We belong to a community of problem-solvers, people who are keen to improve the quality of international education. At our second Summit of school and university leaders we looked at admissions reform, global citizenship and work-readiness, and supporting well-being across and beyond education.

The term “global citizenship” has been a popular and often-used term for over a decade. When I joined Tupperware Brands in 2006 as VP Global Social Responsibility, I was told by the company’s Chairman & CEO, Rick Goings, that he expected me to lead the global citizenship agenda for the company.

An experimental and ambitious initiative was launched in 2008 to reform secondary education across Kazakhstan. Just over a decade later, a network of 21 “beacon” schools are setting standards for education, both across and beyond the country.

Data protection found its way onto my list of responsibilities, and it got there unexpectedly. Like many leaders, I began to pay closer attention in 2018 when a new law, the European General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR as it is commonly known, was about to be implemented. Initially, I wondered, just how much time are we going to have to devote to this? And, even as we prepared at CIS, I didn’t really grasp the impact it would have or the time I would need to devote to managing it.

We sometimes shy away from using certain terms, perhaps because they are too confronting, as suggested by Laurie Tarsharksi in her recent post Three ways your words can make students safer. Older generations regularly witness younger generations taking existing words and loading them with entirely new meanings. In business, we sometimes adapt existing terms for strategic or marketing purposes. In this post, Juan-Camilo Tamayo discusses the emerging use of the term “clients” by some of the admissions and counselling community in the place of “students” and “families”. 

Many of us have data-related responsibilities in our jobs, but are we getting the most out of our data to help us do our jobs more effectively? At CIS, we regularly invite our members to complete surveys that give them access to data designed to inform decisions at their school. Here are three ways our members can get the most out of “live” CIS surveys right now. Two of these surveys have deadlines on 31 October 2019.

Amidst the usual flurry of activity in many schools this September, I'm sure that, like me, your thoughts have been diverted to victims of the latest environmental and human-made disasters. Exposure to these traumatic events can, of course, have a lasting effect on impacted children way beyond the clean-up period. 

Schools providing Chinese students with an international education typically have a staff that includes both Chinese and foreign teachers and school leaders. The development of the skills that students need to be successful learners in an environment beyond China, assumes that the teachers have the understandings and skills to foster intercultural learning and competencies.

The topic of student mental health and well-being is broad, complex and highly sensitive so we are careful and privileged to work with experts from a wide range of associated specialist fields. Their expertise covers forensic psychology, medical practitioners, writers, activism, editing, nursing, safeguarding, researching, workshop design, and clinical psychology. Several of them will be sharing their insights and practical strategies with our community in November ...

It’s quite a responsibility to find and recruit the right teachers, and it’s largely the responsibility of your school leadership to do so. When a school takes a more egalitarian approach by formally inviting teaching staff into the recruitment process, a school’s chances of recruiting the right person with the right fit for that school’s culture increases—according to Mireille Rabaté and Nicole Jackson at Lycée International de Londres Winston Churchill.

You can make children safer at your school by changing how you talk about harm. The strongest word isn’t always the right word. Perhaps it’s the news or social media, but there is a tendency to refer to all sexual offenders as predators or pedophiles. Yet, no one believes they hire, work with, or know a pedophile or predator. Casual use of these pejorative terms is inaccurate and leads to harmful bias.

When 50% of your school’s staff are from a local eastern culture and 50% are from a western culture, how do you navigate the many associated cultural behaviours and inevitable misunderstandings to nurture a mutually respectful, collaborative, effective and happy working environment for all?

We live in a world where change is the norm and some estimate that two out of three children now starting school will have jobs that don’t exist today. How do we plan ahead when we operate in school systems that were designed for the industrial revolution, not Industry 4.0? How can we most effectively help schools recruit leaders best suited to navigate the changes that are already happening and will continue to happen?

Read these four great examples of actions being taken by our university members to strengthen student support services with a focus on well-being. Thanks to our colleagues at the University of San Francisco, Erasmus University College, Ryerson University and Leiden University College for sending us these examples.

We’re a few weeks away from heading south to our 11th CIS Australia Conference, in Melbourne from 28-30 August (final places available, go register!). It’s a regional CIS conference that brings together CIS member schools and universities from across Australia and beyond. What do they have in common? A shared commitment to international education and global citizenship.

We all recognize that differentiation in the classroom is essential for a high-quality learning environment where all levels of ability are nurtured to thrive in an age requiring personalization of the student experience. However, differentiation in curriculum and pedagogy are also still relatively unchartered waterways for many schools and, critically, provide an opportunity for schools to offer a teaching and learning experience that is unique and authentic.

If you work in education, the end of each term brings many things—joyful celebrations, relief, achievement, disappointment, arrivals, departures, and most of all a whole lot of change. It’s at these moments that we pause, think deeply and make decisions about the future. Some decisions are long in the making, but others suddenly become apparent. Why? Because these end of term moments bring with them the time to stop doing, breathe, and really think about what we do.

The impact we’ve made as a volunteer taskforce has been significant, especially considering it was only five years ago that we set out to make a difference. Those of us who founded The International Taskforce on Child Protection (ITFCP) determined it was time to chart our course for the future, and so we did, and five areas of impact emerged from our discussion ...

It's not always easy to find guidance or resources to help support students making the transition from school to university, so Katie Rigg has pulled some together, with particular focus on international students. She outlines six important approaches to consider along with resource tips and useful links for each.

Tarek Razik’s biography on our Board of Trustees page says that he is “focused on progressive and innovation education” and he certainly seems to be living up to this in the way he approaches educator recruitment. As head of school at Jakarta Intercultural School in Indonesia, Tarek ensures that there is student representation in the interview process for new staff ...