This is a speech at HS Assembly on March 7, 2022.
Photo taken in Chongming Island at the end of February 2022.
The ECNUAS high school sets up twelve learner attributes and outlines twelve monthly educational themes combining the learner attributes and five categories of learning skills. At the beginning of each month, I would explain a monthly theme from different perspectives.
This month I will continue to explain the theme of March, which includes two key terms Communicators and Research Skills.
• Communicators.
You understand and express ideas and information confidently and creatively in more than one language and in a variety of modes of communication.
You work effectively and willingly in collaboration with others.
• Research skills.
You demonstrate information literacy such as finding, interpreting, judging and creating information.
You also demonstrate media literacy, interacting with media to use and create ideas and information.
I have talked about three modes of communication, including interpersonal communication, interpretive communication, and presentational communication. I have talked about types of communication, including verbal, nonverbal, written, and visual. Also, I have talked about some useful communication skills, for instance the importance of listening, giving timely feedback, adapting your communication styles for different audience, etc. For these above-mentioned knowledge and tips, you can either do your own research and learn more or read my speech scripts, which you can find on my website xuefenghuang.org under the Blog section.
Today I am going to talk about opportunities in the school for you to learn and practice communication skills so that you can become successful communicators. In the ECNUAS high school curriculum model, there are three domains of development, including Ways of being, Ways of learning, and Ways of doing. Each student must learn and grow in all the three domains in order to develop in a balanced way. The quality of a good communicator works for all the three domains. A good person and a useful citizen must be a good communicator, a lot of learning activities and processes in classrooms and in the school require you to be a good communicator. Especially, I want to highlight the importance of being an effective communicator as to Ways of doing today.
UNESCO promotes learning to do things as one of the pillars of learning in the modern world. It asks young learners to apply what they learned into practices that are linked with real world problems. To this end, learners should not only learn and use basic skills such as reading, writing, and computing that you will probably obtain through academic study. Young learners should also develop higher-order skills such as collaboration, communication, creativity, and adaptability. Clearly, we can see that communication impacts the function of a person who wants to make things or changes happen. Therefore, every student in this school should develop it.
Fortunately, this school provides many opportunities for our students to learn and exercise communication skills. For example, we have created different levels of student leadership. At CAS club or sports team level, there are club leaders or team captains; at homeroom level, there are monitors and other leaders who take care of businesses in the homeroom; in Houses, there are House Captains and prefects; at the high school level, there is a group of student leaders who not only represent the four Houses but also the whole student population.
All these student leaders must be good communicators as they are firstly the bridges between students and all education and care givers in the school. They bring students’ voices to teachers, supporting staff, school administrators and on the other hand pass important messages back to students. Secondly, they influence the student population by communicating their ideas, opinions, and plans among students. Different students have different needs, so to find a best balance when they try to make things happen demands an art of communication. For example, I learned that the HSSA has drafted an interesting plan for the upcoming House Night 2022. Now they have to work on a communication plan in a purpose of bringing every student and teacher of this community with 250 members on board. It is not an easy task. They need many good communicators to make it happen.
At the beginning of this semester, the high school introduced a number of changes including the evening study arrangement, a new management system for student lockers, the re-grouping of Grade 9 classes, and the introduction to the GAC courses and ACT test to all students, parents, and teachers. Out of these changes emerged a few excellent teacher communicators and leaders. I would like to talk about their contributions today so our students can learn from how they make changes happen, especially how they successfully communicated with stakeholders of these changes.
Behind the changes of the evening study and student lockers, Miss Ann Liu is one of the main contributors. She made good plans, asked for feedback from other leaders and fellow teachers, and clearly passed relevant information to students, homeroom teachers, evening study supervisors, the logistics office supporting staff, canteen staff, and the bus company. When concerns arose after these changes were introduced, she patiently responded to students, teachers, and supporting staff. You can see change is not easy. To make it work, communication must be one of the main keys.
Behind the series of changes in relation to GAC, ACT, as well as G9 curriculum revamp, there is a team of teacher leaders. Especially, the Assistant Principal Mr. Nikolaos Bitos and the university counsellor Ms. Chao Xu made greater contribution. Ms. Xu tries to sort out the logistics part of the GAC/ACT program while Mr. Bitos figures out the academic part of it. I know Mr. Bitos spoke with all Subject Groups and many teachers before the team arrived at a draft curriculum integration plan. He then outlined the plan by writing and communicated with teachers and the high school leadership team so that we have the confidence in its delivery. Ms. Chao has been working with me when we planned all parents and students’ communications in relation to this change. We spoke with the HS PTA even before the semester began so the information could be circulated among students and parents in advance. We then organized student meetings and parent meetings. At these meeting, Ms. Xu formally and clearly explained reasons and benefits of the upcoming change. We gathered questions and concerns from students, parents, and teachers, and we patiently provided clarifications when we had chances to speak with them. We used a variety of channels including newsletters, Managebac, emails, and Wechat groups to release relevant change information to make sure everyone was informed and all voices were heard.
The purpose of talking about these student and teacher leaders and communicators is to call on other students in this room to learn from them. According to Albert Bandura’s Social Learning Theory, learning through observation is one important means of learning positive (and negative) behaviours. Now with these above-mentioned live teacher and student models of good communicators, other students in this school have many opportunities of learning quality and skills in this regard. In Bandura’ theory, verbal explanations in association with good behaviors are also conducive to observational learning. My today’s speech plays this role to some extent.
Next I will summarize the House Point competition in January and February 2022. I will talk about the total merits (individual points) of each House, the Point of each House, and hence announce the winner of the month. Following the competition result, I will praise the students who earned more than 10 merits in each House and the best students who earned merits because of their contributions to school events and external contests. Finally, I will present the House Point results in the dormitory. You will see that dormitory teachers gave out more positive points this time to encourage positive behaviours among students, following the recommendation that I sent them at the end of last semester.
As always, you can read my speech at xuefenghuang.org/blog or my Wechat account 谈不谈.
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