THINKING SCHOOL APPROACH
THINKING SKILLS PROGRAMME
Mountain Cambridge School is affiliated with Thinking Schools South Africa (TSSA) and are in the process of working towards getting our accreditation from Exeter University in London, UK. Cambridge requires our school to have a student-centred learning approach to enable the students to apply their knowledge.
In all our academic programmes, the students are encouraged to become independent, critical thinkers and problem solvers. Focus is also placed on the development of effective communication skills, both written and oral.
Our Thinking Skills programme is central in our approach to academics. Students are taught a wide range of strategies and tools that enable them to engage in higher order thinking. Dr David Hyerle’s Thinking Maps and Dr Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats are applied across the curriculum at every level. These tools enable our students to organise their thoughts and make effective decisions about how to approach their work.
TOURNAMENT OF MINDS (TOM)
MCS partakes in the Tournament of Minds Primary School competition to develop our students’ critical thinking skills. Thinking outside of the box. TOM offers teams of students the opportunity to solve authentic, open-ended challenges that foster creative, divergent thinking whilst developing collaborative enterprise, excellence and teamwork.
Tournament of Minds (TOM) is an Australian educational programme developed especially for talented and creative students across all sectors. We believe that our students at the Mountain Cambridge School have all the above qualities.
TOM challenges and expect the combination of skills emphasizing The Arts, Language, Literature, and Science in the creation of a production in line with the Challenge, yet to be announced. This Super challenge will be solved by the team, where they will provide a solution to the problem given.
The aim of tournament of the minds is to enhance the potential of our youth by developing diverse skills.
ESTEAM PROGRAMME
ESTEAM is an acronym for Entrepreneurship, Science, Technology, Robotics, Engineering, Art and Maths. The countries who have focussed on ESTEAM, have produced top engineers, designers, computer scientists, creators of software and biomedical experts to name a few.
The International Cambridge curriculum for Sciences, Mathematics and Technology is considered to be one of the best in the world. MCS has increased collaboration between these subject areas as an integrated approach to ensure that we challenge our students to develop new ways of thinking and encourages our students to think more broadly about real-world problems. Our learning programme ensures that we do more critical problem-solving projects to express our students ‘creative thinking through design and fabrication. It supports our underlying philosophy at our school of: I do – I understand. MCS also includes Entrepreneurship (Business Studies & Accounting) into this teaching programme as it is abundantly clear that to flourish in the new world, an entrepreneurial spirit is vital.
At MCS, the vision for ESTEAM applies to all learning from pre-preparatory ages to school leaving since innovation, solution finding, critical and analytical thinking and entrepreneurship are key to being relevant for this fast-changing world. Every student embarks on this inspirational project-based learning programme in the pursuit of knowledge and the mastery of critical 21st century skills.