The program
Everything outside the classroom, run as one system.
In many schools, camps, service, leadership, clubs and trips are often run by different people… for different reasons. X-Factor-Ed ties them together, so every experience builds on the last and students take on more… and more responsibility.
Four pillars
Experiential learning
Learning by doing: in the field, in communities, on expeditions.
The classroom is the most ridiculous place to learn ecology.
Harry Hildebrand
Leadership
An increase in leadership opportunities always has the biggest positive impact on the ‘culture’ of the school. Usually it involves (but not always) older students interacting, collaborating and leading younger students.
Leadership opportunities created with X-Factor-Ed usually rely on ‘leadership teams’, not just on one ‘standout leader’, giving more students an opportunity to realise that they can collaborate and provide much improved leadership as a team, bringing different (complementary) qualities ‘to the table’!
International citizenship
Getting to know people whose lives are different from yours, in your own community and overseas (and learning from them), and looking for opportunities to work with other schools rather than only ‘in-house’.
X-Factor
Every person has something that makes them special. Something they could stand up on a chair and talk about non-stop for ten minutes. That’s their X-Factor. The program helps students find theirs and helps them to develop it into ‘their purpose’.
All together, X-Factor-Ed is a holistic program: the whole student, not just the report card.
How it works in practice
Prefects
Support in providing structure to the prefect team: specific roles for junior prefects (for example SRC, arts, sport, environment and community), with mentoring and coaching by senior prefects.
We never say, “You can’t do that.” We say, “How are you planning to do that? What if this happens? Who could help with that?”
Harry Hildebrand
Senior student leadership
A leadership program at the end of the year for 16-year-olds (Year 10 in Australia), preparing every Year 10 student to apply for leadership roles in their second-last year: student mentors and leaders on school trips and outdoor education, coaching, junior homeroom mentoring, and more.
The X-Factor-Ed journal
Every student keeps a journal on every experience: a daily entry, plus guided reflections at the end of the day, often led by student leaders rather than teachers. It’s where the experiences get unpacked, and maximised. The journal is never graded. It belongs to the student, and only they decide who reads it.
The three-day design process, as part of the positive impact community project
- Inspiration. Students get to know a community: its people, what matters to them, what they’re proud of. You never walk in and decide what a community needs.
- Ideation. Students take their ideas back to the people they met, test them against reality, and build a plan and a budget.
- Implementation. A panel of students, local people and adults approves the plan, then students put it into action, with someone local ready to keep it going after they leave.
Who it’s for?
Schools that want students to have a bigger say in the culture of their school: leadership opportunities from around age eight to eighteen, with a leadership training program at about sixteen (the end of Year 10 in Australia) that prepares students to lead camps, projects and councils from the following year.
An intense week each year, plus daily opportunities built into how the school runs.
Start with a conversation.
Tell us about your school. Harry reads every enquiry himself and will reply personally.