Session Three - Saturday 12th January 2013

Winter bites with a vengeance for the first ESIP session in 2013 but despite a few absences, 56 Emerging Scholars arrived for a varied day of mental and physical exertion. The girls got down to work in breakfast club planning their targets for the day and catching up after the Christmas holidays.

This week was focused on passion and choices and Simon re-introduced the ‘smiling kitten’ technique for dealing with stressful situations: take a deep breath and slowly breath out turning up the corners of your mouth to end in a smile. Trust us – it works and makes you feel instantly better!

Today was Aspirations Day for Year 8 and we welcomed Sasha Henriques and Patricia Tumwine (of Thames Tideway Tunnel) who gave passionate talks about the twists and turns of education, life and careers and the importance of passion and a goal for seeing you through whatever life throws up. 

Year 9’s day was ‘Articulate: Speaking with Conviction and Clarity’ with the aim of helping the girls express themselves on an issue about which they feel strongly. Sarah Kerr-Dineen, Warden of Forest School gave a talk to the girls about tips and techniques when speaking in public. The students critiqued the Warden’s talk confidently and very astutely.

The Year 9 session was split into three parts: theory (reshaping models of good speakers followed by tips and techniques and the critique), development/practice (preparing the talk and working collaboratively, polishing and practicing) and delivery (all the girls delivering a two minute speech with peer assessment and feedback from colleagues who acted as a critical and supportive audience). All the girls showed courage to deliver – most of us do not find speech making very natural.

Year 9s feedback to each other was really constructive, compared to just being frank and identifying what’s wrong. The girls are continuing to grow in maturity. One teacher commented how they were better than many older students we worked with.

In Aspirations, the year 8 guest speakers were very good. Sasha used a  ‘luggage tags’ theme to help demonstrate the journey to her current role as a genetic counsellor. The story involved realizing that some jobs aren’t quite right for you and throughout her talk, she explained her passion and drive and direction and how you can drive yourself through what might feel like ‘hell’ on a day by day basis, one step at a time, because the end goal is worth it.

Patricia’s talk highlighted her various career changes and how she has ended up in a job she didn’t even know existed at the time she was at university. She told the story of how she progressed from a first degree to a Masters and the challenge and resilience needed to get a job when employers don’t even acknowledge your applications. She emphasized the need for perseverance and to keep asking yourself what you want to achieve year on year. The key message was ‘don’t quit just when things get difficult’ because they will get difficult a lot and you succeed by overcoming it.

In both cases, Sasha and Patricia are in jobs they love and doing what they want to do but it wasn't easy getting there.

The girls then broke into their six career groups (doctors, lawyers, business people, creatives, scientists and performers) to plan their footprints and ‘life paths’ using the Aspiration Hurdles game. It provided an opportunity to imagine and learn, to practice step by step planning, creative thinking, critical thinking and problem solving. They worked really well with mentors and commented positively on how it had changed the way they think about careers and aspirations.

After a short break we welcomed London Stunt School (Alasdair Monteith and acting coach Scott Hinds) to run Stunt Factory. Scott started us off with icebreakers including how it feels to be judged and perceived and how we can use distraction techniques (in this case counting pink shoelaces) to lessen the impact. We practiced a spatial awareness exercise (involving walking and then running round the hall in different directions) before moving onto the techniques.

Alasdair and Scott emphasized the importance of ‘illusion’ in stunt techniques and that you never leave a mark or damage an actor or their appearance if you want to work again! The key message emphasized the need for practice and effort and making sure everything was safe. The secret to learning was listening, followed by training and practice.

The girls learned a number of stunt techniques including punching (how to look like you’ve made contact whilst missing the face by 12 inches), safe strangulation (a clever trick with arms and hands which leaves the ‘victim’ in full control), the upper cut, knap, and the hair pull (using a fist). The girls saw the techniques clearly demonstrated and then worked in pairs, rotating partners throughout the two sessions.

At the end of the session the girls created mini-performances in their pairs. Alasdair commented how well the girls had worked together and how quickly they had learned compared to other groups he had worked with. The girls helped each other out and grew tremendously in confidence, particularly the quieter ones.

Stunt Factory was a big success. It offered a very physical and expressive dimension to ESIP and was a lot of fun to all involved (including the staff). The girls grew significantly in confidence, especially the usually shy and quiet ones and it was an opportunity to ‘look silly and not worry about it’, a useful thing to learn.

The girls ended the day tired but happy.

Year 8 will head to Imperial College on Saturday 2nd February whilst Year 9 have an extra week off and return to Forest on Saturday 9th February.

Session Two - Gallery Showcase

Session Two - Saturday 8th December 2012

Today was a new milestone for ESIP as Year 8 met Year 9 and we had 60 students in school for the first time.

The day started with breakfast club, supported as usual by our excellent team of mentors.

Year 9 headed off to the Drama Studio for ‘Representations of Women’. It’s not often you mix Dr Seuss with William Shakespeare but it worked. 

After the warm up to reconstruct ‘Green Eggs and Ham’ we moved on to King Lear and the relationship between the King and Cordelia and then Taming of the Shrew and some differences in opinion on Kate – was she submissive or did she have a trick or two up her sleeve? The plays gave us the opportunity to practice expression and performance and to make different interpretations of what Shakespeare wrote. We analysed and discussed the language, thinking about how the women in the plays were presented and got creative with the text. It’s not every day you get to edit Shakespeare and put on your own performance.

The Year 9s spent a very thoughtful day of drama, interpretation and poetry and ended up creating a collage based on their inpidual thoughts, feelings and interpretations of how women are represented. We will be showing some of these at the End of Year event.

Meanwhile Year 8 were busy with ‘Argument in Action’. Never let it be said that ESIP fails to equip students with essential skills in life or which making successful arguments is a key one! We likened some of these skills to verbal karate – knowing how to think on the spot and say the right thing.

To warm up we practised a few games including the Balloon Debate. Five pupils volunteered to take on a persona and tried to persuade the others, by means of a two minute speech, why they should not be thrown out of a sinking balloon. The rest of the class then had to vote on who to save! 

In life you learn from others and then from experience so we started watching examples of debating speeches by champion debaters. We introduced the key points of structuring, rebuttal and points of information. We learned about PEEL - Point, Explanation, Example, Link – and then practised it within a debate on whether London should be an Independent State. We then played the Alley Game to practice our rebuttals.

After lunch it was time for the debates proper with our motion This House Believes Euthanasia Should Be Legalised. We heard some excellent points across the four groups and every girl, however shy, spoke up and made their voice heard with convincing arguments. There were some excellent ideas and as last year despite many girls having never debated before the standard was excellent and worthy of a competition standard.

Today was all about expression and interaction. It’s not often every girl in a group this size gets, and takes, the opportunity to be vocal and put their voice forward. The Year 9s in particular were very insightful with excellent evaluations of Shakespeare’s writing and some fantastic performances. Perhaps we will see some Shakespeare at the End of Year event…

It was great to see Year 8 and Year 9 together and we look forward to the next session in January.

Session One (Year 8) - Gallery Showcase

Session One (Welcome to Year 8) - Saturday 24th November 2012

24th November 2012 was a busy day for ESIP as we welcomed not only a new Year 8 group but also their parents to the Headmistress' Welcome Breakfast.

Mrs Penny Goodman, Head of Forest Girls' School opened the event and talked about the role Forest School plays in ESIP. Dr Simon Davey, Programme Leader explained the vision for ESIP and the role we play in developing ability, belief and character to raise aspirations, achievement, learning capability and resilience. After brief contributions from Dona Henriques and Fidelma Boyd, Deputy Head of St Angela's, two of our ESIP Year 9s (Mia and Maya) talked about the benefits they had gained from ESIP Year 8 last year.

Meanwhile all 30 new Year 8s were getting to know each other in the Girls School Hall through icebreakers.

We kicked off Year Eight with the Induction session - an introduction to ESIP with exercises in the Big 5 skills, learning capability and a series of videos. We played with modelling clay and party poppers to demonstrate the malleability of our brains (and our capability to develop new skills and abilities through practice and effort whatever the extent or our current ability) and how our brains create those new synaptic connections.

In our Inner Hedgehog exercise, we thought about what we were passionate about, what we could become excellent at and what might make us money in the future. This exercise will help shape our ambitions and future opportunities.

After break (and some creative activity with the modelling clay) we headed off to the Ways of Seeing session led by Miss Spencer-Ellis and Miss O'Sullivan.

Ways of Seeing focused on two of the Big 5 skills - creative thinking and critical thinking. We learned about perspectives (and challenged our perspectives) and we interpreted some paintings (and discussed how our interpretations were different to the artists). We brainstormed ideas and we created a poem each. By the end we had a better understanding of the different views of art and poetry and flexed our creative muscles.

• “I have become more confident. When I first got told to write a poem I was quite worried about what to write but when I got into it I was no longer worried. This will make a difference so I don’t give up on something even if I don’t have much experience in it.”

At the end of the day we had Reflection Time, an opportunity to consider what we had learned and set ourselves some challenges to build on that learning in advance of the next session. 

See the gallery of photos from the day.