From the Head of Secondary 02.09.2023
We now have out teacher mentors in place for the Charity Committee [Ms Jing] and the Student Council [Ms Li], and those groups will be having their first official meetings next week. Many thanks to those colleagues for taking on those roles. I am sure we are going to see real commitment from both of these voluntary groups again this year; they are such great ambassadors for our school, contributing positively to KIS, the KK community, and the wider world. In next week’s newsletter we will be able to announce who are student leaders are in those teams, and what specific roles are they taking on, and later on in September we have our student leadership assembly where we will hear about their plans for the year.
Earlier this week I spoke to all Secondary staff about one of our newest school policies ‘Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence Tools’ which was created towards the end of last academic year by a working party led by Mr Ghanbari. As a school we had earlier made the decision that we were going to embrace AI [unlike some other countries around the world who have banned it in schools]. Artificial Intelligence has a huge capacity to transform education in a positive way, but there are lots of aspects which need to be considered:
- Appropriate Use
- Ethical Considerations
- Academic Integrity
- Transparency
- Challenging Misuse
- Staff Use
- Student use
- Coursework and Exams
The policy lays down guidelines which cover all these areas. The world of Artificial Intelligence is continually changing / developing and as a school we will continue to monitor its use in our classrooms, for the benefit of our students.
In the same staff meeting Mr Bromley spoke about the system which we use to track students’ academic progress. Teachers used shared documents to enter achieved grades at frequent intervals and from that we can easily see how students are performing across all of their subjects. This enables us to identify students, who, for example, need additional support. We can spot trends and ask questions if a student’s grades appear to be falling, in one subject or perhaps in more than one, and we can look to provide academic and pastoral support as necessary. Our goal is to make sure that students achieve their potential, whether they are in Year 7 or Year 13.
Read on to see how the library renovation is coming along, supported by our wonderful library cadets!
Have a wonderful weekend!
Mrs Margaret Renshaw
Head of Secondary / Deputy Principal
Library Cadet News!
It’s all change in the Secondary Library for 2023 – we have had a summer of renovation, and the Library is now sporting a lovely new wooden floor, fresh paint, new lighting, and the exciting addition of ‘floating’ bookcases which can be wheeled around to create new spaces every day.
We can now change the floorplan of the Library to whatever suits our needs – we can now seat 2 or 3 separate classroom areas, or move everything back to create a single hall or assembly space – or, our cadets’ current favourite: A book labyrinth! We also have new sofas and beanbags to ensure a comfortable reading atmosphere for those that just want to get lost in a good book.
The cadet ‘army’ has been mobilised for the tremendous task of reshelving the 1000s of books, and we now have more than 20 students signed up for active duty. Our first task is to reorganise all the books into genre groups so that books can easily be found according to the readers’ wants. There have already been many heated debates about library layout and organising – who would have thought that book cataloguing could be so controversial?! However, we all agree that the new Library is going to be a wonderful place to be for all of the KIS students, whether it’s for rest, relaxation, reading or lessons.
