we are having with the values in our vision and mission statements. At ISH we talk about empowering our students. The data shows that the longer students are at ISH the teacher-student relationship tips towards more empowerment. We can also show that our students are developing better cross-cultural communication skills over time. This is great data to share with Boards, especially in Finland where we have to define our value-added educational currency very clearly. Our next step is to create a similar questionnaire for our parents as a way of aligning educational values and expectations.
ISH is partnering with the Council of International Schools (CIS) on the further development of this questionnaire model. It is excellent that CIS and a growing number of international schools are increasing their focus on intercultural learning. We believe that this questionnaire has tremendous potential to measure the soft skills that we value. The sophisticated questionnaire platform that is being developed will allow educators to splice the data quickly by gender, age and other factors as well as culture. If you are interested in being part of this study, please be in touch.
My thanks go to in particular to Robin Schneider for his partnership in this project, to Grade 5L, the High School Student Council, Gabrielle Welch and to my colleagues in the research group:
Caitlin Bestard, Rachel Curle, Matthew Derrett, Linda Gerberich, Peter Goodman, Jyri-Pekka Komonen, Sue Laws, Chandra McGowan, Brent Pinkerton, Alwyn Roberts, Minna Tammivuori-Piraux and Carrie Turunen.
Peter Welch
Head of School
International School of Helsinki
peterw@ishelsinki.fi
Culture is more helpfully defined as our core values, social norms and assumptions. It is formed by the interaction of beliefs and behaviors that exist in our family, community, schools and social environment.
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