Introduction
Ziauddin School is an accredited Edexcel school which means that our students are studying the Edexcel iPrimary (International Primary) and iLowerSecondary (International Lower Secondary) curriculums. These are comprehensive, thematic curriculums focused around creative learning, with specific learning goals for every subject and having a focus on students’ developing international mindedness, cross-cultural sensitivities and promoting greater personal learning.
These curriculums enable us to be flexible and adaptable with how we teach, ensuring that students’ interests are accommodated and lessons can be tailored to individual levels of understanding. They are focused around subject-mastery, personal/cognitive development of students and they support our International Dimension that we aim to bring to the school. These curriculums also integrate easily with the Pakistan National Curriculum.
Learning Goals
The subject/topic goals are prescribed at each grade level and are the foundation for the iPrimary curriculums. They cover the knowledge, skills and understanding across the subjects for each grade level. At Ziauddin we add personal learning goals related to 21st Century learning which are built into the learning activities and assigned tasks of students. Using our International Dimension means that lessons can be contextualised in ways to develop students’ cultural, national and international understandings and perspectives.
Assessment
We believe that assessment of students’ in school should support learning and not just be a score card of attainment. Therefore, we recognise that effective assessment needs time and practice, and so we build simple processes to support both teachers and students with using assessment to support learning within our programmes. We use our continuous assessment procedures through the iPrimary progress tests for each unit to help students move from beginning to learn a subject to mastery of the subject. These help us to identify the learning stage of each student with a set of learning goals from which we update our ‘Student Profile’.