22 minute read
The Last 90 Days: How do International School Leaders ‘Leave
When international school leadership needs to break with the legacy and context of the past
By Rob Ford
In January 2019, I stood with a group of school leaders in a very wintery and cold Moldova, talking about how we approached school leadership in England compared to Eastern Europe. ‘So, education is generally dysfunctional and chaotic in England?’ the nodding heads of teachers and school leaders in Chisinau, all agreeing with the question their Eastern European colleague had just put to me once I had finished speaking. My reply was ‘not exactly’ and I certainly hadn’t set out to convey that impression when I spoke then about the systems, changes and reforms in England over the last decade. I had in fact set out to illustrate the dynamism, innovation, energy and leadership of the English education system, which we were leading on in my own UK-based school of Wyedean. We had this in abundance, and in many inspirational examples is an education system to be admired globally – especially compared to post-Soviet societies where the pull away from authoritarianism, particularly in the public services, still had a way to go.
I had felt very confident in fact when comparing the approaches taken in countries like England to Eastern European countries in areas of leadership, school is always inspirational to have the privilege to see if I am invited into a classroom in the UK or abroad. This left such an impression on me as a career challenge that when the opportunity came to take up the role of Director of Heritage International School, the first international school in Moldova and a potential game changer, I took the very difficult decision to leave the wonderful community of Wyedean as principal to start a new chapter in my career as a school leader.
I want to return to the idea of ‘Soviet’ leadership (management) which seemed to crop up in so many discussions. There is a legacy of the Soviet Bloc that still lingers understandably in this part of the world. I remember having a similar conversation with the eminent academic Professor Maria Mendel, in Jagiellonian University, Krakow in the autumn of 2017. Professor Mendel, a fellow of both the University of Gdansk and Johns Hopkins University, is well placed to comment on this model still pervading in education in Eastern Europe. Where her research has been particularly prominent recently though, is in offering a different lens to view the neoliberal model of education in the UK and the USA. It was supposed to release greater freedoms and leadership based on schools and their communities 10-15 years ago but, in reality, this has not always happened.
One of the strengths of the English system was how school improvement had been given back to schools and school communities to lead in the system. The article I Used to Preach the Gospel of Education Reform. Then I Became the Mayor by President Obama’s former chief of staff and later mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel on how he reformed the Chicago school system, is worth a read. He believed in the power of school leadership as one of the main drivers of reform in schools. He highlighted the need for principals to be autonomous and have flexibility, which would then establish the right culture and team within an institution. In the current pandemic, where local communities and schools have been given the autonomy of a degree of decision-making in a clear, unambiguous national framework, as we had in Moldova from the ministry, is illustrated a self-evident truth about where the transformative power of positive change and educational gains in our local community schools come from. The Canadian education writer and leadership guru, Michael Fullan, in his book Nuance, also advocates the need for the type of leadership that is genuinely leading self-improving schools. Fullan argues that as we enter the 2020s, education is becoming less effective in its central role of producing the better citizens we need and want, especially when schooling seems no longer up to the challenges faced by learners in the 21st century. New leaders, or ‘nuanced leaders’ as he describes, will be characterised he says by those who can get beneath the surface in what he proposes will ‘leverage deep change for the better’ (Fullan, 2018).These leaders are able to motivate, and mobilise as they have the best knowledge for solving complex problems: ‘The world is becoming more demanding at the very time that regular schooling is standing still – actually going backwards as fewer and fewer students and teachers buy into what they are required to do’.
I believe strongly as a school leader that a selfimproving school-led system allows the development of leadership that writers like Fullan call for, and the system of education is developing which tackles the problems and purpose of education in the 21st century. The disengagement of young people from curriculums and schools could be reversed if they were listened to more carefully regarding some of the issues that are at the forefront of their minds. These include the uncertainties
improvement, teaching and learning, safeguarding, curriculum, diversity and well-being, to name but a few. My mind quickly did a reflective spin on its rolodexlike recall over the last 30 or so minutes as I blustered a very poor Hugh Grantesque Englishman abroad impression. I was sure that what I had said was not how the questioner had described back to me but I soon realised that the system, processes, practices, culture, direction and vision of education in England must seem very alien to group of educators where a centralised ministry of education still has so much sway: a system where leadership is often summed up by one word, ‘Soviet’, where public workers can be seen as more akin to civil servants, and public buildings and infrastructure are still in urgent need of capital investment. On the plane home, I reflected on making sense of what has been happening to education in England for so many years, in almost a permanent revolution of constant new ideas and innovation, all against the very real backdrop of severe underfunding and a chronic lack of investment across the board. One of the reasons I am a passionate advocate as a global educator is that there are so many ideas and innovations to be gained through cooperation and collaboration between systems around the world. The dedication and professionalism of teachers is also something that
Saving time and energy reducing your PSHE planning
What is Jigsaw? The Jigsaw teaching programme is a comprehensive and original scheme of work covering all aspects of Personal, Social, Health Education as required by the Independent School Standards (guidance, paragraph 2.12 2019), and including statutory Relationships Education at Primary and Relationships and Sex Education at Secondary (DfE Guidance 2019). How is Jigsaw PSHE structured? Every year group studies the same Puzzle at the same time at its own level, lending itself to a whole-school approach. Can we measure progress? Attainment descriptors (working at, towards and beyond) for every Puzzle make progression clear and assessment straightforward, to maximise and evidence learning. How does it fit into my school? Designed as a whole-school programme, Jigsaw enhances growth-mindset culture and builds ethos; enhances a sense of belonging and community; values every child and is inclusive, and nurtures positive relationship with self and others, all conducive to learning. What is core to Jigsaw PSHE? The authentic focus on emotional and mental health is underpinned by mindfulness philosophy and made real by mindfulness practice being embedded in every lesson. This empowers students to regulate their own emotional states and choose their responses, impacting positively on behaviours and self-esteem. What is the end result? Students gain knowledge and insight into themselves, others and the world they live in and become discerning and resilient global citizens.
Success Story: Impact of Jigsaw: With particular reference to our Early Years children, it has helped to develop their skills in all areas of PSED including Making Relationships, Self-Confidence and Self-Awareness, and Managing Feelings and Behaviour.
Jigsaw has helped to develop the language and vocabulary skills of children, enabling them to better express themselves. We have also seen children developing confidence, especially when it comes to speaking about their feelings. The children are also better tuned in to, and more mindful of, the feelings of their peers and also the impact their own behaviour can have on others. This has supported children in strengthening their relationships with others.
Louise Everson
Head of Primary International School Breda
of Climate Change, university places, job insecurity and better mental health: issues that should be prioritised and supported. If the relentless focus of schools stopped being about competitiveness, or living on an outdated failed dogma and a fearful obsession with narrow data targets, and instead a more holistic collaborative approach was allowed, a self-improving school could then lead on this for wider benefi t.
Teachers would want to stay and new teachers would join in the system, instead of leaving in droves, if they felt they were respected, listened to and allowed to practise teaching for the very reasons they came into the profession; to make a transformative learning and life difference in the lives of young people. In addition, before someone cries ‘standards’, the best examples of selfimproving school systems led by nuanced leaders show that accountability is much stronger because of personal integrity, professionalism, trust, respect and a common sense of shared purpose in the school and its community. Too many ‘surface leaders’ provide short-term false clarity and allow these problems to keep manifesting. This style of leadership would perhaps have been more fi tting for the Soviet management system back in the heyday of the USSR.
I have been fascinated with Eastern Europe, thanks to inspiring teachers, since I stood on the Berlin Wall in front of the Brandenburg Tor as a student on a history trip just weeks after the Wall opened on 9 November 1989. Leading the fi rst international school in the postSoviet republic of Moldova thirty years after those momentous events of 1989-1991 was more than the challenge I had been seeking after leading Wyedean, in the UK. I have spent a lot of time in Russia and Eastern Europe through international education work over the years. I therefore took the advice of a colleague in the fi eld and avidly watched the HBO series ‘Chernobyl’ based on Serhii Plokhy’s brilliant book (see Jack, 2019). Plokhy places the Brezhnev stagnation across the whole of society in the USSR in a system unable to allow any form of impact leadership except failed dirigisme management. This is at the heart of why such a human disaster occurred in 1986. As post-Soviet countries like Moldova develop, even 30 years on, that Soviet legacy still has a strong pull. Therefore, in March 2020, as the Covid crisis hit and schools were forced into lockdown, the need for true leadership and innovative thinking was never greater. In Moldova, we proudly demonstrated in our innovative response to the crisis that the actual paradigm shift was not necessarily a ‘digital revolution’, but a powerful agency in schools to adapt and fi nd solutions – even to something as existentially threatening as the pandemic – and still navigate the organisation and community through this crisis with hope, optimism and vaccinations.
Anyone in education in 2021 knows how important hope for a better future is as a fundamental tenet of schools. The lessons are there to be learned for those societies in which schools and communities have been let down by ambiguous and confl icting directions from central ministries in a legacy of fragmentation and competition between schools: fragmentation and competition that weakened the ability to fi nd a wider response and trust in leadership. For Moldova, 202021, and all education systems, questioning which bits of the original ‘normality’ we should ditch and which we should keep when we are through the pandemic, could represent a real breakthrough from legacies of the past, providing a more hopeful future for young people going into the new decade. Our leadership in schools will need to be less saddled with failed systems and labels of the past, ‘east and west’, and be able to embrace the opportunities of a rapidly changing global educational landscape. ◆
Rob Ford is Director of Heritage International School in Chisinau, Moldova, a long-term British Council Schools’ Ambassador and previously Principal of Wyedean School, Gloucestershire, UK. ✉ robert.ford@heritage.md
References
• Emmanuel R (2019) I Used to Preach the Gospel of Education Reform. Then I Became the Mayor. The Atlantic. February. Policy Makers Need a
New Path to Education Reform - The Atlantic
• Fullan M (2018) Nuance: Why Some Leaders Succeed and Others Fail. New York: Corwin Press. • Jack A (2019) Podcast of interview by Andrew Jack of Serhii Plokhy about his book ‘Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy’. https://www.pushkinhouse. org/ph-podcast/a-history-of-a-tragedy
After the Flood
By Richard Pearce
As the pandemic has passed through its many phases, different in each country, the common cry has gone up: ‘What will be the New Normal?’ For some that stability is still far ahead, but enough time has passed for us to reflect on what we have seen, how we have reacted, what has worked and what hasn’t. What is happening as the new Northern hemisphere school year gets underway in many international schools?
International schools need to meet the expectations of Western parents and faculty at the same time as satisfying local governments and parents, so they always have built-in tensions; this time the divergences may be a matter of life and death. The privileges which often belong to expatriates or to the local elites who seek ‘international’ education are painfully clear in this crisis. While rich nations strive for complete vaccination of the domestic population, and build the same expectation in their expatriate communities, the host nations in which those schools are embedded may be struggling for even initial injections. The image of the community of an induction programmes are impeded and international school has never been the conversations around the coffee so clearly dissociated from the host machine are denied? In our schools nation. How is this working out? Can the pre-term period for new teachers your ‘community engagement’ extend is crucial, but both the timing and the to donating doses of vaccine? How degree of integration of the sessions are can a school express problematic. And all its commitment to those thoughtful, caring, vaccination in a society In the classrooms, transition programmes, which doubts its value, or even denies the the needs of aiming to bring children into close enough existence of the disease? social distancing contact to form new
In the classrooms, friendships – how the needs of social go against many can we do that? How distancing go against many of our dearest of our dearest many schools have an Adventure Weekend principles of schooling. principles of close to the start of Learning is a social the year, to establish process, and education schooling. community spirit and as we practise it relies give the new child a upon establishing social sense of belonging, and relationships between teacher and can it be run while Covid rages outside? students. On the domestic scene ‘working Online learning programmes have a from home’ has been a widespread long history, and in the last two years success, but virtual communication is many international school teachers have better at the maintenance of working worked far beyond their normal bounds relationships within a team than at of duty to become effective distance initiating them. How does a brand new teachers. But most programmes that were employee become one of a team, when readily available have been developed within a single country and they may not be appropriate for our diverse communities. And how do teachers feel, after labouring in an unfamiliar mode to construct online courses, if these are now to be replaced by yet another compromise between contact and virtual teaching?
What have we found ourselves doing for the first time, in our teaching and in our organisation? Have we adopted new practices or been barred from old ones in ways which still make sense when schools normalise? How did it feel? And can we imagine how it felt to our various students? The same things may feel differently to different people. We do new things because they feel good to us in our local scale of Good; the Sony Walkman was invented in Japan to avoid disturbing the peace of others, but adopted in the West to promote the enjoyment of the wearer. Similarly, masks have been adopted widely, but often Westerners have been motivated by self-interest as much as by communal responsibility. How about class sizes, and distancing: how have children reacted to these experiences? Smaller working groups have permitted more personal attention, but we may have lost opportunities for collaborative working which we had before.
Research: an opportunity to take stock
Robinson-Neal (2021) suggests that it would pay to study the changed outcomes of schooling in four areas: academic achievement, psychological consequences, teachers’ practice, and pre-existing
inequities. The fourth area is a cultural matter; children who are already unable or unwilling to profit from their schooling may have suffered disproportionately. In international schools this applies to those who have difficulty communicating with teachers, and those who are or who feel apart. Just as language initially separates those with fluent English from those with language needs, so cultural conventions such as the relationship between teacher and student may be assumed by the teacher but still to be learned by some students. There was never a time when it was more important to appreciate the ‘foreignness’ of a student who has grown up in another educational culture. ‘International’, the description kindly given by English-speaking schools to those from other countries, does not begin to acknowledge the alienation they often feel from the school’s ways and its norms. Digital teaching may in a way have given some relief, however. Where classroom language has been a hurdle for a student to surmount, it has long been useful to offer material in print or online which can be studied at the student’s own pace. Digital communication gives time for comprehension and reflection, and it allows questions to be asked privately where a student would have been illequipped or too shy to ask in class.
If this is a glimpse of what technology could offer for future pedagogy, let us look very carefully and see what has worked and what we can build into future practice. It will also reveal vulnerabilities of our teaching and perhaps of the assumptions we make about students’ various abilities to benefit. So let us, for once, pause in our eagerness to ‘celebrate’ what went right for some, and face up to what may have gone wrong for others. Then we can share good practices, looking beyond the myth of a single ‘best practice’, and each pick out what suits our students and situation best. I feel sure that IS magazine will welcome our open collegial sharing of what we have learned, successful and unsuccessful. ◆
Dr Richard Pearce has taught for many years in and about international schools, and has researched and written on how students negotiate cultural adjustment in a new school. ✉ rldpearce@gmail.com
References
• Robinson-Neal A (2021) Reflections on Educational Practice: COVID-19 Influences. Academia Letters. Article 176. doi.org/10.20935/AL176. (Accessed 22.9.2021)
Bilingual education needs to be targeted toward learning
By Richard Mast
Many schools in China are presenting themselves to the community as bilingual. This is seen as a highly desirable position both educationally and in marketing terms. However, the view that as long as the students are taught English, all will be well, is not showing the level of success that has been assumed and desired, raising the question of what is bilingual education and how can it be successfully implemented? The most obvious component in this context is the teaching of Chinese language. A school implementing the national curriculum goes a long way to achieving a central aim of bilingualism as well as recognising and honouring the culture of the community. The teaching of English is another matter.
It is not possible to unpick all of the factors and their implications for the teaching of English to children of a completely different culture. It is important, however, at least to identify the components that are impacting implementation and the ability to succeed, which is what this article will do.
The English that is needed
The premise for a bilingual school should have two components: 1. Conversational English 2. English needed for teaching and learning The need to converse in English is important, but this does not mean dismissing or ignoring Chinese. English, as a language, represents western culture and as such should not be seen as supplanting the language of the community. Both languages have a place and must be considered of equal importance and prevalence. There are also very good pedagogical reasons to ensure that Chinese is a central language component even when lessons are led by foreign teachers.
When it comes to planning for the teaching of academic English, we have to build from the components that are essential for learning in all subjects at all levels. There are key pedagogical components that shape and dominate teaching, learning and assessment in international education. They include: • The prevalence of verbs in the way we describe learning outcomes, teach and assess learning. • The types of questions we ask and the way we express them. • The use of English that is expected in the way students are expected to respond to teaching, learning and assessment situations.
We use approximately 160 verbs in our pedagogy and curriculum documentation. If students enter the school at a young age, there is time to ensure that they learn the verbs and develop the strategies needed to respond appropriately. However, when students arrive in Year 10,
1The learning of language is not a universal process
The learning of Chinese is done by a process very different from the learning of English. When teaching English, we cannot assume equivalency in pedagogy.
2A focus upon English Literature is not helping
Look at the international Chinese language course and it does not take long to realise that the course is usually English Literature under another name. Yes, there are novels and poetry from the host country and the students answer in their native language, but how it is taught, what is expected and how it is assessed are totally western culture-based. Teaching English for this end point is not working.
3It cannot be assumed that because students learn English in the local schools they will be able to transition into a bilingual environment
Students do learn English and they learn an effective form of English to suit purposes which are valid and appropriate for the hundreds of millions of students in the local schools. However, in a bilingual school they will be expected to use a form of English that is not the same as their experience (and that of the Chinese teachers, administrators and parents).
4Translation is not the same as interpretation
It is too easy to assume that all the words used in the teaching, learning and assessment for an international curriculum have exact equivalency in the host country language. It is also easy to assume that the characters used in Chinese to represent the words convey identical meaning to their meaning in English. Neither of these assumptions is valid.
In addition, even if there is an equivalent word and the characters are aligned, it cannot be assumed that students will interpret the words in the same way. The student is highly likely to respond to the word in a different way. For example, the way Chinese people describe and explain is completely different from the way expected by western teachers. The Chinese student only knows how people in China describe and explain. This cannot be ignored or dismissed. 11 or 12, the timeline is too short. Other approaches have to be undertaken. The learning of verbs has to be prioritised, coordinated and guaranteed. A shorter list has to be generated, based upon the requirements of the subjects being taught.
Alone, the teaching of these English verbs is not enough. As signalled earlier, there is no guarantee that the students have equivalent words in Chinese to fall back upon. Nor is there a guarantee that their interpretation is what is required. This has to be addressed not only in English but also in Chinese language. This is bilingual education working for educational benefit.
Mother Tongue Theory
Mother Tongue Theory argues that to be able to learn another language successfully, the student has to master their mother tongue. For the students to be successful in an international education setting, the foundation has to start in Chinese Language. The learning verbs need to be taught in Chinese Language first. The verbs need to be presented with characters that convey not only the meaning that is expected within Chinese culture but also the meaning(s) that appear in all the subjects the students will be experiencing. This is complex but critical.
Added to the difficulty is that the Chinese Language teachers may not know the verbs in the way we do. They are not practitioners of western curriculum and so even if presented with a verb, they are not necessarily experienced in its application in teaching and learning. For this to be addressed, they need to be trained in western pedagogy in relation to teaching Chinese language. Access to the language of learning through both languages has to be the foundation for bilingual education. Teach the students how to learn – language is the key. ◆
What form of English should be taught and how can students entering at Year 10 and beyond be prepared in time for the demands of Year 12?
Richard Mast trains Chinese and foreign teachers and administrators in China and Australia. ✉ rmast617@gmail.com
