TIS Director's Blog

Most schools and organizations have strategic plans. The idea is to set long-term to medium-term goals (3 to 5 years) for schools to focus on so they do not get lost during the business of normal operations. Representatives from all stakeholder groups get together, usually for a full day or retreat setting to create the plan. I have seen many plans and for most, I feel, they are too spread out, trying to cover too many areas. They are also usually very dense language wise, and using a lot of platitudes. This is not good for a community to rally behind or even understand what the community should be trying to accomplish. Many schools help this by using the strategic plan to make yearly operational goals that narrow and define goals.

I am an outsider to OIS, as I have not yet started my job as Head of School. This gives me a typical stakeholder’s perspective of the plan, as most people were not involved in creating the document. It is not good to have too many people involved in the writing of the document because that is one way to get the document to be too diverse, and the more people participating, the harder it is to reach consensus in what are the priorities.

I really like the OIS Strategic Plan 2013-2016. It is entitled, “Partnerships for the Future” which refers to the unique position of OIS. I don’t know of any international schools that share a campus and program with a local, private, international school (Senri International School SIS) and are part of prominent university foundation. The main goal of the next three years is to develop, celebrate, and market these two partnerships. The school was founded in 1991 with its sister school, SIS, and it merged with the Kwansei Gaukin (Western Japan University) in April of 2010. During the next two school years, from 2011 to 2013, OIS did a self-study, collecting much data from the community and underwent an accreditation visit from several agencies. This time of reflection and evaluation was a good opportunity to make a new strategic plan. In 2014-2015, OIS will be in the second year of the plan and I will be blogging on our progress.

You can read the document in its entirety at the end of this post. I have summarized the key goals below.

The OIS Strategic Plan fits in with the KG Foundation’s 10-year Strategic Plan. The KG Foundation is in the second half of the plan and in these five years, they are “raising the quality of education in context of a global environment.” That resonates with what OIS does and in fact, what the Japanese education system is trying to do as a whole. They are trying to produce students that are global citizens and can interact and compete with a interconnected global community. The OIS plan is broken down into four main areas:

Learning Community – The main goals here are to vertically align the school’s curriculum, better collect and analyze student learning data, and define clearly the Professional Development Program for OIS within the KG Foundation’s budget.

Technology and Learning – Develop a person in the position of Technology Director. The Tech Director will lead the school in figuring out what is the best technology tools for students to learn with in this age of the internet and in conjunction with the library, support teachers in using technology to improve their teaching.

Attracting Learners – Through better marketing of the school’s unique partnerships, increase enrollment in the upper grades, and get a more diverse, international student body.

The OIS Community – Focus more on the “soft skills” of character education by enhancing  programs such as pastoral care, Community, Action, and Service, and the PTA. They also want to broaden the number of community members interacting with the KG Foundation and to communicate clearly means to be in the two partnerships.

I have been thinking a lot recently about libraries and their place in schools. Due to so much information being available on line, either through web sites or ebooks, the focus of libraries is changing from a place to find information and quiet research, to something else. I do think a section of a library should be for quiet study, but ideally, it would be isolated from the center of the library and not be the entire library. An article about the school library in Monticello High School, in Chartlottesville, Virginia, gives one example of where libraries are moving towards.

Librarian Jane Ackroyd, “People no longer have to come to a library to get information,” she says, “so the library has to get people coming in for different reasons. Students need somewhere to socialize, create things and collaborate.”

The library now is called ¨The Learning Commons¨and logged more than 33,000 visits outside of class time in a school of just over 1,000 students. They have a Garage Band (music authorship software) lab, a ¨Hacker Space¨with a 3-D printer, microscope, old tech equipment, etc. Glass walls separate spaces but allow people to see what is happening throughout the library. They also have student reading lounges, collaboration tables, etc.

The link to the article is here.

Below is the principals’ report to the International School of Belgrade’s Board of Trustees. Every year we give this presentation to the Board of Trustees and post it to our school web site. I would like to thank Lower School Principal, Brian Lettinga for helping with the presentation. The report includes standardized test results like M.A.P., SAT, and IB results and other indicators of student learning.

I am completing six years as the Upper School Principal of the International School of Belgrade this week and wanted to save to my web site videos from yesterday’s farewell ceremony and the welcome to the upper school video I made a couple of years ago.

Next is the Middle School Diary of 2013-2014.

Below is a teacher produced video of a parody of the song “Fancy.”

And finally, the ISB MS version of “Happy” which was a popular song for schools in the 2013-2014 school year.

I also copied here my farewell message to the community.

Below is an article I wrote for the Central and Eastern European Schools Association web site. The link to the article is here.

Earlier this month, the worst flooding in history occurred in Bosnia & Herzegovina and Serbia. An area the size of Slovenia was flooded and thousands of people needed to be evacuated. Here in Serbia, many left in the middle of the night to avoid the almost 2 meter high waters that inundated their homes and apartment blocks. 33 people lost their lives and over 25,000 people fled to evacuee centers in Belgrade or found lodging with friends or family.

The response to the disaster from our school and the entire country was incredible. Thousands of volunteers came out to help fill and carry sand bags, rescue stranded people with boats, etc. I heard immediately from parents, students, and teachers, asking for the school to organize a donation drive. In just a few days, our gymnasium was filled with clothes, diapers, water, canned food, etc. in response to a call for donations. The students helped out by sorting and delivering the goods to evacuee centers around the city. Many of the students held fundraising events like bake sales, theatre performances, donation drives, etc. The high school students asked for a school-wide assembly to explain what happened and to outline the school’s relief efforts. The Board of Trustees and Staff Association are distributing cash donations to our employees from Obrenovac, a city 30 kilometers from Belgrade, located on the banks of the Sava River. We also selected a special needs school in Obrenovac to help. They need everything, from new flooring and paint, to books and school supplies. We also heard from other CEESA schools, asking how they could help.

The city of Obrenovac is covered with mud and some areas are still inaccessible. There is no electricity, water, or mobile phone service. Most people have not been able to get back to their homes. There is much more work still to be done to get the flood victims’ lives back to normal. The school hopes to continue helping and community service initiatives are being planned.

With all of this sadness and tragedy, it has been wonderful to see the kindness and caring of the people of Serbia and our ISB community. It is also nice as an international educator to get the opportunity to help out our host nation of Serbia and make a difference in the lives of those impacted by the disaster.

Below is a report from our Facilities & Security Manager and Director with the donation totals.

Parents and staff brought many bags and boxes of donations, and students were directly involved in the process of  gathering, sorting and distributing these. A joint decision was made to send the majority of the donations to Suplja stena in Avala, due to the high number of children there and the distance of this evacuation center from the city center. (Evacuation centers within Belgrade city limits were received more donations than more remote ones.) ISB students were directly involved in two visits there, and brought the following:

• Clothing (male, female, child) – 850 kilos
• Blankets, sheets, pillows – 400 kilos
• Food – 500 kilos
• Diapers – 20 packs
• Baby food – 30 kilos
• Water – 300 liters
• Toys – 20 boxes
• Hygiene products – 16 boxes

ISB has provided a pump for extracting water from houses along with a generator to citizens of Obrenovac, and trained some of them how to use the machines. We also donated 240 liters of disinfecting chemicals and fuel (120 euros). We intend to buy an industrial-strength dehumidifier as well.The remaining donations that are still in the school gym will be distributed during the following weeks directly to households in flooded areas, especially rural ones. Students are eager to help, and will be involved in making packages for
households and distributing them.

We have set up two funds: one for the money that we are receiving specific for the ISB employees who have personally been impacted by the flooding in Obrenovac, the second for any monetary donations we receive towards our intended longer-range relief efforts. We have identified a school in Obrenovac for special needs students as the primary recipient
of funds from the second account. The school is called Dnevni boravak and we have established contact with the school Director. ISB has had previous connections with this school. We envision not only buying items needed, but also involving our students and community directly in things like painting and building projects, all to be determined according to the
specific needs that are identified.

My wife Nadia and I completed our final Girls On The Move (GOTM) and Boys On The Move (BOTM) program this morning. The idea was brought to us by a friend from Seattle whose daughter participated in a Girls On The Run program.  We wanted something adapted for our international school so she came up with a different version and called it Girls On The Move.  GOTM is a club for young girls that discusses issues such as body image, relationships with boys/parents, happiness, self confidence, intercultural understanding, etc. After each session they train for a five kilometer run. Most of the girls have never done any distance running before, and this opens a new lifelong activity for them. It also is an example of some of the things Nadia is trying to teach them in the club. This year another teacher, Jeff Zollner, joined and did a similar program for the grade 4 and 5 boys.

As you can see above, we had a lot of fun! It is a positive experience for both the parents and teachers, who serve as “running buddies” and the students. She hopes to do the program again in Japan.

What is a pump track? I asked the same question when approached by a student for his personal project. In the Middle Years Programme of the International Baccalaureate, students in their fifth year (Grade 10) are required to complete a Personal Project. Students complete a year-long project about something they are passionate about, which can range from making a guitar, writing a play, learning how to code and making a app, planning and executing an overnight hiking trip, etc. It is the culmination of their time in the MYP and is an independent project outside of their school work. They select a supervisor at school to help them and many use their parents or other community members, especially experts in the field they are interested in to help them.

Rafael is young man who spends much of his weekend riding mountain bicycles. He competes in extreme downhill events and belongs to a BMX (bicycle motocross) club. His goal was to build a “pump track” at our school and introduce the sport to other students. A pump track is a dirt circuit with bumps, berms, and jumps that allows students to learn how to ride on rugged terrain. At first I was skeptical like any administrator, worried about student safety and school liability, but as I learned more and saw how committed Rafael was to doing this, I decided to support him and make it happen. We had to go through a lot of convincing, and he made a presentation to the school administration team. After clearing with the school insurance, he got permission to go ahead and design and build a pump track on our campus.

He spent a week constructing it with friends, with the school supplying dirt and tools. This weekend he held two sessions, one for middle school students and another for lower school students. It was one of the most rewarding projects I have seen in my educational career. The boys absolutely loved it and it was good to see how physical challenges really engaged them. Rafael was very patient with the younger students and I noticed how they really looked up to him. I even got into the spirit of the day and rode the course myself. I am an avid cyclist, but only on road cycles, but I experienced the appeal of off-road cycling. It is a great workout and fun! The pump track was another way to “hook” kids into school and I have developed a closer relationship with them.

Rafael’s project was a great example of what is best about the personal project. He learned much about how to get a project from the idea, through a bunch of obstacles to completion. It took a lot of planning and working through school channels to get it done. Rafael learned how to work the system. It also brought the community together and allowed a student to demonstrate leadership ability that would not normally be seen in a school setting. It also made me realize the importance of facilitating students to “discover their passion” and how educational leaders sometimes need to take calculated risks. I am glad we went through with it and the experience of being a personal project supervisor, ended up being one of the most rewarding of my career.

(photo courtesy of The Mirror UK web site)

This semester I have been working with our Grade 8 science teachers, the school nurse, and other Middle School personnel with our Sexual Health and Reproduction unit with the Grade 8 students. With pornography easily available on the internet, this has changed the ways schools need to support adolescents with this topic. This is much different from previous generations and the viewing of pornographyis getting easier all the time with the advent of mobile devices. Almost all teenagers have seen pornography and that is true with the surveys we did with our grade 8 students. I and most parents wonder what the impact this viewing of pornography, much of it violent or unusual, has on the minds of young people. This article in the New York Times by David Segal, suggests that the academic research on the topic is inconclusive and difficult to study. Segal writes,

Neuroscience tells us that young minds are still forming and thus malleable, and they tend to respond to emotionally charged material in ways that adults don’t. Given that pornography is emotionally charged, it would be shocking if it had no impact.

“I have a son,” says Professor Reid of U.C.L.A., “and I don’t want him getting his information about human sexuality from Internet porn because the vast majority of such material contains fraudulent messages about sex — that all women have insatiable sexual appetites, for example.”

With adolescents viewing more explicit forms of pornography at earlier ages than before, it is vital that schools and parents educate children from a young age about sexual health. Explicit instruction on healthy, emotionally satisfying, and most importantly, respectful sexual relationships needs to occur throughout childhood and adolescents. Teenagers need information and support to make good decisions about engaging in sexual behaviors.

One of the best resources for teens and parents on the internet is the site run by Gary Wilson, www.yourbrainonporn.com. His Tedx Talk, “The Great Porn Experiment” is mandatory watching for parents and teenagers, especially boys. Wilson described the effect pornography has on adolescent brains and the problems associated with excessive exposure to pornography before the age of 22. Some psychologists are reporting arousal addiction has serious negative impacts on boys.

All of us involved in this unit have learned a lot from preparing of the lessons, teaching the classes, receiving feedback from both students and their parents. In my opinion, it is one of the most important things schools can do to help young people. I would even expand the program more to combat the ever-growing pervasiveness of pornography in the lives of teenagers. It should be a mandatory topic for all MYP grade levels. Schools need to help parents in communicating about these topics with their children.