Leopard's Tale |
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 A Happy New Year to All of You!
I hope everyone had a wonderful, memorable time with loved ones over the festive season. Everyone is back now with fond stories to tell and with renewed vigor and energy for the new calendar year ahead. New Students On Monday at the New Student Orientation, we welcomed 18 students and their families to the AISL community, a couple of whom were returning after some time. They all seemed happy to be here and I know that they will settle in quickly and make friends both at school and in the wider community. Recruitment During the second half of the last semester, we were busy with recruitment to fill positions of faculty who are not returning next year. Once this entire process is completed, we will be sharing our leaving faculty and our new hires. Watch this space in the coming weeks. Secondary Principal News At the end of last semester, Dr. Rick Odum announced that this will be his last year at AISL and that he has accepted a principal position at an international school in Bali. Congratulations to him. Ms Fiona Moss, our current Assistant Principal has stepped up to be our-interim Principal for next year. Working with Rick, Fiona has been instrumental in implementing positive changes in the Secondary school and we are looking forward to her leading this section from August 2023. Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) This week, AISL took a deep-dive into SEL under the guidance of Ellen Mahoney. Ellen is the CEO of Sea Change Mentoring. Her work involves helping international schools learn how to incorporate mentoring into their social emotional learning, providing us the opportunity to master social and emotional competencies and well-being skills. After a whole school session with faculty on Monday, she worked throughout the week with various teams within the school and, yesterday evening, met with a substantial parent group. Thank you all for coming and to the PTA for supplying the refreshments. And in the Global World of Education… Chat GPT Just as we were completing the first semester ahead of a month-long break, a new artificial intelligence (AI) tool was launched that will undoubtedly revolutionize the world of education. Postings are all over social media and it is certainly a hot topic of conversation. AISL knows we have to get in front of this to the best of our ability and once we have more to share, we will be hosting a parent information session in the coming weeks. If any parent in our community has knowledge and expertise in the field of AI and would be willing to talk with the us about this and how it will affect our future, please reach out to: otooher@aislusaka.org For Consideration - Five Themes for Education in 2023 (From the Big Questions Institute) Artificial Intelligence - There was an explosion of breath taking AI tools towards the end of 2022 of which Chat GPT is just one example. This has a massive impact on how we think about the practice and outcomes of education moving forward. Regenerative Design - It is clear that our environmental challenges are becoming more and more difficult to overcome and that our students will be living as adults in a period of great disruption and potential hardship. Therefore schools need to redesign their most fundamental systems, practices, and pedagogies to focus on the regeneration of all life on the planet. 2043 - More than ever, we face an uncertain future. As a community, we must consider building our capacities to develop a future lens through which to make every decision about the experience of school we create for students. This is at the heart of our strategy process. "Epistemic Humility" - With the rapidly increasing scale and complexity of the information we receive daily, we must now learn and employ new strategies for separating fact from fiction, determining truth and creating and contributing knowledge in ethical and effective ways. Urgency - There needs to be a focus in schools on:
PTA Coffee Morning The PTA Coffee morning will take place tomorrow, Friday 20 January, at 7:30am in the Pavilion. ISSEA (International School of South and East Africa) Boys & Girls Rugby 7s For the first time in three years, AISL is hosting an in-person sporting event. The tournament is taking place from Thursday, 2 February and ends on Saturday, 4 February. Rugby 7s is a fast and exciting game and promises to be great entertainment. As a consequence of this event, the Friday Market will not take place next Friday but will be held on Friday, 3 February, with a hope that you may come for lunch and then go to the field to support our Leopard Athletes. Enjoy the weekend listening to the experiences of your children during their first week back at school. As always, if you have any topic you wish to discuss or to be addressed, please reach out. With kind regards, Dr. Oli Tooher-Hancock Director Comments are closed.
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