Photo taken in SABS on May 30 2022. The school name was changed to Shanghai Arete Bilingual School (SABS) yesterday. The previous school name ECNUAS shown in the photo became history.
Return to school
It is the second last day of May 2022. We had a month of resilience and self-management in May. At the end of May, the school changed its name to Shanghai Arete Bilingual School, the abbreviation is SABS. Now, we are also looking at June and eventually the dates of returning to the school. On June 6th, some Grade 11 students will come back to school and start their off-line study after online learning for over two months since the middle of March. Other students in Grade 11 will still learn online. On June 13th, our Grade 9 students will return to the school.
The school will prepare everything to make sure all students and staff are safe at school. I would like to ask all returning students and teachers to follow disease control instructions strictly before and after you are back to school. At the same time, the teachers will try our best to make both online and face-to-face teaching and learning work. It will be a new experience and new difficult for us, but I trust we will overcome it again successfully.
Theme of month
The theme of June 2022 will be Reflective and Thinking Skills.
Reflective.
You give thoughtful consideration to your own learning and experience.
You are able to assess and understand your strengths and limitations in order to support your learning and personal development.
Thinking skills
You are able to think critically by analyzing and evaluating issues and ideas;
You are able to think creatively by generating novel ideas and considering new perspectives;
You are also able to transfer skills and knowledge across disciplines.
Thinking skills is the second part of this month’s theme. I especially promote critical thinking skills as they are something that Chinese people often lack due to cultural and educational reasons. Thinking critically requires you to be open to new ideas and perspectives. People are often trapped by own experience and knowledge and tend to be blind towards new lights. These new lights sometimes bring new windows and pathways through which your life might lead to new possibilities and successes that you have never been able to dream about before.
For examples, I had an interesting conversation with a student about the idea of learning useful things in high school. I try to sell him a new perspective that usefulness is a complicated and debatable concept that should be considered critically. I shared with him that students should learn a lot of seemingly “useless” things in high school, which will be eventually “useful” in the future. For example, we have a course Critical Thinking and Writing for A-Level students. This school based CTW is to prepare students’ thinking skills in English and academic research and writing skills that are required in all high school courses. A pragmatic perspective might make you think CTW is useless because it is not an A-Level course; a near-sighted perspective might make you think CTW is useless because it costs you extra time that you can otherwise spend on other subjects. However, if you look at the learning from broader and long-term perspectives, you will realize the course adds your knowledge, skills, and experience that can be transferred to all other subjects in high school and prepares you key academic skills that you will need in your university study. That is to say, the learning in CTW pushes up the overall level of your learning and saves you time in long run. This example tells that thinking critically can help you better weigh the value and usefulness of what you study in the school. I use the example to show you how important critical thinking to your study and life.
In terms of reflective skills of the Theme, you can not only develop them in academic study but also in extra-curricular activities. I have talked about opportunities of developing reflective skills when you study in international curricula such as in IBDP and A-Level. Today I would like to speak more about how to practice your reflective skills in extra-curriculum activities.
In our school, extra-curriculum especially CAS experience is a guided experiential learning experience. With the guidance of club supervisors and other teachers, you reflect on attitudes, feelings, values, principles, motivation, emotions and self- development. For example, this group of Grade 12 DP students will complete their CAS learning on June 1. What they do recently is to reflect on these aspects of their learning experiences. More specifically, after you organize or participate in an activity, you can try to describe what happened in words, express your feelings, generating new ideas, and ask some questions. You may want to talk to someone, either your teacher or classmates, or just write down memorable moments, important incidents, successes and difficulties.
You may use a variety of ways to express your feeling associated with the participation, for example, one interesting video clip or photo collection, or making a well-prepared presentation to share what you did. Going deeper, you can re-examine the choices you made and the actions you took in the activity and create new and possibly better ideas and plans for future. You can also ask yourself questions or ask someone else to ask you questions about the people you met in the activity, the processes you designed and applied for the activity, and the problems you think you have solved. These questions will help you reflect and learn more from the experience.
As far as I can see, these reflective skills can be used in any activities that you organize and participate in or outside the school. We not only learn new knowledge and skills, we also use them in real world situations. In other words, we learn to do things and try to succeed. Learning to have a reflective mind is part of this and you will benefit from it throughout your life.
Homeroom teachers’ sharing
We will have a special session today. This session is to acknowledge the important work of homeroom teachers in the high school. It is also an opportunity for homeroom teachers to share their stories and understandings about education.
The concept of Homeroom Teacher is quite Chinese, every student who experiences education in Chinese schools knows this concept and more or less know what homeroom teachers are supposed to do. Some people dubbed homeroom teacher as the tinniest “Director” in China, alluding to the fact that a homeroom teacher needs to take care of everything of the students in the class and yet the teacher has little power. Homeroom teachers carry more responsibilities and sometimes burdens in public schools. Although we use the same name, what our homeroom teachers do differ than that in public schools to some degree. Therefore, the original concept may carry some footnotes that may or may not fit what the homeroom teachers do in this international high school.
Like those in public schools, the homeroom teachers in our school are the teachers closest to our students, they pay attention to students’ wellbeing on the top of academic study, they also play a key role in communicating with parents. Our homeroom teachers work with the high school administration on students’ disciplinary matters too.
The differences of our homeroom teachers are mainly brought by the holistic education system in this international high school. We try our best to support our students to grow personally, socially, and academically. We also try to provide students with opportunities to develop emotional skills and healthy life styles. To this end, we need more and in fact all teachers to provide guidance and sometimes directly teach our students from different perspectives. For example, the University Counsellors provide education in terms of career and study planning, the Heads of House design and organize activities that improve students social and organizational skills, the CAS club supervisors and CAS advisors help students develop aspects other than academics and reflective skills, and the specialist psychologists in the high school provide valuable support in terms of students’ mental health and Performance Enhancement.
You can see that it takes the whole system to ensure every learner’s well-rounded development in the school. Homeroom teachers are an irreplaceable part of the system. So, today and the next Monday we will hear what our homeroom teachers have to say to students and teachers.
Comentários