Collaboration with “Challenging Learning”

We feel highly honored to be able to collaborate with worldwide well known educator Mr. James Nottingham and his Challenging Learning team. Mr. Notthingham is an inspirational leader for 21st century education and we look up to his educational philosophy as well as practical methods that our teachers can use in their classrooms.

His “Learning Pit Concept” is a very well known concept, many educators around the world is using his model to show students “What a learning looks like”.

We are proud to be the first school to collaborate with him to implement some of his ideas in our education as we aim to grow students to be come “passionate learners”.

Learning Pit

This image of Learning Pit shows how the learning looks like. We first think we can do things easily, but in most cases things don’t go as you expect and you go down into the pit. But it doesn’t mean it is an end, the real learning starts from there. When we see students struggling, losing confidence we show this image to them so that they become aware where they are now, what they should be doing from there.

Fail forward

Mr.Notthingham also suggests that we, teachers and parents should welcome children making mistakes as that is the important learning and takes them to the next level. Especially in Japan, we see that students have very low self-efficacy, they are afraid of making mistakes. We want to spread the thinking “making mistakes is a good thing” “challenging is fun, easy is boring”.

Growth Mindset

Growth Mindset VS Fixed Mindset. Growth Mindset was suggested by Prof. Carol Dweck, it is the thinking that there is not limit in what you can achieve only if you don’t give up on yourself. Mr. Notthingham also sees this as very important for the learners. We tend to understand the “success” is achieved only those who were born with talent or special environment, but many research shows the key to the success is “mental stamina”, the “Grit” that you don’t give up. We would like our students to engage their learning with this Growth Mindset as we believe this mindset will push them even further forward.