The end of term is fast approaching and we are very excited about the way we have redesigned our reports. The first one will be issued to you at the end of this term. It has been a very long journey to get to this point, but we are hopeful that it will have been worth it. Our teachers have worked together in producing the report template - collaborating and discussing with all of our students in mind.
We believe that the new report is an exciting opportunity for teachers to provide even better and more personalised feedback to our students and parents - and it is based upon the key attributes that we believe are integral to the development of each student. We have also produced an extensive set of online resources which will help parents understand the grading systems of all year groups, which will hopefully enable them to support their children. This resource will be made available at the time we release the reports.
There will be a parent workshop on April 4th which will be devoted to understanding the new reports, and I encourage as many of you as possible to attend so that you can interact with it and ask any questions you may have. Mrs Debbie Murray-Smith will be inviting parents to this event in the next few days.
Two pieces of Year 9 work that caught my eye this week were terrific examples of the ambitious learning attributes that we are trying to develop in our students, and that we hope will be reflected in the new reports.
In Vietnamese, I saw some collaborative work critically evaluating Nhớ Con Sông Quê Hương by the poet, Te Hanh. The high quality of the work showed great critical thinking, diligence and team work to analyze the key phrases of the poem.
In English, too, I saw examples of students successfully reinventing passages from Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens into a range of different dialects and styles. This was a very hard task in order to convey the meaning of the original text in a different voice. My thanks to Nghia Doan and Ioan Morgan for sharing these with me.
Both examples were developing our students bilingual proficiency, their ability to collaborate with each other, and challenging them to work hard to produce the right results. They were being challenged to be ambitious in their learning.
I do hope that you will be able to come to the workshop on April 4th.
I wish you all a great week ahead.
