Weekly Update: November 20-24

Research shows that the single biggest influence on student success is the teacher in the classroom.  Tim and I have almost finished observing the HS staff over the last few months.  We have the amazing jobs of seeing why our students are so lucky and why they are so successful.  This week the PTA honors your dedication to our students.  Don’t miss their luncheon this coming Monday.

Have a great weekend,

Jacob

Thursday, November 16
Tripod Surveys Blocks A & B
HS Music Concert, 6pm (Auditorium)

Friday, November 17
Day 10- EFGH
Faculty Breakfast (sponsored by MWL) 7:30-8am
Tripod Surveys Blocks E & F
StuCo Lock-in 7pm-7am

Monday, November 20
Day 1- ABCD
Advisory Schedule
Tripod Surveys Blocks C & D
PTA Teacher Appreciation Luncheon

Tuesday, November 21
Day 2- EFGH
Tripod Surveys Blocks G & H
HSLT Meeting, 3:15-4:45 (Counseling Office Conference Room) Agenda Here

Wednesday, November 22
Day 3- BCDA
HS Divisional Meeting, 3:15-4:30 (MPR)

Thursday, November 23
Day 4- FGHE
Advisory Schedule

Friday, November 24
Day 5- CDAB

On the Horizon:

SSIS Holiday Staff Party, December 9 (GEM Center)
Last Day of Semester 1, Early Release, December 15

Staff Action Needed:

• Start planning for a two hour chunk of time with each of your classes during the last two weeks of the semester as an alternative to exams in the gym.  See below for more information.

Wellness Conference– A team of teachers from our school is traveling to go to a wellness conference organized by Catriona (our next head of school) on the Taipei American School campus.  The timing is perfect for this event as we strategically put things in place in our division to better serve the holistic needs of all of our students.  Tim, Sean, Bilal, and Jodi are attending from our division.  I am looking forward to hearing what they have learned.

Tripod Surveys– As Tim mentioned at our meeting this week, we begin the Tripod surveys this Thursday and finish up the next week.  While we were told that we would get the shortened version of this survey, it looks like we got the same one as last year.  As a result, please plan on spending a bit more time on these in your classes on the designated days.  You will be given slips of paper with access codes to open the survey.  Make sure you hand out the correct slips to the right classes.  A-H block is printed in the bottom left corner.  It is best to give these at the beginning of the period and rush them at the end.  Please refer to Tim’s email about instructions here for more details.  The goals of these surveys is to give you targeted feedback for you to analyze.  These are research based and were used last year, so if you are new to the division please check in with your department head, Tim or Jacob.  The main purpose of the tools is to be reflective in your practice.  This is not used for the evaluation of staff.  See the dates in the calendar above.  Please stick to this schedule, so we can avoid survey fatigue.  If you are already scheduled to give and assessment that will take the entire block, make sure to share your plan of how you are going to make this up during the week of November 20-24 with Jacob and Tim.

Upcoming Faculty Meeting– The faculty meeting on November 22 will be lead by the instructional coaches for technology and David Perkin from the ICT department.  They will be introducing our new Learning Management platform, called Power Learning, that will be replacing Moodle.

New Staff in the HS 2018-19– Tim and I have been extremely busy over the last few weeks and months hiring staff for the 2018-19 school year.  A special thanks to our department heads and others that have supported this process through the vetting, screening and interviewing of candidates to find the right fit for our division.  You can find out a bit more about them here.

Schedule for the Last Weeks of School–  While we have eliminated sitting semester exams in the gym to increase our instructional hours for HL and AP courses, there are still opportunities to have larger tests, projects and assessments.  Each block during the last two weeks of school will be assigned a two block of time where you may choose to deliver an AP/DP Mock type exam, have students give presentations to their peers, work on a project or some other authentic activity of your choosing.  The only class allowed to give an assessment on these days is the two hour block class to ensure we are not overloading our students with assessments on any given day.  The HSLT will be looking at the schedule this coming week to finalize it.  Hopefully it will be ready to share in next week’s Lair.