Director's Blog

The banner above was from our hosting of an IB PYP workshop this weekend at the school. Over 100 educators from 26 different countries came to SOIS to attend 5 different workshops in English and Japanese.

Last Thursday I attended the fall meeting of the Heads of School of the IB Association of Japan (IBAJ). IBAJ is one the numerous regional associations that has formed in countries throughout the world. This association is especially important here in Japan, because the IB Asia Pacific Regional Office overseas over 600 IB schools in 26 different countries. The association provides the IB schools in Japan, a forum to collaborate and support each other. The association also is a unified voice towards the Asia Pacific Regional Office in dealing with challenges specific to Japan. There are 27 schools in Japan currently offering at least one of the IB’s three programmes (PYP,MYP,DP). We at the Osaka International School of Kwansai Gakuin offer all three and we are one of only three schools in Japan doing so.

Some of the meeting was spent discussing the structure of IBAJ as it is a relatively new organization. We also had video conferences with members of the IB Asia Pacific Regional Team, including the Heads of School Services and Professional Development. They will also be visiting the Kobe/Osaka area on November 22-23 and I hope to get a chance to meet them in person.

We also received an update on the status of Japanese Ministry of Education’s (MEXT)  initiative of attempting to have 200 Article 1 (Japanese national) schools earn IB authorization by the year 2018. This is a move by the Japanese government to train its future workforce to be more globally competitive in this interconnected world. MEXT is working on a collaborative project with the IB to offer IB courses in Japanese. The idea is for students to earn a Dual Language IB Diploma, with 2 courses in English and 4 courses in Japanese. The IB website has this link in both English and Japanese with more information about the initiative. The list of Diploma Programme courses  now offered in Japanese is growing and includes economics, history. biology, physics, and as we learned at the meeting, mathematics is now in Japanese.  s.

As for the 200 IB schools by 2018, progress is slow because of many factors.  There is a lack of IB expertise and the costs are high for either training staff or getting qualified teachers. There are national curriculum demands that might make it difficult for schools to fit the IB requirements in the students already busy schedule. Finally, there are also language and culture barriers to get through to understand what it takes to start an IB curriculum. We spoke with Ayumi Hoshino, the IB Developer for Japan and she highlighted the numerous workshops taking place throughout Japan. I remember she said there were about 12 schools moving that are applying or going to apply for authorization.

We are SOIS are in an ideal situation. The Senri International School received a grant three years ago to explore the IB curriculum and over 70% of their faculty has received some training in IB pedagogy. They are moving towards offering some classes in IB in the near future. The eventual goal would be to have the full, IB Dual Language Diploma available for all SIS students. OIS faculty would serve as mentors and the two faculties could work together to improve their teaching. It would also benefit OIS to have more students in the Diploma Programme and give us the chance to offer more courses, possibly IB Theatre, different foreign languages, and even going towards the IB Career-related Certificate., and be the first school in Japan to offer the fourth IB programme. The expansion of our IB courses would cause the two faculties to work more closely together, living the vision of the two school concept. This also fits in well with KG University and KG Senior High School winning the Super Global Awards from the government. SOIS is a role model for the globalization of education in Japan.

This February 2014 article from the Japan Times gives some more background of the MEXT-IB collaboration. The article featured former Head of OIS, John Searle (excerpt below)

Osaka International School of Kwansei Gakuin is one of 27 schools in Japan currently offering the IB diploma in English. John Searle, the head of school, says the institution has been following the curriculum for many years and that they have a relatively deep understanding of its value in an international context. He says that offering the dual-language diploma within the national framework will “bring the benefit of significant diversity to Japanese education.”

“Our own experience has shown us that an interesting additional value of offering the IB programs has been the stimulus of discussion, ideas and learning created between all involved,” Searle says. “Such discussion is the bedrock of change and has far wider implications beyond just program implementation. On a larger scale, if students, parents, teachers, schools and universities have the conversations required to understand what the IB programs are about, it really could have a huge impact on how people think about education and learning here in Japan.”

Last week I visited many classes as part of the process of getting to know the school. I try to take some time each day to spend some time in classroom. International school teachers, well, all teachers, are language teachers because of the importance of vocabulary in learning. Without words, students cannot critically think and express themselves. Some of the words I noticed being used by students were astrolobe, peninsula, zeitgeist, onomatopoeia, ostinato and Balfour Declaration. These are not everyday conversational vocabulary, but are academic vocabulary. English language learners have even more challenges than native speakers and it can take up to 4-5 years of schooling for non native speakers to master academic English.

Above, Ms. Hancock’s science class is looking at a fake crime scene. The students were so excited it was difficult to hold them behind the lines. Using forensics science activities to get students to evaluate situations is a good idea and one of the best characteristics of an IB education. The students need to apply their knowledge to a new situation.

I had to laugh at the end of mathematics class (below) when the grade 9 students took out their phones to photograph the white board. I wish we had that in high school! Mr. Bertman does an excellent job of differentiating for instruction and had three problems on the board of varying levels of difficulty. All students were challenged by the word problems and no gave up due to it being too difficult. Note that I saw them taking notes the old fashioned way during the class.

It was an impressive performance by the elementary teacher at last week’s Back to School night for the elementary school. I sat in on a couple of presentations and the dedication of the teachers to the students was evident. From the specialists to the classroom teachers, clear descriptions of what is being taught and learned at OIS was presented to the parents. It was a well attended event and I am looking forward to this week’s MS/HS Back to School event.

The grade 12 English students are reading Canadian Robertson Davies’s novel Fifth Business. Mr. David Algey the teacher did an oral exam on an excerpt from the novel, demonstrating a requirement of the IB for the students. He demonstrated the Student Learning Result of Risk Taker, allowing the students to praise and critique his performance. This made the students feel better about the upcoming exam. Mr. Van Plantinga during the MS/HS Assembly did a presentation on the teen brain and invited students to come to the learning lab to take a right brain/left brain quiz.

Finally, the grade 5 students gave a touching version of Tim Wills’s “Don’t Laugh at Me”. The assembly focused on our Student Learning Results and the values of being open-minded and caring. You can watch the video below.

I try to make time for visiting classrooms and talking with teachers and students about what they are doing. As the Head of School, it is easy to sometimes get trapped in the office or in meetings. It is always uplifting to spend some time with the students and it helps me as a leader, understand the daily rhythm of the school. Sometimes I will do a blog post on my observations. The purpose is to keep community members and visitors informed about the teaching and learning and to show off what great teachers and student we have here at SOIS of KG.

It is nice to see the range of activities for the different subject areas and grade levels in a short time. The seniors were discussing the play, “Top Girls” by Caryl Churchill, which is set in late twentieth century London, and features a total female cast of characters. The play examines feminist issues. The grade 10 students were learning how to simplify radicals in mathematics, and the grade 8 students were learning how to use Adobe Photoshop in Design class. The grade 2 students were reading Goldilocks out loud as a group. As you can see in the first photo above, the kindergarten students were getting some exercise and were laughing while dancing the classic, “Hokey Pokey” a participation dance for children, popular in English speaking countries. That is one of best sounds, the infectious laughter of children! In a grade 8 visual arts class (middle photo), Ms. Henbest was explaining color theory to the students. The visual arts is one of the shared programs between the two schools and the building was designed to feature many stunning display places, almost like an art gallery. One of the projects the students did last term was to pick someone, most were famous people, and learn about their life. They then were asked to pick a quote by the person and feature it, and the symbols of the person’s life, into the design of a canopic jar. The ancient Egyptians used these jars to store the viscera of their owner during the mummification process to use in the after life. These jars contained no viscera, but many were quite provocative. The students also sketched their figure.

My second course this summer was School Law & Ethics taught by visiting professor, Mark Klein. Mark is the Superintendent of Council Rock School District, an affluent area near Philadelphia/Princeton area. It was enriching to learn about his experiences as leader of a large, public school community and he was generous in providing school documentation.

The course was thought-provoking and very useful for my daily work as an administrator. We covered a lot of different areas regarding school law. We learned the overall structure of the justice system in the US and practiced reading and analyzing court case documents, including the US Supreme Court. Over 2/3 of all cases brought to trial in school law in the US are dealing with the IDEA, the Individual Disabilities Education Act (Special Needs Students). Every day we took on topics like searches, security cameras, contract law, employees rights, tenure, background checks, religion in schools, student teaching, and the latest big issue, the Internet. It reemphasized the importance of having a good Acceptable Use Policy, Copyrights, and Social Media policies. We also explored how the different areas of professional and personal ethics come together for a individual code of conduct.

This is all very useful and I will definitely be referring to these notes below in the future.

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.