Hi Everyone,

In mid-March, I will pay my first visit to South Korea.  Having lived in the Far East for eleven years (Hong Kong five years and Bangkok six years), South Korea has always been the missing piece in my Asia travel jigsaw.  I will be in Seoul visiting schools, then in Daegu for the IB Conference.  I’m excited to be co-presenting with two of my favourite people – one is the talented Secondary Principal of a great MARIO school and the other, a senior member of the IB team and a genuine thought leader.  Both share my passion for well-being and learning.  Our session will begin with some disturbing trends in student anxiety and poor well-being, but will go on to share some of the positive changes we are seeing.  Overall, it will be upbeat and optimistic, because at MARIO Education, we are actively addressing many of these issues.

We’re proud to be supporting our growing number of schools in helping their students in a range of ways:

·      Our check-ins (which take only a couple of minutes) provide immediate data on how students are feeling, and this generates some fascinating data visualizations which can be filtered by grade level and by individual students.  This ensures all students are heard and enabling them to indicate when things are all good, and when they’re not so good.  School leaders, counsellors and well-being leads can view data across the school, identifying patterns and outliers and deciding how to allocate resources.

·      Our MARIO 1:1 conversations address the data and help get students back on track to reach their goals and center themselves.  Our founder, Phil has been offering free training sessions to all MARIO schools, upskilling teachers in how to conduct these powerful coaching conversations (these take between three – seven minutes).

·      Our Personal Learning Plans (PLPs) are a way for each student to articulate who they are as a learner, how they learn best, how teachers and others can best help them, how they are progressing towards their goals, and how their friendships are.  These PLPs are not only co-constructed by the students themselves, they also monitor and update them, teaching important self-management skills and habits.

·      Our MARIO conferences focus on executive functioning skills and organizational aptitudes, helping students to develop their study skills and become more self-directed.

There are many other aspects to what we do (including class reflections, a range of bespoke surveys, IEP uploads etc.) and our extensive suite of strategies and tools can be viewed as a menu from which schools can select according to their needs.

Assuming I find my way around Seoul and then to Daegu via the superb but complex Korean train network without getting hopelessly lost, I look forward to sharing more about our conversations on well-being and learning when/if I return!

Best wishes,

Graeme