Director's Blog

I really feel it is important that international school faculty participate in the host nation’s culture. To celebrate the end of our Orientation and preparation for the school year, we invited the Abrašević Folk Dancing Ensemble to give us a workshop at the school. The dance troupe was famous during the time of Yugoslavia and still tours today, being founded in 1905. Folk dancing is common here in the Balkans and some of our local faculty, when they were younger, participated in folk dancing groups.

They put an exhibition of dancing for us and more importantly, explained to the faculty what the different costumes from the different regions of Serbia symbolize. They then tried to teach us some of the basic steps and it was sooo much fun. As you can see from the photo above, we all had a great time and shared many laughs. Dancing makes one feel good and it was nice to end such a hectic time with an experience that was so relaxing and entertaining.

I was so inspired by the instructor and the troupe that I want to have the students involved as well. Hopefully in the second semester, we can have the troupe come and work with our students.

This year we built into the calendar and established as a tradition, the student bonding trips. Especially this year, with 42 new students and 4 new teachers to the ISB Upper School, it was important to get them to make connections with each other and the returning students and faculty. Every grade level went to a different place near Belgrade and the idea is for the groups to learn about Serbian history and culture, be active in the outdoors, and spend time getting to know one another.

I went on the Grade 7 Retreat and had a lot of fun. I wish I could have bottled the energy of the 155 students on Thursday morning in the gym, as we took attendance and sent them out to their buses! They were so excited! We kept them busy with sight seeing, lots of hiking, and time for playing sports. In the evening, we did some group activities, like the one above, where they had to sit on each other’s knees. If the group does it at the same time and slowly, it can be done and they can support one another. After a few attempts, the group finally got it. We also made a Harlem Shake video among other things.

One could see the social groups breaking down during the trip. It is a challenge for our school to get the long-term local students to connect with the transient expatriate students. The Serbians have seen many friends come and go and can get a bit wary. Also the big differences in culture sometimes need to be understood.

I think next year we can make it better by working funding of the trip into the tuition, thus lowering the amount of logistics that needs to be worked out.

 

On Saturday I participated in our annual ISB Board of Trustees Retreat. Every September, the Board gets together along with the Senior Administration Team of the school. The goals of the day are to orient the new Board Members, give everyone board training on their roles and responsibilities, and to plan out the school year. We also bring in a consultant. Below are my non-confidential notes on the training aspects of the day. I always learn something about excellent governance.

I also have worked quite a bit with our consultant, Mrs. Adele Hodgson, and it was good again to spend the day with her. She has worked with so many schools and I appreciate being able to benchmark our school with the many she has experience with.

 

 

 

Periodically I like to post my classroom observations. As a principal, I feel it is important to understand what is going on in the classrooms so I can help and support the teaching and learning. I always enjoy learning new things!

The Grade 9 English class has an Outside Reading Requirement (ORR) theme of “Let Freedom Read”. ORR books are like book clubs and the students work in groups and get together to discuss sections as they read through the novels. The focus are books that have been banned in certain parts of the world various political or social reasons. Some of the books the students can choose from are as follows:

• To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee (USA)
• One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Russia)
• Slaughterhouse Five – Kurt Vonnegut (USA)
• The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini (Afghanistan)
• Frankenstein – Mary Shelly (UK)
• A Wrinkle in Time – Madelaine L’Engle (USA)
• The Golden Compass – Philip Pullman (UK)
• Ender’s Game – Orson Scott Card (USA)
• Animal Farm – George Orwell (UK) 

The Grade 6 Mathematics students were practicing rounding decimals. Half the class was working on the board (below) and the other half were working at their desks. A sample problem was to round the number 78290 to the nearest hundreds place. My answer – 78300, which was correct.

The seventh grade science class was listening to a lecture. Science teacher Janice Medenica was sharing a student cartoon on how fungi spread spores through insects. The idea was to demonstrate good note taking skills, dividing the paper into input and output. The output shows the teacher that the student understands the material. The input side are the notes from the information source (lecture, video, reading) and the output is showing how this information fits in the student’s schema. This could include a rap song about fungi or a cartoon.

The grade 12 psychology class working on presentation on a knowledge issue in the field. For example, Sreta (below) chose Doping in Sports because he is a hockey player and learned from a former National Hockey League player that many of the players use performing enhancing drugs to keep up with the rigors of an 82-game season. When he participated in the world Under-18 hockey championships, several of his teammates were tested. He was looking at sources when I sat down next to him. It looked like it was going to be an excellent presentation.

The grade 11 English class was discussing the DP Classroom Without Walls trip to Bosnia, with stops in Višegrad, Mostar, Sarajevo, and Trebinje. The trip will concentrate on the history and literature of the region, including Nobel Literature Prize winner Ivo Andrić’s book, Bridge Over the River Drina  and the origins of World War I.

I really like it when teachers and administrators take extra care in designing their classrooms and offices. The “wow”
factor for students and colleagues helps the learning in the space. I want to share the three-part video series with faculty next week as they set up their classrooms and other learning spaces. The videos were featured on one of my favorite educational resource web sites, Edutopia, published by the George Lucas Foundation. The videos follow the consulting firm, The Third Teacher Plus, as they work with an American middle school teacher and help him re-design his classroom. I had to laugh remembering how many students they cram in a classroom in public schools. The featured teacher has classes of 36 students. The videos were inspiring to me and hopefully our faculty as well.

 

The second part shows the actually work and physical transformation of the room. I particularly loved the “Toss and Keep” game. I also see the Stanford d.school also is involved in this particular project.  This is an ideal situation with a team of professionals working in the room.

 

 

Part three shows the final product and the reactions of the students. They also go through all the facets of the room. It really makes me want to do this with my office. The original post on Edutopia can be found here.

 

 

 

Our EDL Leadership 424 class participated in a workshop held at the Jazz at Lincoln Center in Manhattan earlier this week. Creativity and Imagination in Leadership Seminar was hosted by the Maxine Greene Center for Aesthetic Education and Social Imagination and Jazz @ Lincoln Center. The Jazz @ Lincoln Center was started in 1987 with the mission of spreading jazz music and acts kind of like a Jazz Hall of Fame, but with more of a promotional and teaching aspect. They have their own orchestra led by Jazz great Wynton Marsalis. Our workshop was held in one of the studio classrooms and led by Dr. Jon Drescher from Lehigh’s Center for Developing Urban Educational Leaders. 

The purpose of the experience was to “expand our awareness of the importance of multiple perspectives, collaboration, risk-taking, and reflective practices. We arrived and in small groups, arranged a traditional American song to fit our experience of America. Since we had several Latin Americans in our group, we put a Spanish language and Latin American culture spin on the Elvis Presley classic, Blue Suede Shoes. Other groups included hip-hop (urban principals), spoken word, etc.

Next we listened to the band, The Amigos (video above). They teach US History through music and music through US History and do a lot of performances in schools. It was amazing their talent, enthusiasm, and repertoire. They performed many kinds of American music, for example Zydeco, Blue Grass, Negro Spiritual, Slide Piano, etc. I learned  much and enjoyed the music. A brilliant idea! They will be going on an overseas tour next month courtesy of the US State Department as an ambassador and teacher of American culture. They will be fine representatives. As a non musician, I appreciated and was inspired by the musicians, especially their tie in with US history and teaching history through music and vice versa. I was totally engaged throughout the concert, and I am not a big music fan. The background behind each song hooked me into what they were doing and I gained a deeper level of understanding of America.

I wish we would have talked a bit more to the band although they did hit upon some of their work together. This excerpt from an article from Warwick Business School Researcher Deniz Ucbasaran featured in The Guardian gets to the main point.

build creative tension and give individuals their heads” while working within the framework of a collective. They have to harness the “disparate egos of highly talented people” and somehow keep them working towards the same goal. “To the uninitiated, jazz seems like chaos, whereas the reality is that it’s very ordered,” she says. “Underpinning the structure is a long tradition of education and practice.

What did I take away from the workshop? I did understand the concepts of improvisation, creative conflict, etc. and the music group reinforced this, but my big learning was the power of the fine arts to inspire and teach organizations. What a great way to focus and build team work than through music, theatre, or visual arts. Not only does it put The Arts (IB proper noun) in the center of everyone’s focus, but it can bring together diverse groups. This is also a neat way of doing Professional Development and truly differentiating for those people who are musically oriented. What a great way to engage people. This would also work great with students and parents.

I would love to do this with our faculty, students, and parents, and teach Serbian culture and history through music and vice versa. My vision would be to have a traditional Serbian folk band and troupe of dancers come in and play songs and give mini-lectures about the instruments and meanings/origins of the songs. They could also talk about the costumes and participants in the workshop would learn the basic steps of a Kolo dance and maybe how to play some simple melodies on the gusle, or accordion.

As a step further, I do want to read Max Depree’s book, Leadership Jazz and see how more applications to leadership can be found reflecting on this experience.

We participated in a Design Thinking workshop by the d.school Institute of Design at Stanford University. They produced an 90-minute crash course workshop that the public can take on line. Our EDL 424 Leadership: Self & Groups class did the workshop aided by our professor.The goal of the d.school’s workshop is to give participants the experience of using “design thinking” to solve problems. We were paired up and asked to consider the last time we gave a gift. The idea then was to apply design thinking to improving the experience.

Design thinking has been around since the 1970s. The d.school lab at Stanford brings together people from many different disciplines and areas of expertise to work out the messy problems of the world. They foster radical collaboration and innovation. I love that word innovation! Their ideas are neatly summarized here.

The big learning I took from the process of design thinking was to focus on EMPATHY while solving problems. During the workshop, after initially interviewing my partner about her latest gift-giving experience, we were asked to dig deeper and figure out what was “really going on” with the giving of the gift. What did the gift really mean? The Stanford workshop people asked us to latch on to something the other person said that hinted at something deeper. For my friend, it was her concern about her friend’s pregnancy (it was for a baby shower) and the lack of support from the father of her baby. An example I could use at my school would be at our recently created Curriculum Overview Maps. Teachers from PK through 12 got together periodically this year to vertically align the curriculum. I worked closely with the science department and we mapped out the content and skills sequentially to ensure a smooth transition from PYP to MYP to DP. What we need to go back to is to empathize with the students and what do we want the students to feel as they go through the curriculum. In my opinion, the science teachers would want to have the students either be inspired to become scientists or have an appreciate for science and see how it enriches their lives. What is in the curriculum to stimulate this????

The model of d.school’s design thinking is below.

Another one of the key ideas I took away from the experience was the d.school’s call for action. They emphasized instead of thinking about something for too long, get started and do something. The result will be more thinking along the way and a better finished product.

Finally I really felt that I got to know my partner and it can create a bond between employees or students.

It reminds me of the “Design and Technology” course in the IB’s Middle Years Programme that teaches the “Design Cycle”

The basic idea of the MYP design cycle is to Investigate-Plan-Create- Evaluate and to move between and among these actions while solving a problem.

I will recommend our teachers of Design and Technology to do this crash course with their students. There is a web site with a crash course and materials adapted for a K-12 school http://www.designthinkingforeducators.com/.

I really enjoyed our class on Sunday here at Lehigh University. I am taking EDL 424 “Leadership: Self & Groups again with Dr. Anne Marie Fitzgerald. We took time out of our regular studies to learn some physical leadership skills up on the mountain top campus. As you can see above, all of the activities were physical tests that required team work to complete. My favorite was the large balance below, which required everybody to play a part in the in the success of the activity. We needed to get everyone on board without the platform touching the ground.

It gave me many ideas about getting leadership and teamwork with students and staff. I appreciated the physical challenge and a break from the academic or mental challenges we normally face in school. These kinds of things would work very well at our school. Besides me, can you spot the other former ISB employee???

 

I just completed the first course in my Doctoral program of Educational Leadership at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.  I plan to take three courses this summer and need to complete 16 total to earn the Ed.D.

This first course was taught by Dr. Anne Fitzgerald and it focused on Bolman and Deal’s book, “Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice and Leadership”. The big idea for leaders is to look at organizations through four different “frames” or models. I made a power point to summarize the four frame and it is below. The idea is to force oneself to think in different ways and frame issues from different perspectives. It also is important for leaders to think in ways that are not naturally inclined to do.

There are lots of valuable ideas and resources the course provided me. The photo above is a board game we did in class called The Change Game, and it was a simulation of how to implement change in a school. My notes from the course are below. There were several big ideas that were also featured in the class besides the four frames. These included Roger Martin’s Integrative Thinking and the Opposable Mind, the Curse of Cluelessness, Mintzberg’s Five, Myerson’s Tempered Radicals, Keegan and Lahey’s Immunity to Change.

 

 

 

Every June the Lower School Principal and I make a presentation to the ISB Board of Trustees. The presentation is above and it highlights student achievement. As part of our school’s strategic plan, we are developing a set of indicators which we will monitor to determine success. With that in mind, I went a bit beyond just test scores and documents our cocurricular, fine arts, and community service program.

I am very interested in student learning data and what it can tell us and how it can improve teaching and learning at ISB. In a public forum such as this, I can’t go into the details that are under the data above. We are fortunate at ISB to have students that come from families that value education and our students are strong readers, mathematicians, and students in general that take their education seriously. They are normal teenagers however, and it is a challenge for us to engage and motivate them to do even more.