What are the students learning at OIS?

Grade 3 Teacher Mr. Driver talks with parents during Back to School Night

 

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.

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Kwansei Gakuin Council Meeting – September 5, 2014

I visited the KG main campus over in Kobe for the first time this Saturday. The business manager, office manager, campus supervisor, SIS head, and I, went for a meeting of the KG Council. The Council is an appointed group that provides support and a check for the KG Board of Trustees. I counted about 45 people at the meeting, which took place in the administration building.
My first impression of the campus was “California” and I learned that it was inspired by Stanford University of Palo Alto, California. The Spanish colonial style buildings, tall palm trees, and green mountain backdrop make it a gorgeous scene.
The opening speech by BoT Chair, and former Fuji Film Executive, Akira Miyhara, was well received by those in attendance. He stressed the fact that change comes rapidly to societies, using the example that his former business, photographic film, completely changed with the advent of digital technology. He also mentioned the importance of getting more women into the workforce, something that Prime Minister Abe has also said. I counted only 4 women at the meeting. He went on to encourage the KG schools to produce students that can adapt to change and encourage female students to think about their careers.
The most interesting part of the meeting for me was to hear from the other heads of schools. The KG Foundation has schools from Kindergarten (Early Childhood) all the way through post graduate studies. They value all of the them and the Heads from several schools gave presentations of what is going on at each of the schools at the meeting. The first was the Seiwa Junior College , which is similar to a community college or TAFE (Australia) and they have two-year and vocational programs. The Kwansei Gakuin Junior High School reported having double the number of applicants for the spaces available in the school. The girls are scoring higher than boys, which I find common at this phase of early adolescence. They now have 3 native English speakers on staff. The Kwansei Gakuin Elementary School had a graduation trip to Vancouver, British Columbia. The Head of the Izawa Seiwa Kindergarten did an interesting study of how many steps children take per day. Children are walking much less than when he did the studies in the past. The average dropped from 30,000 steps 10 years ago  to around 3,000 today. The school is focusing on ways to get kids walking more often. The school also grows around 1,000 sweet potatoes yearly on campus and sells them to the cafeteria at KG university and to their community. This year the harvest was much less due to the heavy rains.
The next Council meeting will be in December and Masago Sensei, head of SIS and I will be presenting about what is going on at SOIS.

 

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Classroom Observations – August 29, 2014

Ms. Entwistle leads the kindergarten students as they dance the “Hokey Pokey” 

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.

 

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School Law & Ethics

 

I am pictured with Mark Klein, Professor of School Law and Ethics

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.

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Counseling Psychology

Packer Hall – The first Lehigh University building (1868)

This summer I completed a course in Lehigh’s Counseling Psychology Department entitled, “Diversity and Multicultural Perspectives”. The course was taught by Dr. Kate Richmond, a visiting professor from nearby Muhlenberg College.

I put on Scribd (see below) my daily reflections of my experiences during the course, including lectures, class discussions/presentations, group activities, and the readings. The course was an “eye-opening” experience for me and it made me look critically at my own views and societal and cultural systems that I live in. My major take-aways are as follows:

  • Leading an educational community entails a lot of psychology and counseling. The more insight I have into human nature, the better I do my job and act in the best interest of students.
  • Do not “celebrate” diversity for its own sake, but critically evaluate how different marginalized groups are impacted by our  dominant culture.
  • Great teachers make a big difference in schools. I was inspired by the passion for and knowledge of the subject by Dr. Richmond.
  • Social Justice should be in the everyday life of international schools. The course also gave me some deeper insights into “global citizenship”.

 

 

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OIS Strategic Plan 2013-2016

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.

 

 

 

 

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“Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy”

This was a very interesting read by Slate Senior Editor, Emily Bazelon. She also writes for the New York Times Magazine and is a research scholar at the Yale Law School. She has done a lot of research for this book and really gives a thorough and realistic view of the topic of bullying the modern teenage social dynamics. If you are going to read one book on the topic this is it. I will certainly be thinking the ideas and opinions she brings up in my practice as an educator. I have seen much of what she describes as an upper school principal the past six years, although, working in an international school, we can deal with it much more effectively than in large, US, public schools. It always shocks me how often people bring lawsuits against schools in the USA.

Bazelon gives an excellent summary of the history of research on bullying and the current thinking on how schools should deal with it. She also follows the lives of three teenagers involved in bullying. These include a girl at a tough, urban school, a gay male teenager in a small town, and a student whose friend committed suicide. The following are my takeaways from the book:

  • The educational research shows 75-90% of students do not bully at all or with any regularity. This is a problem for a small segment of students. However, mutual aggression is common and is a natural part of teenage social dynamics, with the drama that comes with these conflicts. Teenagers are competing to move up on the social ladder and this is hugely important for them.
  • The original research on bullying, including the term bullying, is from the Swedish psychologist, Dan Olweus who was the first to scientifically study starting in the 1960s. He came up with a good definition that still holds true today: there needs to be a power difference between the parties, verbal or physical aggression, and sustained over time. Educators need to use the term “bullying” sparingly and use it only in situations that fit with this definition.
  • Schools can reduce bullying and aggression significantly through a comprehensive program of character development. Schools are being asked to do more in the areas of educating students to develop better relationships with others, making ethical decisions, dealing with setbacks, finding happiness, etc. There is a fine line between parents and teachers allowing teens the opportunity to solve social dynamic problems and monitoring for serious aggression that will do some students great harm. Teaching students to be kind, show empathy, and demonstrate humane social etiquette is time well spent! The school culture plays a big part in what is acceptable behavior for the group. Getting students to realize that insults and exclusion should not be tolerated and encouraging them to step forward to help a fellow student when they are victimized is key for schools.
  • The internet has brought another layer to this teen social aggression. Almost more happens on line than in school and teachers and parents need to deal with this. I am a firm believer in supporting students in making good decisions with their on line interactions and even though much of these incidents occur outside of the school, schools communicating with parents are the best way to help them. I admired Bazelon’s attempts at getting Facebook to own up to this problem and to do more for teens that are hurt by spiteful comments. Facebook is making a lot of money off of teens and not giving them enough help.
  • The first step for any school is to get data from the students and faculty on what are the behavioral issues and the extent of social aggression in the school. This can be done through surveys of students. Bazelon suggests using the resources of Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS), which is an US Department of Education program to help schools with discipline, and it is focused on students with disabilities, but it can help all students.
  • Schools should not ignore bullying or cruelty and deal with instances when they come up. In a case of bullying, never get the two parties together to work it out, as there is a big social power difference between the two and it won’t work. It is important for schools to understand the context of bullying and to be proactive, preventing future incidents. Bazelon’s opinion of suspending bullies is that it does no good and instead for schools to take an education approach instead of punitive. I disagree and feel that at an international school, an occasional suspension sends a message to the community that bullying is not acceptable. Of course with a suspension, a school should also deal with the student in the counseling realm as well.

This book will hold a place in my library and I will be referring to it from time to time. She also gives a ton of resources at the end of the book that can help schools in dealing with discipline. Thank you Emily for this important work! Bazelon gave a long interview to NPR’s Terry Gross on the program Fresh Air and discussed the book.

 

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The Role of Libraries in the Digital Age

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.

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ISB Student Learning Results 2013-2014

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.

 

 

 

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Goodbye to ISB

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.

Dear Upper School Parents,
During the planning of our end of the school year, I have been reflecting on my departure as well. In international schools, many students and families leave every year. This is a fact of life with international schools, and it is important to have a ceremony marking this fork in the road of the lives of our departing students. It is also important for the students who are staying, to have them say goodbye and get a sense of closure of their relationships. We will have two farewell ceremonies next Friday, at 9:00 AM for High School and 10:00 AM for Middle School in the gymnasium.
I would like to thank the ISB community for their support and kindness towards me and my family during my six years here at the school. I have fond memories of all the laughs, tears, highs, and lows, of leading the education of an amazing group of adolescents. We are on earth for such a short time with a limited number of years, and I am happy to have had the opportunity to spend six of them in Belgrade, and at ISB. It was my ultimate goal to leave the school in better shape than I found it. From my entire family, thank you for six wonderful years!
This is a photo from our first week in Belgrade in July of 2008.
And here is another from this past May, 2014.

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