Even bright children need Help

Patricia Metham, Principal of The Regent’s School

Dr Virachai Techavichit

Thus, when he was recently seeking a new headmaster, it was not surprising that he started seeking out his many acquaintances in the United Kingdom for suggestions. Following his traditionally stringent criteria for selecting a headmaster, he indicated he was looking for the head of a prominent UK school who was not over 60 and who was willing to commit a significant number of years to his new position in Thailand.

Dr Virachai’s search was successful, but not in exactly the way he had anticipated. One of the educators he contacted for advice was Patricia Metham, headmistress of the prestigious girl’s boarding school Rodean in Brighton, England. She remembers their communication this way:

“I’d met Dr Virachai about three years ago. He contacted me to say he needed somebody to take on management of these schools and could I think of anybody that might assume the position of overall headmaster. So I said, ‘does it have to be a headmaster?’"

It didn’t and Metham was subsequently offered the position of headmistress. Her discussion with her husband on whether to accept went quickly. “It was a cold February day with the wind and the rain bashing. It took us about ten minutes to decide,” Metham recalls.

It turns out Dr Virachai’s timing was impeccable. Metham was only two years away from retirement at Rodean, a prospect she didn’t relish. She had largely completed her self-appointed task of changing Rodean’s elitist image from a “bastion of inequitable class education” to one of a community-minded school with serious academic credentials.

“I felt that what was happeningat Rodean was well launched. We set up a different management system and groups of teachers were really taking it away. In a way, it didn’t need me.”

Of course, there were still things she could have done at Rodean, she says, but the thought of joining a school that was “new and still finding its way” appealed to her.

“And,” she adds, “instead of falling off my perch in two years into retirement, I’ve got a five-and-a-half year contract.”

With two campuses to oversee separated by almost 200 kilometres, Metham compares her role to that of a CEO of a company. “I have an overall responsibility, but clearly at each school there is a good team and at each school that team is evolving,” she says.

She intends to be a very active CEO, nonetheless. “I tend by nature to be what others might call a bossy, interfering woman, but I like to think of myself as hands-on,” she says.

Metham has particular expertise in helping gifted and talented children, an interest she intends to pursue both at The Regent’s and nationwide as an official adviser to the Education Minister on the education of exceptional children.

Like all students, bright students have special needs, Metham says. Failure to address them can lead to problems. Boredom is the most obvious and, if prolonged, Metham says, it can sometimes lead to severe antisocial behaviour, particularly in boys.

A former magistrate for youths in the UK, Metham was appalled by the “heartbreaking” number of bright boys who appeared before her panel. “They were chucked out of school because they were bored to tears and set out to be destructive. The system simply couldn’t work with them we couldn’t deal with them either,” she recalls.

“I gave up because I found it so demoralising. Their ability to plan, their ability to fantasise, their ability to negotiate, to predict and outwit was terrific. That could have been channeled. When I retire, I’m going to go back and I’m going to do something like that. That’s my mission,” she says with determination.

Metham says the brightest students can also sometimes be the most inhibited, a trait she finds very frustrating. “I can’t get them to experiment with ideas because the moment they start to frame a thought, they can see the inadequacy of the thought. The danger here is that they will simply retreat within themselves or that they become hypercritical.”

Interestingly, Metham is not fond of separating the top students into their own schools or classes. “I’m not in favour of having academies that are only for the very bright because I do think there is a danger that you disable them for real life afterwards,” she explains.

Nor does she endorse another popular “solution” for dealing with students perceived as being ahead of their classmates. “I’m not a great one for accelerating up through the years,” she says, “because they miss out socially. They don’t learn some of the social skills that they’re going to need.”

Instead, she favours what she calls a “dual approach” – helping bright students develop their talents within their normal classes while periodically providing them with opportunities to join with other talented children for special projects.

Within the classroom, Metham says bright children need to have the opportunity to go beyond the normal curriculum. “There has got to be extension material,” she says. “The teacher needs to be able to say while the rest of the class is doing this, this group can work over there.”

But they must be given meaningful tasks, Metham stresses. “They mustn’t think they’re just being dumped. You’ve got to give them a project that’s a real project.” And when they finish, it is important that they report back to the class.

Back in the UK, Metham and husband Tim, a science professor at the University of Sussex, have been especially active in the second element of the dual approach: the special projects.

One of their most innovative efforts involved about 80 children from 10 different schools who gathered together for a week during their school holidays. The overall theme was the life and work of the famous astronomer Galileo, culminating in an elaborate two-a-half-hour presentation which mixed scientific demonstrations, music, film and drama.

On the science side, some students carried out experiments using the sort of technology available to Galileo. “We had them climbing towers and dropping things,” Metham recalls. “We had them rolling things down slopes. We had them making very primitive telescopes.”

A second group operated under a totally different constraint. They conducted their experiments by modeling them on the computer. As a result, Metham says, “the students were able to make some quality judgments about doing experiments virtually as opposed to what you can do yourselves.”

The creative arts side of the project was equally varied, Metham explains. One group did a film of the week’s proceedings; another wrote music. There were also two very different dramas.

“One was a sort of television documentary – an historical drama-documentary about the trials. In the other we did clowning techniques – imagining the sort of thing that went wrong while Galileo was working with artisans of the time to demonstrate experiments. So you had explanations of both what should be happening and some clowning techniques.”

The benefits for the student were considerable, Metham says. “They worked as a team, they solved problems, they developed technical skills. They learnt also to listen to each other.

“One of the things that they delighted in was that they weren’t considered strange. At school very often, it’s not ‘cool’ to be academic or intellectual and they just enjoyed being with other children for a week who liked to ask the tricky question.”

Does Metham have anything similar in mind for The Regent’s School? Very definitely she says, and not just in terms of programmes for the top students. “I would hate anybody to think that I was only interested in the gifted. I think the approaches that we’ve got enable children of many abilities to push their boundaries.”

The first area of focus is likely to be years seven and eight of the British curriculum – the years between primary school and the beginning of IGCSE classes.

“We did it in my last school,” she says. “We scrapped the standard curriculum for years seven and eight and we started to do big cross-curricular projects. That’s the great joy of an independent school.”

Metham was particularly impressed with the innovations made in the physics programme at Rodean, not a traditionally strong area at a girls’ school.

“We had this inspirational head of physics who said, allow me to scrap the curriculum and I will revitalise physics. And so at the end of year nine, they spent their physics lessons designing and building little racing cars.”

The rewards of such an approach are tremendous, she says, but it’s hard work and a real challenge for the teachers. “You’ve got to have teachers who are prepared to say, OK, I’m going to put aside the textbook.”

She is full of confidence her new team is up to the task. “The team I worked with at Rodean was superb and now I’ve come and found a team that is equally prepared to take on the challenge.”

WITH MINISTER PONGPOL IN LOEI AND PHETCHABUN

By Patricia Metham

From left: Dr Virachai Techavichit, Patricia Metham, Principal of The Regent’s School, and Dr Tim Metham.

In my first five months as Principal of The Regent’s School, I learnt how to meet, greet and thank in Thai. During my three days as part of the Minister of Education’s entourage, I added another word to my tiny repertoire: patana. Uniformed administrators of primary schools, high schools, hilltribe schools, schools for the gifted, technical schools and colleges of higher education worked patana zealously into their tributes to the Minister and their accounts of how life should be, would be, in their own institutions. Talk of development and change is everywhere as educators grapple with the Education Act and the new curriculum.

Minister Pongpol Adireksarn is a man with a mission and moves like a man in a hurry. I was expected to stick beside him as his newly designated adviser on the education of gifted children so there was little chance to wander off the official route to find out what those most directly involved in teaching and learning were making of this demand for change. As I know from years as a teacher and headmistress in the UK, a long and winding road separates those framing the laws from those doing the business day after day in ordinary schools.

It was disconcerting to hear Thai officials use English terms that in England have lost their shine: ‘child-centred learning’, ‘equity’, ‘local management’. The difference here is that there seems to be no cynicism – some bewilderment, certainly, but none of the ‘been there, done that, got the tee shirt’ weariness that has become commonplace in English state-managed education.

Everywhere I was met with warmth and a keen desire to learn from the experience of others, which will make all the difference when we move on to the next step – workshops for teachers organised by the Ministry, the World Wildlife Fund of Thailand and The Regent’s School.

The Minister is touring Thailand to explain to provincial administrators how the new system is to work. Schools are to become ‘legal entities’ – what in the UK was introduced some years ago as ‘local management in schools’. Each school will be encouraged to seek funding from the community and will be required to be transparent and scrupulous in its keeping of accounts.

Ms Metham and husband Tim get some hands-son training in classical Thai music.

Escape from centralised control will have its benefits and its striking inequalities. All communities may be equal in law but in life some are distinctly more equal than others. In a hilltribe community, picturesque infants in traditional dress stood waiting to walk hand-in-hand with visitors through the village, pausing like professionals for photographs. If they were lucky, this earned them fifty or a hundred baht. Amongst the teachers there was a disarming eagerness to bridge language and cultural divides. But the poverty was striking.

The Government’s war on drugs and the fear of Sars have shrivelled up the tourist trade here, and there is no other developed source of income to hand. Who in this community is to provide the school telephone line, the books and the specialist teachers needed to make the new curriculum real?

They are already drawing on the community’s resources: almost everyone donates their used telephone cards as work cards and stimulus material. For these hill people, patana is a fervent hope, as one of their leaders explained to the Minister in halting but emphatic Thai. Self-help can only take them so far.

Education Minister Pongpol Adireksarn, centre, and Patricia Metham talk with some Thai students about their project.

A ministerial tour is not for the faint-hearted or frail. From the early morning briefing by the Air Force at Don Muang airport to a brain-storming meeting back in the airport three days later, the schedule was breathless.

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Last modified: July 7, 2003