PRECONFERENCES

MONDAY | 28 October 2019

07:30-18:00 EARCOS REGISTRATION TPS - Function Room 3

TUESDAY | 29 October 2019

07:30-19:00 EARCOS REGISTRATION TPS - Function Room 3

8:00-17:00 APAC/ADS MEETING TMS - Meeting Room 6

08:30-20:00 International School Leadership Program University of San Francisco / Washington State University TMS - Meeting Room 7

08:30-16:30 RAMI MADANI Learning Focused Leadership TPS - Function Room 10

Leaders are always on stage, the choices we make are about which stage to be on, and what impact we choose to have on the people we lead. This advanced pre-conference session will focus on four key components for educational leaders. Vision: How can we increase our ability to influence and inspire others and, when required, manage our positional authority effectively? Learning: How do we enhance our ability to observe confidently and give insightful, learning-focused feedback? Culture: There is much more to school culture than striving to be positive, respectful, and professional. What does a transformative school culture mean and how do we cultivate it? Facilitation: A leader’s capability to facilitate impactful learning-focussed meetings and conversations can profoundly impact how participants feel about their purpose and work. The workshop will suggest strategies that promote self-reflection that help us see how leadership is, at its core, very personal.

MARILYN GEORGE WASC Focus on Learning Accreditation Training TMS - Rose Garden

The one-day interactive ACS WASC session will examine the guiding principles and essentials of the Focus on Learning self-study process and the many ways it can be adapted to a school’s situation to ensure a meaningful self-study process. The session will provide an opportunity for EARCOS educators to examine strategies inherent in Focus on Learning that support the school’s assessment of student learning in relation to schoolwide learner outcomes and academic standards. During the latter part of the session, there will be a panel of EARCOS educators who will share how they adapted the Focus on Learning process for their respective schools, including integration with strategic planning. This session enables participants to become eligible for serving on WASC visiting committees.

12:00-13:00 LUNCH

Venues: Café Boleh (Pacific Sutera) Five Sails (Magellan Sutera) 10:00-10:30 MORNING COFFEE BREAK 15:00-15:30 AFTERNOON COFFEE BREAK

Venues: Function Room Foyer (Pacific Sutera) Meeting Foyer (Magellan Sutera)

WEDNESDAY | 30 October 2019

07:00-19:00 EARCOS REGISTRATION

08:00-17:00 APAC/ADs Meeting 09:00-17:00 APAC Head of Schools

09:00-20:00 International School Leadership Program University of San Francisco / Washington State University

09:30-17:00 EARCOS Board of Trustees Meeting TPS - Function Room 3

TMS - Meeting Room 6 TMS - Meeting Room 5

TMS - Meeting Room 7

TPS - Function Room 6

Leadership Through Partnership (LTP)

(continued on Thursday)

Presenter: JOHN LITTLEFORD

TPS - Function Room 7

08:30-12:00 Leadership Through Engagement: Becoming Truly Strategic Boards and Heads This session will examine the broad range of board governance practices from policy governance to generative governance. Which governance protocols are the healthiest and lead to the most strategic school work?

The session begins Wednesday and continues Thursday morning when a cohort of new attendees will be integrated into a program focusing on head search, transition and succession. How to ensure that searches produce long-term leaders who leave a lasting legacy.

Part I Significant Takeaways:

1. How to ensure truly “healthy” boards with the right players in the room with appropriate terms of office 2. The EIGHT key roles of the crucial governance/policy/nominating committee in board selection, training, discipline and development 3. The three key partnerships: head/chair; head/board; chair/board 4. The qualities most needed in a board chair and how to spot them? 5. Best and worst practice for head evaluation, chair evaluation and board evaluation 6. The “terms” of engagement of the board with parents, staff, alumni and others and managing constituent communication

13:00-16:30 Part II Leadership Through Engagement: Difficult Issues, Tough Conversations and Creative Solutions TPS - Function Room 7

1. How to change the statistics on head turnover 2. Understanding your type of school: Are you an international school or an independent school and the importance of this distinction for board governance and community expectations 3. How to build a powerful culture of charitable giving in international school cultures 4. “Boundary issues” in school communities and how they affects board oversight of the Head 5. The three key factors in achieving and maintaining long term financial sustainability

Business Managers’ (EARASBO)

Facilitator: NOEL KHNG

TMS - Meeting Room 3

08:30-16:00 Developing An Effective Employee Handbook

Introduction: An employee handbook is a collation of an organisation’s Human Resource policies, procedures, terms of conditions of employment, working conditions, and code of conduct that guide employees’ behaviour in the organisation.

The objectives of an employee handbook include providing: - Employees with a working guide to the understanding of the day-to-day administration of human resource policies and practices - A general summary description of the company’s HR policies - Information on employee benefits, and - Expected code of conduct.

HARvEY AlvY TMS - Meeting Room 1 Fighting for Educational Change: Choosing Initiatives of Substance Over Fads This preconference workshop by the author of the recent book, Fighting for Change in Your School: How to Avoid Fads and Focus on Substance (ASCD, 2017), will help international school leaders address the fads that undermine both innovative and timeless educational practices. This is a high stakes and urgent challenge that affects student achievement, teacher success, leadership effectiveness, curriculum, fiscal and resource accountability, professional development, and the confidence of international parents in their schools. To meet this challenge workshop participants will examine the book’s six “Red Flag” strategies to avoid harmful fads that educators confront (e.g., overpromising the effect of a new program); and six “Guidelines” to promote reforms of substance in schools (e.g., promoting both innovative and timeless practices). Interactive workshop activities will provide leaders with practical professional development strategies to take home and share with their school colleagues, to assess educational trends and positively impact student and teacher success.

CHRiS JANSEN TMS - Meeting Room 10 Enhancing a Leadership Network Across-Asia Through Mentoring The EARCOS network of school Heads/Principals and aspiring Heads/Principals has an enormous and largely untapped potential to grow its own capacity through the peer to peer sharing of expertise, experience and support. Over the last 3 years EARCOS has piloted a the EARCOS Leadership Mentoring (ELM) programme which involved experienced Heads undertaking an online training programme before being paired with first time Heads around the region. Although the benefits of this process have been excellent for those involved, the numbers participating in this process has been very small. (Read more on Whova App)

lEE ANN JUNG Assessment, Grading, & Feedback: A Powerful GPS for All Learners to Succeed TMS - Meeting Room 4

Is your school interested in making a move to standards-based learning and grading? Whether you are just beginning the conversation or are well on your way, you will gain important guidance for implementation. Learn about common missteps and how to avoid them. Meet and collaborate with others on the journey. In this session, we will take a look at our classroom assessment practices and ask the question, “How can we measure what really matters most to students?” We will revisit guiding principles of mastery learning and explore ways to use new paradigms, including principles of standards-based learning and grading, to make classroom assessment more meaningful for students and streamlined for teachers. We will consider the measurement issues in traditional assessment and grading that are causing problems with long-term student engagement and motivation and explore alternatives. See one school’s standardsbased report card and learn about their journey toward supporting deep learning that prepares students for lifelong success.

ADAM OlENN TPS - Function Room 8

Brand + Story Good marketing comes down to knowing who you are and communicating that clearly and with emotional resonance. We’ll begin the day with a seminar on what branding is–and what it isn’t–so we have a shared understanding and vocabulary for what it is, how it works, and why we need it. After a short break, we’ll talk through each other’s brand identities to understand where the real points of differentiation are and how to leverage them. After lunch, we’ll settle back in with a guided writing exercise, followed by a seminar on storytelling. We’ll then apply the principles from the seminar to our writing exercises until each one is a powerful marketing and recruiting tool. Finally, we’ll review those principles in their simplest form so we can go home and coach colleagues, volunteers, and board members to tell their own powerful and moving stories in support of our schools.”

JENNiFER SPARROW TPS - Function Room 2

Leading Innovative Change Schools regularly implement high-impact, innovative practices to better serve their students. School leaders play an important role in ensuring these practices are found across all classrooms instead of just a few. Although there are many resources to support school leadership and additional resources to explain how innovation scales (spreads) across a system, the intersection of the two is not commonly unpacked. This pre-conference will focus on a set of research-based leadership strategies that can help school leaders successfully scale innovative practices throughout their system. While theory will be explained using examples of how these strategies have worked in practice, the majority of the session will be focused on application. Participants should bring a change they are trying to implement in their context to use as a case study throughout the session.

ANN STRAUB TPS - Function Room 9

Intercultural Leadership: Educating for Global Citizenship What is your school’s definition of global citizenship? How is this put into practice and measured? The words “global citizenship” often appear in school’s guiding statements, but what this looks like and how to accomplish this is often frustratingly vague with a “hit or miss” approach prevailing. This requires a leader who understands what is meant by intercultural leadership and strives to develop intercultural competence. In this interactive workshop, we will refer to research on intercultural leadership, reflect on our own leadership traits, and look at a school’s institutional responsibility toward the development of global citizens and how this can be operationalized in a practical sense. By discussing international school case studies, listening to an experienced school leader focused on global citizenship, and seeing successful school examples, participants will gain a much clearer picture of where their school is on this journey with subsequent steps in mind.

JAMES WARNOCk Feedback: The Engine for Student and Teacher Growth TMS - Meeting Room 2

This practical, interactive presentation will focus on the critical role feedback plays in promoting both student and teacher growth. Drawing from our work at Research for Better Teaching, participants will first develop a common definition of feedback and then identify what must be in place both in classroom instruction and in teacher supervision in order for feedback to be possible. Video analysis of classroom instruction and teacher conferencing will be utilized to highlight key concepts and promote participant discussion and reflection.

kENDAll ZOllER TPS - Function Room 1

Voices Leading From the Ecotone Using case studies from his most recent book, Voices Leading from the Ecotone, participants work through a leadership model designed to disrupt systems. Disruptions of creativity and innovation that challenge values and beliefs. The narratives are primarily practical in nature and drawn from school leaders at the highest needs schools in a large urban school district in the southwestern United States. Every day they grapple with social justice and equity: poverty, gangs, violence, racial tension, disability, and LGBTQ issues. Each narrative highlights a leader’s struggles, challenges, and the “a-ha” moments that help the school move forward.

08:30-14:30

MARilYN GEORGE TPS - Function Room 4

WASC Visiting Committee Chair Training The session will prepare EARCOS educators to chair a WASC visiting committee after having served several times as a visiting committee member. The chair roles that will be examined are the following: keeper of the school improvement vision; coach for the school and the visiting committee members; and organizer of the visit. Through dialogue and discussion there will be shared insights and advice from fellow EARCOS educators who have already chaired full, mid-cycle, and other special visits.

(For the past several years we have done a session on Thursday, October 31, 2019, for 1 hour 15 minutes about becoming accredited. CIS joined us last year. It was a conversation with the participants. We always seem to have about 25-30 people.)

10:00-10:30 MORNING COFFEE BREAK

12:00-13:00 LUNCH TPS & TMS Room Foyer

TPS - Café Boleh(Level 2) and Hibiscus Garden(level 1) / TMS - Five Sails and Al-Fresco (Level 1)

15:00-15:30 AFTERNOON COFFEE BREAK TPS & TMS Room Foyer

17:30-19:30 APAC 25th Anniversary Reception TMS - Sunset Bar (Open space next to Al-Fresco)