The British International School of Houston, Texas, US
The British International School of Houston is part of the Nord Anglia Education global group of schools. It has been present in Houston for almost 20 years, but a few years ago, it had the opportunity to design, build an open a brand new campus. What happens if you design and operate the school completely around the needs of the learners?
This might sound obvious, but the reality is that most schools are designed and operate around the needs of teachers. Teachers have their own classrooms, with their own desks and their own white boards. Students move from teacher’s room to room as they get a year older, or as they change subject. This is not the case at the British International School of Houston. Instead, everything is built around the individualized and personalized needs of the learners.
BISH Edumissions ‘Best in the World’
This is a general overview video of how The British International School of Houston operates and how the campus was designed. It sets the scene for the other videos and gives an overall summary.
This is another summary video that looks at the design and grand opening of the new campus. It gives you a feeling of how the campus was built as well as the collaborations with Juilliard and MIT. It sets the scene for some of the other, more specific videos.
In this film, we intend to illustrate our beliefs about young children and how this influences our view that school is a democratic place. We will show some examples of how children are active participants in their daily experiences of school and that school is not simply done to them. We believe the ways in which our children make decisions about many different aspects of school is quite unique.
This video is about the British International School of Houston’s immersive Innovation Curriculum developed in partnership with Dr Katey Forth and the Texas Medical Center. It shares the journey the school has been on as we have worked to learn from and improve each iteration of the curriculum as well as highlighting where we think we can develop it further over the coming years.
This video is about the British International School of Houston’s Mi Learning programme. This programme gives control of learning to the students. Students are encouraged to develop a passion project based on Google’s 20% time and Genius Hour. We have learnt a lot over the first year of this programme, developing it with each cycle and leading us to what you see here filmed at the final festival.
The environment at our school was created with one focus: learners and their learning. Our implementation of a 1-1 iPad program from Year 1-9 and a BYOD from Year 10-13 allowed for the environment and technology to work together. This provided enhanced learning opportunities and additional student leadership opportunities. This video should show you where we are now after 1 year in our new campus.
The Personal Project invites students to participate in a 15 week, self-directed inquiry that focusses either exclusively, or sharing elements of, Art, Design Technology (Rapid prototyping) and Computer Science. Set within a global context, students choose a topic and their supervisor that will help coach them through four main components: Investigation, planning, taking action and reflection.
