don’t know, yet instinctively we are persuaded that two schools must be better than one and that each partner should have something to gain.

I believe the IBO is in a strong position to shed some light on the increasingly popular practice of school partnership and we are actively seeking funding to support a serious study.

George Walker

It can be helpful to see a familiar concept suddenly illuminated in a completely new context and it is often the novelist who provides the illumination.

At my wife’s insistence, I have just read Edith Wharton’s novel, The Children, and I’m glad I did.  It describes the behaviour of a group of seven children, aged from just a few months to 15 years, siblings and step-siblings, who are dragged from one Palace hotel to the next in the glamorous resorts of 1920s Europe – Venice, Cortina, Biarritz, Paris – unsure anymore of where they belong.  They have lost all contact with their places of birth and have only a passing interest in where they happen to be.  Completely lacking any roots, they have become self-reliant, competent in a variety of languages and desperately dependent on each other’s company.  Their only point of stability is a grandmother in New York whom most of them have never met.

In a book that was one of her favourites, but is little known today, Edith Wharton gives us a vivid early account of children whom today we would describe as Third Culture Kids (TCKs): they are detached completely from the culture of their passports, never long enough in their temporary place of residence to acquire a replacement culture, but instead they develop a new, third culture, whose distinctive features have been well researched.  For example, read Mary Langford’s chapter ‘Global Nomads, Third Culture Kids and international schools’ in International Education: Principles and Practice, edited by Mary Hayden and Jeff Thompson (Kogan Page,1998)and also the article ‘Belonging, identity and third culture kids’ by Helen Fail, Jeff Thompson and George Walker in Vol 3 No 3 (2004) of the Journal of Research in International Education.

The TCK is well known to anyone who has taught in an international school.  In Wharton’s satirical novel, the parents and step-parents are the hedonistic, super-rich Americans of the Jazz Age, drifting aimlessly from one expensive source of pleasure and distraction to the next.  Today they have been replaced by hard-working international diplomats, civil servants and business people, but the children’s sense of isolation remains essentially the same.

Into these children’s drifting lives is suddenly thrown a middle-aged civil engineer, Martin Boyne.  Reluctantly, he becomes their adviser, their protector and their advocate in negotiations with their dysfunctional parents, whom he knew in his youth.  Boyne provides a bridge, a common feature in many of Wharton’s novels, between the values of the old and stuffy aristocratic New York (into which he is about to marry) and those of the new generation of can-do entrepreneurs represented by the boisterous energy and naïve optimism of the children.

For reasons that are still unknown, Edith Wharton decided to change the original happy ending and instead brings the sometimes hilarious novel to a bleak and lonely conclusion.  Even so, it was a huge popular success when it was published in 1928 but the critics did not like it, perhaps because they did not know how to handle the 46-year-old Boyne’s increasing infatuation for Judy, the 15-year-old leader of the children.  Such a relationship was taboo at the time and it is off-limits today, which may explain why this remarkable book still remains largely hidden in the shadows.  It is published by Virago Press (1985).

George Walker

I have been in Stockholm at the biennial conference of Nordic IB schools.  I am not really supposed to attend sub-regional meetings but I can never resist the Nordic invitation, perhaps because so many are state schools, so four years ago (two days after 9/11 - I remember it well) I was in Denmark and two years ago in Iceland.

George Walker

The IBO combines vision and pragmatism in equal measure so if you’re running low on one you can switch over to the other without any sense of guilt.

George Walker