GATE Students attend Masterclass with Harvard Professor

On Monday SCBC’s Gifted and Talented students had the fantastic privilege of attending an AVID masterclass with a prominent physicist, education innovator and Harvard Professor, Eric Mazur. 

Posing practical Physics problems, Professor Mazur introduced students to an educational approach that he is famous for popularising, the ‘Peer Instruction Method’ of teaching. This approach encourages students to engage in collaborative and critical thinking with their peers to arrive at solutions to complex problems.

A major theme of the workshop was ‘Succeeding from Failure’. Mazur encouraged students to embrace failure and to see it as an important part of the learning process, as opposed to fearing or avoiding it. This is an especially important message for students who typically do well at school and don’t often encounter failure in an academic context.

At SCBC, we seek to instil a growth mindset in our students. Through a range of AVID strategies and classroom dialogue, we encourage students to avoid saying “I can’t” in response to failure, but rather to say “I can’t yet.” Rather than believing their intelligence and capabilities are fixed, our students are taught that they can develop their potential through effort, practise, inquiry and collaboration. “Yet” is a powerful word if a student believes it. Professor Mazur’s workshop reinforced this message and presented an amazing opportunity for our students to hear firsthand from one of the world’s leading voices in education.

For more information on our Gifted and Talented Programme, and how to apply for 2020, contact our Dean of Studies at trimblej@scbc.wa.edu.au