Executive Head, ICHK Secondary
Toby has worked in senior leadership in schools since 2002, initially in London and, since 2008, in Hong Kong. He joined ICHK as Deputy Head in 2012, became Head of School in 2016, and since 2024 is Executive Head.
The presentation addresses a fundamental error in education as conventionally practised, which is to conceive of learning as a reductive journey towards an integrated mastery of information. This is not how human cognition or understanding works. Rather, people tack towards a more satisfactory adumbration of a psychosomatic Gestalt, which licenses their plans for thought and action, and which is continually shifting in its content, its internal and external relations, and its valency. The current mismatch between practice and actuality is consequential for how learners come to conceive of their knowing selves, usually to their detriment.
The presentation argues via an exploration of three visual metaphors for student experience that, outside of a few special areas of knowledge (principally mathematics, physics, and engineering), the ambition of schooling should be to familiarise young people with adumbration in its most productive guises.
By drawing on the work of Iain McGilchrist (hemispheric tendencies towards either apprehension or comprehension), Wendy Wheeler (the ubiquity of biosemiotics and meaning making), and Nel Noddings (the call for integrative centres of care), a new model is suggested, created with the express intent of encouraging curiosity, intellectual humility, growth, and personal well being.