As per course,
"Watch:
A Healthy School Culture
A Toxic School Culture
Establishing a school culture?
A school culture is the environment that exists within the school community. It is exemplified by the behavioural norms that exist in the school.
A healthy school culture is one in which all school staff believes in the ability of its students, and that each and every child can be successful. As a result, teachers adapt and modify teaching strategies according to their student’s strengths and needs. A healthy school culture is one in which teachers collaborate with one another, sharing ideas, and giving honest descriptive feedback. Teachers have a willingness to change in order to reach every student. Administrators act as co-learners, encourage risk-taking, and support teachers in every way that they can. This may be through connecting teachers, providing resources, professional development opportunities or simply being a good listener. A healthy school culture is one where all students and staff feel valued, respected and important. The feeling is one of positivity, and administrators are well equipped to manage frustrations. The focus is on learning, and ensuring each and every student has the opportunity to experience success.
When a school values the opinions of all of those within its community, and comes together to form big ideas or goals to follow, the school creates a sense of togetherness, and ultimately this will lead to a more positive culture.
Post:
What is a school culture? Explain what this looks like, sounds like and feels like.
Review and comment on two other postings by your colleagues."
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As per discussion,
"A school culture reflects the overall attitude that is taken to the community and its members, in the video "Establishing a School Culture" by "Professional Learning Supports", our speaker Kelly Rizzo speaks to the idea of building a sustainable circle of experts to systematically help develop a strong sense of existence and development within the school community itself. To extend on the idea of a rich school culture, Rizzo also focuses on the inclusion of parents as a form of educational input/output for students after school.
In the international school community, the school culture is seemingly toxic as outlined through the video by Dr. Muhammad but is characteristically changing as the Chinese government is forcing a paradigm shift that will systematically eliminate schools (one by one) that are abundantly schools of a "toxic" nature. This is interesting because over the last decade, international school's educational governance was characteristically "as long as they don't talk about the three T's and stay in line-we don't care what they do.", in this mentality a laissez-faire approach was taken to the delivery of education by many "large companies" view the necessity versus excess of international schools. What would characterize some of these schools a healthy, as Dr.Muhammad describes, (would be if they first align what the educational body is trying to accomplish and ensuring the methods/content are capable of getting students to the cognitive destination) is actually what makes some of them so atrociously terrible in the first place. This is a direct cause for international schools to systematically close their doors or feel the financial pressures that the Chinese government is dumping on them. To see this unfold is quite remarkable really because a lot of these international schools are profit driven-I mean, that's how so many overseas teachers are paid the way we are, they are often profit driven because they are apart of a corporate group (often holding groups or Real Estate Companies). These corporate bodies want through money into their structures and human resources but don't once stop to question what it is they are delving into as a curriculum.
For example, there are many schools offering many different Canadian curriculums, meaning I worked at school that was accredited in BC's Provincial Curriculum, offered a job at another school that is accredited with the Alberta Provincial Curriculum and currently work at a school that is accredited to offer Ontario Secondary School Diplomas.
Now, without talking myself out of a job-specifically one of the biggest headaches for educators who are concerned with the material and content (rather than delivery specifically) is the functionality of the curriculum in this country. Each province was built to streamline students based on their post-secondary goals (college v. university), in China ONLY Academic and University courses are offered (yes, some M, such as Data Management, AVI, ADA, etc.) but other than that none. Now consider mandatory classes of students to get the OSSD-French, CHV/GLS, PE, etc. taking this into account, its really not all that difficult to make it work, but to excel in it as a teacher, it takes experience. Try discussing job options and educational pathways with students in the class geared towards the same outcomes-there is a lot of room for creativity, but if you don't have the experience, its nightmarish for students and teachers.
Another course to reflect on would be Canadian history-try teaching that to a group of students who are learning English as a Second Language and now also incorporating the original spelling Kanata as well as the names of characters from France and Spain. Not nightmarish, unless you have no experience. Its basically Geography class and History together.
Now finally, the most interesting in my opinion has been the degradation of the BC curriculum by some of these international schools. In some of these BC Offshore schools, Indigenous topics/history is basically non-existent. This was a big part of the redevelopment of BC's educational reform where they eliminated "prescribed learning outcomes" and replaced with core competencies as well as curricular competencies. A lot of the key values and practices of this framework revolve around practice and understanding of the first nation's perspectives. The school I used to work at had such a difficult time trying to fathom how this would "translate" into an overseas Chinese-Canadian school, that it basically decided to make connections to the first nations perspectives using the 24 Chinese communist core values-in a manner of looking at it-and then when push came to shove, the school decided maybe it was time to drop the curriculum. In a turn of understanding (ironically enough), it allowed the school to do what Dr. Muhammad mentioned, which was basically an audit of its goals and contents as a community as a whole. Well, they have now created their own curriculum and are basically planning on getting approved by the British Council (IELTS' governing body) and then taking their show on the road. They still very much have stocks and have a profit line (which they don't meet because of the uncertainty of their student success rates).
Side note: it will be interesting to see if this sideshow act works out, if it does, it spells disaster for most other international schools as it will low-ball student tuition, with (they hope) seemingly similar student success. Forecast and gossip says it looks like it will be fairly successful, but initially, a lot of universities were stating non-cooperation with the school's initiative at first because of the lack of accreditation. "
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Since the original publication of this post, I have come into a position where I am an English Department Head/Sr. English Coordinator.
I have been working closely with students and faculty to create a more apparent writing/authorship culture in our school. I am not going against the grain of ChatGPT revolution, but simply applying the appreciation and importance of authorship and writing process. For university students, these skills, or processes are going to be fundamental to the development of one's resilience.
I recently came across an actualized club by students in another school/location,
https://theprosetrain.com/
I really liked this idea, I have spoken with staff about graffiti walls before, it was a welcomed idea, but the institution refuses the space to make this happen-so we need to be a little more creative. The AVI class is currently producing graffiti street art on campus, but I want to build something for the English Dept. in particular, online may be a good place, but I am even considering something more visually accessible, apparent, loud, boisterous, basically-tangible.
Just sharing thoughts, we are developing our authorship board this year and going to nominate students to head the online newsletter for our program, thereafter my hope is to initiate a publication to recognize different works of art by students that make it through a panel of critics.
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