From the Principal 20.02.2021
Saturday 20th February
Dear KIS Community,
Welcome back. We started the second half of this term just a couple of days ago and our staff had a day of online learning themselves, this time from the other side. We have days built into the school calendar for staff development and this time around we had a virtual development day on Wednesday.
The morning started off with a Key Note Speech from myself discussing Cultural Competence and Cultural Literacy with a focus on the differences between International and Multicultural before a brief discussion on the development of International Schools in the future.
This was followed by a period of independent learning for all staff as they completed a theory course to update all staff skills in first aid for schools. Then after a quick break for Tea and Coffee or whatever else they found in their fridge, staff split off into three groups. Support and Admin staff continued with their Independent Learning.
Primary teachers worked with Mrs Smith and looked at the use of Professional Enquiry to support development in Primary teaching practice. As Mrs Smith explained to the teachers “No one understands the challenges teachers face in the classroom better than other teachers – which is why collaboration is a crucial part of teacher professional development.”
The Primary TLAs had a session with one of our two Lead TLAs, Ms Victoria, who delivered an excellent session to all our TLAs. Focusing on many aspects of day to day work that our TLAs do to support our primary children’s learning. This included topics such as Scaffolding, Prompting, Clueing, Modelling and Correcting. The TLA role is crucial to supporting our younger children inside and outside the classroom and the session was an excellent opportunity to support those that are responsible for this.
Ms Service led a session for the secondary teachers and gave a wonderful presentation on the use of and importance of Assessment for Learning (AfL). The basic premise is that students can use the results and feedback of their work and assessments to understand their own learning, what is working and what needs improving. AfL is a whole school focus this year and Ms Service took this opportunity to support the Secondary teachers within their departments and enhance the great work they have been doing with AfL across the secondary school.
After staff had their lunch break, members of the ELT had development training on the use of our information management system, Engage, to help prepare our school for online assessment and reporting. The rest of us came back together for a session on what to expect for the forthcoming CIS virtual visit. We discussed the visiting team, the outline of the schedule, lesson and learning observations, and what to expect during the various meetings over the four and a half days of the visit. It is not long to go now and our visit will be starting one month from now on March 21st. More information will be shared with you in due course.
Also as part of our ongoing teacher development, on Friday a group of staff met at school (physically distanced, with masks of course) to start their training for ‘Teaching in English in Multilingual Classrooms’ or TEMC. This is an intense and well-respected training and development course to support teachers and TLAs for teaching children from multilingual as well as multicultural backgrounds in the same classes. Over the next two years all of our teaching and TLA staff will be trained in this important aspect of international education.
Next week we look forward to seeing our oldest and youngest back in school and before long we hope to see everyone else being able to return.
As always, stay safe and have a lovely weekend.
Ian Gross
Principal
