Personal Development

The answer to the question “What does this person need?” for adolescents often falls under the category of Personal Development. This is especially the case for those who have struggled with school due to challenges such as anxiety or depression,  dyslexia, or autism spectrum disorder.

Thus, for many, self-development is the most important education that they can gain from Harbour College, and we rightly focus heavily on this. “Building Resilience” is perhaps the quality that encompasses the higher purpose of the school.

We believe that the best thing a school can do to care for students’ mental health and nurture resilience is to create a healthy school culture. This will naturally provide compassionate experiential lessons necessary for them to learn more about themselves.

Below diagram describes the process behind deliberate culture creation of the school.

At the foundation, we have Student Learning Priorities that is the overarching mission of the school.

In the middle we have values & policies/operation framework that underpin our actions.

At the top of the culture creation pyramid is our actions - what we do every day. This completes Harbour College’s Personal Development Framework and is described below:

We utilise the following principles of modern behaviour science. All parents of Harbour College must be on board with these.

Old neural connections and experiences cannot be “erased”.

  • We help students to accept inner feelings and thoughts in judgement-free environment, and shift focusing to being psychologically flexible to commit to helpful actions.

    Vast majority of students arrive to the school with a heavily-practiced strategy of avoidance. This is most definitely not the answer and we have to teach them, with compassion, more helpful ways of managing themselves.

Humans develop by building new relationships with activities and experiences

  • One of the major works of Harbour College is to create occasions where students are gradually exposed to their avoiding activities (i.e. “graded exposure”), aiming for creating new positive experiential learning.

    Such activities are discussed and planned beforehand, and debriefed afterward to maximise chances of constructive outcome. For many, it starts with persevering with being at school even when feeling anxious.

Human behaviour is responsive to the environment

  • No matter who they students are, and what “diagnoses” or background they bring, human behaviour can always be improved with the environment that is safe, consistent, and truthful.

    We use the accurate analogy of students being the pilot, and the teachers being in the control tower. They will be given feedbacks but they will have to point and pilot the airplane themselves!

We believe that these elements are what are needed to fulfil our daily mission

“Everything we do, we do it to help our students so they find their place in the world”.

We encourage each family to discuss with us to create the best alignment in plan and actions for your child.