Learning Principles & Innovation

A Tradition of Innovation

Dulwich College International draws strength from its founding school’s history of philanthropy, pioneering spirit and innovation. As a family of schools we have established a global reputation across ten campuses as leaders in evidence based educational initiatives that are proven to increase student achievement and wellbeing. Having learnt from our founding school’s capacity to remain agile and relevant over four centuries, our schools are guided by reliable research findings that have helped keep the Dulwich family of schools at the forefront of best educational practice.

Evidence Based Education

To be effective in this endeavor, we have partnered with leading educational researchers from the UK-based Evidence Based Education (EBE) group to ensure the work we carry out through The Dulwich Lab is robust and reliable. Members of the EBE team offer bespoke methodological training for DCI teachers in order to “professionalise” action research projects to ultimately benefit student learning and wellbeing.

Our partnership with Evidence Based Education enables our group of schools to select those educational initiatives that we know will add the most value. Subsequently, we are confident that the educational enterprises we prioritise as a group represent an effective use of resources to ensure each student reaches their personal best. Furthermore, our capacity to use refined value-added measures to track not only an individual’s academic progress but also character development guarantees accountability for our strategic initiatives.

Dulwich College International Learning Principles

Learning is effective when it has a clear purpose:

• Students take ownership and responsibility for their own learning.
• Students use what they already know to construct new understandings.

Learning is effective when it is adapted and applied:

• Students make connections between knowledge, concepts and skills.
• Students transfer knowledge, concepts and skills to a variety of contexts.

Learning is effective when it is personalised:

• Students are appropriately challenged from their own starting points.
• Students can engage in meaningful and deliberate practice in lesson time.
• Students respond to quality feedback with concrete strategies for improvement.

Learning is effective when it is relational:

• Students engage in effective collaboration and build positive, safe relationships.
• Students are able to recognize mistakes as collective learning opportunities.

Two Core Outcomes

• The long-term retention of valuable knowledge, concepts and skills.
• The ability to transfer what has been retained into different contexts and situations.

Research suggests key indicators of learning should be defined and shared with the broader school community. These proven learning standards have become a set of guiding principles that all stakeholders can reference. Additionally, these statements are used to evaluate education across our schools, to help students ‘self-direct’ their own learning and to underpin our strategic planning and wider professional activity.