Day Two, CIS and International Education
CIS Developments
CIS has tightened up procedures for membership and is providing more focused support in the accreditation process. The eighth edition of the Accreditation Manual has less sstandards but has a much greater emphaisis on the teaching and Learning component and on governance. It is moving away from an audit approach where reams were written about facilities and fire drills to look at the essesnce of an international education across three domains:
- Learning programs to enable student growth
- School Commitment to local and global ciommunity
- Support systems.
The purpose of international schools is to assist learners to become successful global citizens who are comfortable with cultural differences, interact across cultures and move through cultural milieu with a suite of identities. Intercultural understanding underpins the notion of international education
The process for accreditation requires the school to have a clear idea of what international education means in its contexts for its students. A significant development is that Chair and Co-Chairs will receive a Self-Study that has been pre-read at CIS and potential issues for exploration highlighted. This in turn gives greater support to a candidate school for accreditation because it can be alerted to areas that might require deeper clarification or greater evidence.
Tine Kohler. Cultural Skill Building
This workshop outlined a range of techniques and concepts that can be explicitly taught to engender intercultural and intracultural understanding. The idea is to give students an toolkit to expose our conceprions, challeng them, support students to question constructively and to learn from experience so that they are able to reposition themselves with insight. One activity was to write up 5 things about two distinct societies (e.g. China and Australia) , the peoples and the values and then to compare and contrast in a group discussion. Another was to use a leadership roleplay to construct culturally diverse scenarios which were performed and then debriefed. Anothher kind of roleplay was to see how conversations have cultural rules embedded in them. Having a quick look later, there are many resources available and I liked these
Tim Minchin "Prejudice"
Wayne Craig, Schooling for a brave new world"
The knowledge economy reuqires that education is transformative for the learners and this in turn requires braodening and deepening of teacher quality. Education will need to shift from training and instruction for certainty in life pathways to innovative strategies and structures that help students thrive and inmprove in uncertain and ambiguous global contexts. The world can no longer be delivered in a classroom by teachers deleivering what they learnt. We don't know what will be next but we can speculate.
There is more to education than international and national standards like PISA but there is no doubt that excellence for every learner is fundamental. The capabilities needed by the young are:
- metacognitive thinking
- intrapersonal knowledge and reflection
- interpersonal competence
These need to be nurtured in education systems that allow school autonomy, provide fair funding, have clear standards for teachers and students. In a nutshell schools can only be as good as the people within them so its about developing people with high quality instruction and an ethic of high performance, meaning that every child succeeeds to reach their potential. Schools need to be truly autonomous to do this.
The other thing that that schools are going to need is a a strong sense of moral purpose underlying a strong team and collective capacity to innovate. Professor David Hopkins has much to say about autonomy, improvement, accountability and collective responsibility as elements of moral purpose in education
Follwing on from this then, the whole business of school change is about leadership at every level and for every person. So the leadership capacity of a school has to be identified and attached to shared group values that promote interdependencies not hierarchies. David Logan explores this in his work on tribal leadership:
Education has to empower young people and allow them to define themselves not be defined:
No comments:
Post a Comment