Pride Celebrations

As Pride is celebrated in June worldwide, we have had an informative assembly on the subject of LGBQTIA+ community and the history of Pride and the Stonewall protests.

We have been celebrating our identities and diversity and have been learning about people’s views and how we can show respect for other people’s beliefs even when they are different to our own.

Our House Captains have prepared and delivered the assembly today and we have seen many exciting rainbow costumes.  We hope you have been able to take a tasty rainbow cake as a Friday afternoon treat!

Assembly with guest speaker Billi Bierling 

Last Friday we were very lucky to welcome our guest speaker, Billi Bierling who is an alpinist, journalist and author and has been instrumental in the development of the Himalayan database, a collection of records for all expeditions that have been climbed in the Nepal Himalaya.

Billie told us the story of how she grew up in the German Alps and how her work as a journalist covering mountaineering expeditions led her to covering some of the expeditions in Nepal. This is where she met Elizabeth Hawley who inspired her to pursue her love of climbing and to get involved with the Himalayan database. The database is based on the expedition archives of Elizabeth Hawley, who was a longtime journalist based in Kathmandu. There has been additional information from books, alpine journals and correspondence with Himalayan climbers added to this.

Billi explained some of the history and geography of the Himalayas to our Primary students and then told us her own exciting journey to summit Everest. She also explained to us that the original name, Chomolungma, also spelled Qomolangma, meaning “Goddess Mother of the World.” Billie told us of her adventures and challenges on her travels and some video and photos of her experiences.

She was very impressed with the knowledge of our students and was very excited to hear that some of them have travelled to the Everest region, as well as climbing other himalayan mountains. Billie was also interested to hear of our Houses being named after the Himalayan mountains.

It was a very interesting and exciting presentation and the feedback from students was very positive. If you would like to learn more about Billie’s work in Nepal you can find an article about her in The Nepal Times.

TBS student leaders lead at FOBISIA teachers conference!

Last weekend TBS Kathmandu hosted the FOBISIA Middle Leadership JAWS, and a professional development conference focussed on the role of middle leaders in developing the school curriculum. Most of the seminars were led by teachers from the TBS middle leadership team as well as contributions from conference delegates. The conference started on Saturday afternoon with a Keynote address from Adam Robbins drawing on key themes from his 2021 book “middle leadership mastery”. On Sunday morning there were seminars on a range of topics such as “enhancing creativity and design thinking in the curriculum” to “ how can we make AI work in the curriculum” followed by an afternoon at Boudhanath where delegates were able to experience our students’ wider curriculum in Year 10 English (descriptive writing) and Year 9 geography (sustainable development in NGO work).

The conference continued on Monday with further workshops but the highlight of the conference was a presentation by some of our Year 9 and 10 student leaders who talked on the topic of “what do TBS students want from our curriculum”. Their confidence and the level of maturity by which they ensured that all of the teachers were able to feed their ideas into the main discussion was impressive and reflects very well on the students, but perhaps I should also credit their teachers who have clearly modelled good practices in their own lessons!

You may be interested to know that the students suggested the following five priorities for their curriculum:

1. Ensuring practical (real life) applications of content to aid understanding

2. Offering opportunities for cross-curricular projects to deepen understanding

3. Covering important relevant topics in PSHE

4. Making sure the curriculum is culturally relevant

5. Giving opportunities to extend learning beyond the specific (exam) curriculum

It was a real honour for the TBS to be asked to host this conference and thank you to Ms Williams in her role in developing Staff PLD (Professional Development and Learning) who led the organising of this event. We will be hosting a PIS on teacher PLD early next term, so if this is an area where you would like to find out more about how teachers keep learning.

Key Stage 4 Ambassadors

On Thursday Head of Key Stage 4 talked to all Year 9 & 10 students and explained the student ambassador leadership opportunities for next year. We will be appointing two ambassadors in each of the following categories: Curriculum, Creativity, Sports, Wellbeing, ‘Diversity, Equity and Inclusion’ and Environment. Written applications (one side of A4 maximum) will be invited in the first week of next term and we are hoping that every Key Stage 4 student will put their name forward in this great opportunity to help improve TBS still further. The final team will be selected after a short interview with Ms Middlebrook and the relevant KS5 prefect for that area of school life.

Year 6 Transition Week

It has been a great pleasure to welcome next year’s Year 7 students to the secondary section of the school this week. Year 6 have enjoyed a series of secondary taster lessons including devising a drama from two random props (with an impressively creative link to from a tube of toothpaste and a pair of glasses to Greek mythology) and why coordinates in Geography are different to coordinates in Maths. On Friday they enjoyed a day of activities including a campus treasure hunt and team building games. Thank you to Mr Randall and his team for organising the week.

Sustainable Arts Fair

The student creativity team, led by creativity prefect Devanshi Choudhury, ran a sustainable arts fair on Thursday. We had the opportunity to view and purchase works of art made from upcycled rubbish

Pride Month

In recognition of Pride month the current KS4 DEI ambassadors led an informative assembly on the subject of LGBQTIA+ on Tuesday helping student better understand the issues of diversity and inclusion in TBS, Nepal and the wider world. Students have been invited to wear rainbow colours in school today and contribute to the rainbow cake sale after school today. You may have noticed the Pride “all are welcome here” flag displayed at the school entrance all week.