Collaborative Planning Time

As you may be aware, the school is now officially recognized as a candidate school for the IB Diploma Programme. We will have a pre-authorization visit this term. We are working to ensure that the school satisfies the IB Standards and one such standard is that teachers have time to work together, both within subject areas and across subject areas. We refer to this time as ‘collaborative planning time’.

The  standard requires that we set aside time in all teachers’ timetables for collaborative planning and reflection.  The only way to adequately accomplish this is for all teachers to have the same time free on the timetable – most IB schools in the region do just that. HLYIS, for example, have an early closure on Wednesday.

I have proposed to the Board of Governors that, like our primary partner schools, we will allocate time on our timetable beginning next school year for this planning to take place.  This will mean that school will end earlier next year on Wednesday.

Before moving forward with this change I wanted to seek views from our parents.  You may leave comments using this BLOG.  If you would like to see details of our curriculum structure in terms of periods for lessons please click.

Best Regards,

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CAS Week – Further Views Welcomed

Dear Parents,

My intention will be to use this blog to offer my own thoughts and seek your views on a range of school issues.

This weekend, the topic is the cost of CAS Week.

I hope that you have had a chance to complete the questionnaire about CAS week. We will be using your responses and those from students to make changes and plan for the future.

You may wonder why a trip may cost more than a similar trip you might organize yourself.

The main reason for the difference is the cost related to staff. Our policy dictates the student to staff ratios for trips. This ratio is dependent on the type of activity.

A trip to Guilin organized for your family might have 1 tour guide for 30 or more people ( you may of course have no guides and organize it yourself). Our school trip to Guilin would not be able to run with such a ratio. For this trip the number of students was 25 and we had 6 Dragonfly staff (We also had ICHK teachers present).

Using an outdoor pursuits company will add to the cost for such trips. So why do we work with them? They make sure we have qualified people for the type of activities offered (Rock Climbing, Caving, etc.). They supply the ropes, harnesses, bicycles and other equipment. They also plan t…

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