Educational visits and outdoor learning play an extremely important role within a school community, enriching the educational programme and helping to develop students’ self-confidence, character, resilience and positive relationships with peers and adults. Jake Wiid explains the importance of an Educational Visits Coordinator role and how it could be a key part of your community.
News
It’s that time of year when we have the great pleasure of celebrating the outstanding work across our community of universities and schools each year via the CIS Higher Education Awards. We present them during our CIS Global Forum on International Admission & Guidance.
The CIS definition of global citizenship is often cited in research and continues to be one of our most visited web pages since its publication in 2009. Yet, in 2020, rising voices on social injustice compelled us to take a closer look.
In light of the changing landscape, at CIS we have moved away from using the terms ‘host country’ and ‘host country national’. Find out why.
Area of expertise provided as part of the CIS Affiliated Consultant Network:
Student well-being: protection, safety & security
Checking on the well-being of our students and staff is one of the most important responsibilities of educational leaders, especially when cultural norms and a lack of inclusion and diversity may prevent them from speaking up and asking for support.
We're starting our countdown to next month’s CIS Global Forum on International University Admission & Guidance on 16–18 November by revealing two of our keynote speakers. We anticipate another energising exchange of perspectives that strengthen relationships and support student transitions from school to higher education.
We’re always looking for ways to use data to help solve challenges facing our membership community. And our work to foster greater inclusion across our global community via diversity, equity and anti-racism (I-DEA) continues at pace. One way we are linking these two priorities is to share our data analysis expertise via strategic partnerships, most recently to determine diversity baseline data in international schools, collecting data on gender, nationality, and ethnicity of board members, heads of schools, leadership teams, and teachers.
In 2017, Miguel was appointed to the Board of Trustees at the Council of International Schools (CIS), a membership community working collaboratively to shape international education. He is one of the first higher education members to join international school leaders on the CIS Board as part of a strategic initiative by the association to strengthen collaboration between International Schools and Higher Education Institutions
Ten CIS schools and universities conducted sessions with their international students to understand better the pressures they face when making the transition from secondary school to university, especially in relation to moving across countries and cultures. Explore the three themes emerging from this CIS project so far.
Student well-being is an ongoing area of focus and even more so as we continue to learn and assess new challenges due to the ever-evolving pandemic. We are excited to announce that Linden Global Learning & Support are our latest supporting members, helping CIS member schools and universities address a range of challenges that students experience related to their well-being and learning.
Imagine the scenario. A 16-year student sobbing in a school teacher’s classroom because on the surface it would appear that he is struggling to cope with the stress of his first semester school examinations. Then you discover that this young man has a known history of anxiety and lost contact with his professional support when he transitioned between international schools and countries. Natasha Winnard gives valuable advice to help schools and educators.
Practitioners who have taught open-ended models of curricular frameworks will appreciate the liberating freedom and flexibility to not only curate but also experiment with content and concepts when developing a unit of study. However, with such freedom also comes great responsibility. It requires ongoing curriculum conversations and negotiations in terms of what is to be taught (the content), when it is to be taught (the pacing), and how it is to be taught (the methodology). The most important question in this process is, however, who gets to make these decisions? The term ‘decolonising the curriculum’ acknowledges that no one owns knowledge and that it is socially constructed.
What does global citizenship mean to your students and school community? How do you define, articulate, and implement global citizenship development and intercultural learning? Many schools that we support along their school improvement journeys continue to grapple with how to envision this work. And our conversations usually lead to one challenging question: how do we assess the impact and know whether students have indeed developed the traits of a global citizen?
I have taught critical race theory for the past ten years in three different overseas American schools, and that experience has solidified my unequivocal belief that teaching diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) are fundamental to an effective liberal arts education, still very relevant in preparing our youth for the world they will inherit.