What makes the SSIS Curriculum unique?
Dear colleagues,
Here are some reflections on the SSIS curriculum and how it is conceived. These are the themes that we want to emphasize with parents at Curriculum Night.
- Our Learning Environment is about more than just a traditional curriculum school. Our curriculum does not INCLUDE the 5 Core Values, our curriculum IS the 5 Core Values, and all the subjects fall under the Core Value of Academic Excellence.
- Balance in Life, Dedicated Service, Respect for All, and Sense of Self are the responsibilities of adults to model on and off the school campus, during and outside the school day. The best way we can help our students learn these Core Values is to surround them with adult role models who exhibit the 5 core values. This is the responsibility of parents and all staff at the school. We first teach it by living it, then explicitly modeling it, and only then should we try to ‘teach’ it. Our learning environment needs to be one filled with adult role models who exhibit the 5 Core Values on a daily basis.
- Our learning environment is highly enriched, from a beautiful riverside campus, to outdoor playfields and swimming pools, to dedicated rooms for specialists (drama, host country studies, library, music, physical education, visual arts), maker space, playgrounds, and gardens.
- Technology is an important component of the learning environment in our school. We have a 1:1 device program in grades 3, 4, and 5. We are moving to increased usage of PowerSchool. Apple TV in many classrooms.
- We are moving toward a learning environment that supports students as self-managers whereby increased individualization and differentiation may occur through different students doing different things in different places at different times (moving away from ‘factory model’ schooling).
- Our Learning Environment is exciting: We are moving toward a general educational mindset of innovation, and this will begin to permeate our learning environment. We value experiences such as field trips, project-based learning, guest speakers, parent volunteers, integration of subject areas, connecting the curriculum to real-world problems, developing powerful thinking skills, programming and robotics, the arts, developing information literacy, and more…
I believe #1, #2, #3, and #4 are mostly stating the obvious. #5 and #6 are visions I am fostering and by sharing these with parents, it will help them understand our direction as a school. Don’t feel the need to copy and paste verbatim, put in language that you feel comfortable using. But I think this list starts to explicitly describe the kind of learning environment we offer and are strengthening in our school. I hope this helps.
Cheers,
Dan
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