Vision and mission

The center of the Chapin experience is relationships, and we look forward to welcoming you and your family to experience firsthand the power of a Chapin education.

We stepping on the campus of Chapin School, you enter an extraordinary place for children. It is a place where all of our energies are dedicated to helping children become their best selves. We purposefully create an environment to meet their needs from early childhood to emerging adolescence. We are pioneers in providing a leading-edge academic experience, and we are fundamentally committed to helping all of our students become people of strong character.

• The world is changing fast: many of today’s most popular graduate jobs did not exist20 years ago. It will continue to change fast and unpredictably, so today’s young people will need to be able to learn and re-train, think and work in teams and to be flexible, adaptable and creative. They also need to develop a sense of responsibility for themselves, for their health, for their environment, and for their society. They need to develop respect and understanding for those from different backgrounds, and the confidence and skills to make a positive contribution to their community.

• The challenge to our education system is clear: that it should prepare not just most children but every child to make a success of their life, developing the broader skills, knowledge and understanding that they will need for this future world. If this is our ambition, then we must make sure that the best of what is on offer in our school system which match the best anywhere in the world – is made available to all children as we seek to break the link between disadvantage and low achievement.

• The UNESCO International Commission for the 21st Century suggested that curriculum should be restructured around four pillars of learning ‘learning to know, learning to do, learning to live together, and learning to be’. The Commission believed that striking a balance between these four pillars would enable individuals to achieve their full potential as citizens. Enabling learners to become not only successful learners but also responsible members of society, effective workers, caring members of the community and lifelong learners in an interdependent world, this will be central to our school ethos at second-level. our school will examine the learning opportunities available and provide coherent, relevant learning experience both in and out of class, by creating the supports necessary for young people to ‘learn to know, learn to do, learn to live together and learn to be’. Refocusing and renewing curriculum has been central to international efforts to improve the quality of education generally.

• Our school will provide an education that will enable students to contribute meaningfully to their communities, embrace the rights and responsibilities of citizenship in a democratic society and develop the knowledge and skills necessary for their lives and for their careers in the 21st century. To prepare students for success in the world beyond school they need to develop the capacity to be critical thinkers, problem solvers, effective communicators, creators and innovators. Traditional teaching approaches, based on direct instruction and textbook learning alone, will not adequately develop in students these capacities and improve achievement.

• A teaching philosophy based on the idea that teaching approaches should vary, be flexible and adapt to the individual and diverse needs of students is the fundamental belief of differentiated instruction will be one approach that will provide the scaffolding that students at different levels of readiness need in order to prepare them for success in the world beyond school.

• The importance of the student-teacher relationship and the provision of a warm and caring environment has been shown to have a profound influence on student engagement with learning, achievement, motivation and behavior, as well as being critical in supporting the nurturing of the values and dispositions needed to accept personal responsibility for life-long learning. At our school the teacher-student relationship will be viewed as integral to successful teaching and learning. It is suggested that ‘it is the person in the role, not the role itself, who brings education to life in the classroom.’ Teachers in our school will be caring, nurturing, safe and supportive environment, characterized by positive teacher-student relationships and interactions that bring education to life and support student learning and well-being.
• In his synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses of research related to what influences student achievement, Hattie –UK-(2009) concludes that it is critical that teaching and learning are visible in the classroom. He highlights seven signposts towards excellence in education:

1. Teachers are among the most powerful influences in learning. The greatest motivator.
2. Teachers need to be directive, influential, caring and actively engaged in the passion of teaching and learning.
3. Teachers need to be aware of what each and every student is thinking and knowing, to construct meaning and meaningful experiences in light of this knowledge, and have proficient knowledge and understanding of their content to provide meaningful and appropriate feedback, such that each student moves progressively through the curriculum levels.
4. Teachers need to know the learning intentions these criteria for all students, and know where to go to next in light of the gap between students’ current knowledge and understanding and the success criteria of: ‘Where are you going?’, ‘How are you going?’, and ‘Where to next?.
5. Teachers need to move from the single idea to multiple ideas and to relate and then extend these ideas such that learners construct and reconstruct knowledge and ideas. It is not the knowledge or ideas, but the learner’s construction of this knowledge and these ideas that is critical.
6. School leaders and teachers need to create school, staffroom, and classroom environments where error is welcomed as a learning opportunity, where discarding incorrect knowledge and understandings is welcomed, and where participants can feel safe to learn, relearn, and explore knowledge and understanding.
7. Building on the near-universal specialist schools system, we will seek to make sure that across the country, children and young people have access to the best subject teaching and centers of excellence in specialist schools, through partnership working and the specialist schools networks. We want to see 21st century special schools developing partnerships, sharing their expertise and facilities with other schools and providing children with the skills and confidence needed for greater independence in adult life.
8. We will ensure that in every part of the country, local consortium are in place which can offer a choice of every one of the new Diplomas to 14-19 year-olds. We need primary schools to work together to share specialist teaching that they could not have access to on their own. And we will make sure that where schools wish to bring partnerships together for example, curriculum, behavior and extended schools partnerships – to maximize their impact, they are able to do so.