'PDP'

If a school were to develop a perfect Personal Development Programme for students (PDP) ‘Deans of Students’ might very well become obsolete, extinct, sort of museum pieces. I am thinking of a pedagogical equivalent of the Tyrannosaurus Rex; to be reckoned with but dead.. This assumes that the main function of a DoS, traditionally, is to be reactive in situations of poor decision making, making decisions about who to alert and how the student should make good, to do ‘blame’ rather than ‘no blame’. In old eduspeak this was ‘punish’; now it is probably ‘enjoy a constructive conversation about restitution’. A PDP that involved all students drawing them ineluctably into a desire to know all about the dangers of…well…dangerous things and that made them incapable of failing to apply actuarial logic rather than ‘it can’t possibly happen to me’ so that such behaviours were abandoned before being tried… If…Of course, students would still need access to advice and encouragement but not to a confessional. They would analyse the facts and lead safer lives that counselling would then help them to fine tune.

I have been excited to be working this year with a team of enthusiastic colleagues designing a new PDP for implementation next academic year in grades 6 to 12. It builds on what we have done successfully over the past few years and reaches out to other schools’ experiences. It uses the expertise of experienced tutors, it seeks collaboration with experts beyond the school and embraces latest research and models across the globe. It places the student and the students’ social, emotional and intellectual development and all available information at its core. To increase transfer and relevance it will not be encountered just in a dedicated weekly lesson labelled PDP but will appear through collapsed days, through events, through the MYP curriculum already taught in academic curricular, through Inter Disciplinary Units (IDUs) taught at each grade combining the skills of several academic subjects, through sport and service and clubs and activities…

It will open up sympathetically both for discussion and for instruction the vital topics educationalists believe students need expertise in at their age and it will allow timely attention to vital, relevant current events. It will have input from the students, in fact from peer groups and from older students, not just from adults. It will be communicated to parents so that they can contribute and support and at the same time be reassured.

What it will not do is to replace behavioural expectations and consequences in the school. It will not obviate poor decision making either, not because the PDP will not be excellent but because it will be designed for teenagers. And they are volatile and unpredictable as well as being at the centre of their own universes; pre-Copernican a literary figure once dubbed them. So they will not give in to the concept that they do not need to experiment merely because an adult can tell them in advance and save the pain. That will take away the thrill and risk, indeed the whole point of being an adolescent on the way from dependant child to independent adult. We couldn’t stop that even if we wished as this quest is built-in and hard-wired. But the cliché is true that their world is developing so fast and in so many directions in addition to the obstacles to success that we all knew such as college degrees, competition, seeking employment, unemployment, inflation, supply and demand. So it behoves us as educators to ease this rite of passage in order that your children are as well equipped as it is possible to take on their role of improving our planet. And that is what the ICS Secondary School’s team of PDP writers, deliverers and coordinators will endeavour to do.