QUICK LINKS for Busy People

–THIS WEEK'S CONVERSATIONS–

with International School Leaders from Around the World

We again welcome Dr. Jarek Oleszczuk and American School of Warsaw Director Jon Zurfluh.

Dr. “O” will discuss the unfolding character of COVID-19, the variants and the current and future impact on our international schools. The case study of how ASW has managed to stay open for onsite learning since the beginning of the school year and lessons learned along the way will also be reviewed.  Please ensure that your leadership team and board trustees are part of this CONVERSATION.  As leaders, we all need support in gazing into the crystal ball to better understand a likely path we will travel as international school communities.

AAIE'S NEW SCHOOL PROJECT: Friday 12 February– EQUITY (Part II)

 

Thanks to the great show of support from so many leaders, supporters and practitioners of diversity, equity, inclusion and justice for joining the launch, Week 1 conversation on Equity. Equity is the 7th of 7 Principles in the New School Project, and in many ways feels the most consequential for impacting the outcomes on all the other principles.

 

We encourage you to join us next Friday at our usual time, 8 am US ET when we continue the Equity conversation, kicked off by our curatorial team, Joel Llaban, Emily Meadows and Anna Sugarman.

Getting Off the Hamster Wheel:

Building Organizational Resilience and Instructional Sustainability for Long-Haul Hybrid 

Playing whack-a-mole on a hamster wheel at warp speed — it’s the closest way to describe my experience as an international school head this past year as well as those of my colleagues worldwide. In many ways, we have returned to where we originally started as overwhelmed first-year teachers operating only one or two days ahead in our daily lesson planning . . . trying to figure it out for the first time in real time with never enough time. Yet let’s face the brutal reality that we’ve been under far greater real-world duress now than then with lives in our communities held in the balance. And it’s no game; it’s high stakes. So as we enter our second pandemic school year after giving 110% for 24/7/365 in service to the greater good, I believe that we must begin to grasp these facts and transition away from the notion of the head of school and our respective institutions as preternatural and indefatigable forces of nature. Why? For the simple reason that IT’S NOT SUSTAINABLE. 

Let’s first begin by agreeing with the maxim that advice comes cheap but great advice withstands the proverbial test of time and proves priceless. More than two decades ago before I became a school head, I received some timeless words of wisdom from Dr. Lester Landers, renowned international director and former chief ISS headhunter for HoS openings. Across the vast knowledge base that he could have chosen to impart, he focused on only one central theme in his advice to me: “You’ve given 110% for so many years to become a director, but now you need to reframe your thinking in this new role. It's impossible to maintain that level of effort forever without burning out -- focus on maintaining a steady 85-90% effort in order to sustain excellence over the long haul.”

 

Imagine how counter-intuitive his words seemed to me -- the workaholic effort and physical resilience that had helped achieve success would soon become my biggest Achilles’ heel. Hummm . . . doesn’t that sound exactly like our whack-a-mole lives this past year as well as for so many others within our school communities too. Yes, we’re all still standing and certainly more resilient from it, but with the latest research raising the grim prospect of long-haul covid, we’re now left wondering if we’ll ever get off the hamster wheel. In this article, I would like to forward the notion that wise counsel from the past along with some present learnings from fields outside of education might help inform our conceptual thinking and actions as school heads who are facing the likely specter of long-haul hybrid.

 

Although many people seem to believe that we live in unique times without precedent, as we confront the challenges of long-haul hybrid, maybe we don’t actually need to reinvent the wheel or try to figure it out for the first time in real time. In looking for insights from people in other fields who work at the crossroads of navigating new environments by combining resilience with sustainability, I believe that research in global ecosystems, architecture and city planning, and business economics can help provide us with a potential roadmap with high transferability to our schools. By understanding the foundational principles that guide the thinking and actions in their fields, we just might find ourselves far better grounded for building stronger resilience in our organizations as well as greater sustainability of the core function in schools now – delivering high-quality learning and teaching under the inherent stresses of long-haul hybrid.

 

Before we jump directly into to the pragmatics of leading our schools to build greater capacity for organizational resilience and instructional sustainability, we should first define a couple of terms to ensure common understanding. First, organizational resilience is defined by Altintas and Royer (2009) as the “capacity of an organization to maintain or return to a dynamic stable state which allows it to continue its operations during and after a major incident or in the presence of a continuous stress.” As leaders seeking to build capacity in our people and institutions, although we might be compelled to take immediate action by this notion of returning to solid ground and seeking to maintain stability, we would be wise to look before we leap.

 

CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE

Changing the Operating System of School

–by Dr. David Williows, International School Brussels

"Do we start from a position of trust and offer those around us the space to use their own judgement, believing that they will do the right thing, or do we rush to control with rules and complicated systems of compliance?"

What makes this book stand out for me, however, is the way it calls for a complete change in the operating system - the underlying assumptions running in the background - of the schools, companies and organizations of which we are a part. 

There is too much in Dignan’s work to even begin to do it justice in these few lines. This is a book to read and regularly return to. What is sticking with me right now, however, is the question of how far our underlying - often tacit - assumptions are informing both our understanding of how schools work and how students learn.

 

Do we start from a position of trust and offer those around us the space to use their own judgement, believing that they will do the right thing, or do we rush to control with rules and complicated systems of compliance? 

 

Somewhere in the answer to this question, I believe we discover the kind of schools we really need and, more importantly, what’s stopping many of the students in our schools from doing the best work of their lives.

STAYING UP-TO-DATE ON CORONAVIRUS SCIENCE

Scientists and doctors have made significant progress in treating Covid-19. But the available therapies are few, the evidence for each is at least somewhat mixed, and they all have considerable limitations. Meanwhile, many Americans at the greatest risk for the worst outcomes don’t have access to key therapies that only work early on to help prevent severe symptoms and hospitalization.

 

“We are much better off than we were last spring,” says Manish Sagar, MD, an infectious disease physician at Boston Medical Center and associate professor of medicine and microbiology at Boston University School of Medicine. “We have a number of proven treatments, and we have much more expertise about how to deal with the disease. If you were infected last March as compared to if you were infected today and you, unfortunately, were in the group that was likely to have severe complications, your likelihood of surviving is much higher now than it was back in March.”

 

Yet many hospitals don’t have the necessary equipment to administer some of the helpful therapies nor the range of specialists to share expertise in fields as diverse as infectious disease, pulmonology, hematology, and rheumatology, says Paul Sax, MD, clinical director of infectious diseases at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.

What's the next act for mRNA?

Until the covid-19 pandemic, mRNA was a pretty untested technology. Scientists were excited, money had been poured into development, and there had been some work on vaccines for diseases like rabies and Zika—but overall, mRNA was just a promise.

Today, these vaccines have turned into the fastest and most successful weapon we have for tackling covid directly. That’s a pretty spectacular first act, and there may be more to come.

Our biomedicine editor Antonio Regalado has a cracking feature about how these vaccines work, and what they could do next. Here’s a summary.

They work by teaching genes new tricks. Unlike traditional vaccines, which use live viruses, dead ones, or bits of the shells that viruses come cloaked in to train the body’s immune system, the new shots use messenger RNA—the short-lived middleman molecule that, in our cells, conveys copies of genes to where they can guide the making of proteins.

With Covid, that means cells learning how to respond to the virus. The message that the mRNA vaccine adds to people’s cells is borrowed from the coronavirus itself—the instructions for the crown-like protein, called a spike, that it uses to enter cells. This protein alone can’t make a person sick; instead, it prompts a strong immune response that, in large studies concluded in December, prevented about 95% of covid-19 cases.

What they could do next. In the near future, researchers believe, shots that deliver temporary instructions into cells could lead to vaccines against herpes and malaria, better flu vaccines, and, if the covid-19 germ keeps mutating, updated coronavirus vaccinations, too. But researchers also see a future well beyond vaccines. They think the technology will permit cheap gene fixes for cancer, sickle-cell disease, and maybe even HIV.

"Variants” is the latest term to leap from the infectious disease lexicon to the general public as a result of the coronavirus, as the effects of mutations on transmission and vaccines have emerged as top global concerns.

 

But researchers like Emma Hodcroft, a molecular epidemiologist at the University of Bern, have been looking out for genetic changes to the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus since the beginning of the pandemic. The virus, like any virus, has picked up mutations as it spread, but it’s only been in the past few months that it has been altered in ways that could dramatically shift the dynamics of the Covid-19 pandemic.

 

Tracking the subtle changes to the virus’ RNA is like global detective work, requiring health officials around the world to sequence a selection of viral samples and share them broadly. Without that, scientists are flying blind.

 

“A lot of places that have had big outbreaks are places where we do not have good sequencing, and the only way to monitor for new variants is through sequencing,” Hodcroft said.

 

STATnews spoke with Hodcroft last week about CoVariants.org and all things viral evolution. Excerpts from the conversation are below, lightly edited for clarity.

–THE NEWS of COVID-19–

106,395,021 Cases Worldwide (Johns Hopkins CSSE)

Covid: Scientists Developing Vaccine Boosters to Tackle Variants

Scientists are developing booster jabs to tackle Covid-19 variants, a health minister says, amid concerns about the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine's efficacy against the South Africa strain.

The vaccine provides good protection against the dominant 'Kent' variant in the UK.

But a small study suggests it offers "minimal protection" against mild disease from the South Africa variant.

 

Some 147 cases of this variant have been found in the UK. Health minister Edward Argar said the government was anticipating that an annual jab could be required to combat variants of coronavirus. He also said there was "no evidence" the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine was not effective at preventing severe illness from the South African variant, which scientists have warned could become more widespread in the UK.

 

In South Africa, where the variant - known as 501.V2 or B.1.351 - accounts for 90% of new coronavirus cases in the country, the rollout of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine has been put on hold awaiting further advice.

 

Early research suggests other vaccines are also likely to offer less protection against the South African variant than against the original virus. (New York Times)

 

Indonesia Begins Inoculating People 60 and Older,

After Initially Excluding Them.

Indonesia began inoculating people 60 and older on Monday after health officials concluded that the Chinese-made coronavirus vaccine they were using was safe for that age group.

 

The government had been criticized over its earlier decision to exclude people 60 and older in the early stages of its vaccination campaign, which began on Jan. 13. People in that age group have accounted for half of Indonesia’s coronavirus deaths.

 

Officials said that clinical trials in Indonesia for the Sinovac vaccine, which is made by a private Chinese company and is the only one approved for use in Indonesia so far, did not include any volunteers over age 60 and that more data was needed.

 

Indonesia’s Food and Drug Administration reversed course last week, granting emergency use authorization for the Sinovac vaccine among older people after analyzing trial results from China and Brazil.

 

However, people 60 and older will receive their second dose of the vaccine after four weeks rather than two like everyone else because a trial showed that it would give recipients in that age group greater protection, said the agency’s head, Penny Lukito. The health minister, Budi Gunadi Sadikin, said the priority would be to inoculate older health care workers because they were most at risk.

 

Indonesia, the world’s fourth most-populous nation, with 270 million people, has recorded more than 1.1 million infections and more than 31,000 deaths, making it the worst outbreak in Southeast Asia. (DW.com)

 

Unnerving Variant Transmission

A more contagious variant of the coronavirus first found in Britain is spreading rapidly in the United States, doubling roughly every 10 days, according to a new study. Analyzing half a million coronavirus tests and hundreds of genomes, a team of researchers predicted that in a month this variant could become predominant in the United States, potentially bringing a surge of new cases and increased risk of death. The new research offers the first nationwide look at the history of the variant, known as B.1.1.7, since it arrived in the United States in late 2020. Last month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned that B.1.1.7 could become predominant by March if it behaved the way it did in Britain. The new study confirms that projected path. (The New York Times)

 

Recombination Machinery and Attacking Variants

In recent weeks, scientists have sounded the alarm about new variants of the coronavirus that carry a handful of tiny mutations, some of which seem to make vaccines less effective. But it is not just these small genetic changes that are raising concerns. The novel coronavirus has a propensity to mix large chunks of its genome when it makes copies of itself. Unlike small mutations, which are like typos in the sequence, a phenomenon called recombination resembles a major copy-and-paste error in which the second half of a sentence is completely overwritten with a slightly different version. A flurry of new studies suggests that recombination may allow the virus to shape and shift in dangerous ways. But in the long term, this biological machinery may offer a silver lining, helping researchers find drugs to stop the virus in its tracks. (The New York Times)

 

The South African Variant Significantly Reduces Effectiveness

of at Least One Vaccine

The Oxford/AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine does not appear to offer protection against mild and moderate disease caused by the viral variant first identified in South Africa, according to a study due to be published on Monday. Although none of the more than 2,000 mainly healthy and young patients in the study died or was hospitalized, the findings, which have not yet been peer reviewed, could complicate the race to roll out vaccines as new strains emerge. In both the human trials and tests on the blood of those vaccinated,the jab showed significantly reduced efficacy against the 501Y.V2 viral variant, which is dominant in South Africa, according to the randomized, double-blind study seen by the Financial Times. (Financial Times)

 

Worldwide Economic Damage and "Staggering Hardship"

The scale of the economic damage the coronavirus pandemic has wreaked across low and middle-income countries has been starkly illustrated in a new survey of 30,000 households in nine countries. A median average of 70 per cent of those surveyed reported a drop in income in the early months of the virus’s spread last year, 30 per cent reported a loss of employment and 45 per cent said they had missed or reduced meals, according to the study by researchers at the University of California in Berkeley, Yale University and Northwestern University, among others. Already-poor people have suffered “staggering” hardship and if the effects persist, tens of millions of already vulnerable households will be pushed into poverty, it warned. (via Financial Times)

 

Delaying the Second Dose

AstraZeneca vaccine: delaying the second dose increases protection, according to new data

The Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine is effective at preventing people from developing COVID-19 and could reduce viral transmission, according to a new scientific paper from the team behind the vaccine.

 

The paper also suggests that delaying the second dose to 12 weeks after the first works especially well. The protective effect of the first dose doesn’t appear to wane during these 12 weeks, and leaving a longer gap between doses ultimately seems to make the second more protective.

 

These promising new findings come from an analysis of clinical trial data, updating a previous paper on the vaccine’s trial results published in early December. However, it’s important to keep in mind that the paper is a preprint – meaning its results haven’t yet been scrutinized formally by other scientists.

 

The main difference between this paper and the last is that more cases of COVID-19 have been included. In the December paper, 192 cases of illness were included in the analysis, enough to give a general estimate of the amount by which the vaccine reduces the risk of developing symptomatic COVID-19 – otherwise known its efficacy. This new paper analyses 332 cases. (Washington Post)

South Africa Suspends Rollout

of Oxford-AstraZeneca Coronavirus Vaccine

South Africa on Sunday said it would suspend its rollout of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine after initial trials showed "disappointing" results against the B.1.351 variant of COVID-19 .

The country has received 1 million doses of the jab. It had planned to start using it to vaccinate front-line healthcare workers from mid-February. 

 

The study, involving around 2,000 people, found that the vaccine offered "minimal protection" against mild and moderate cases of COVID-19. It has not yet been peer-reviewed.

 

"We have decided to put a temporary hold on the rollout of the (AstraZeneca) vaccine. More work needs to be done," said South African Health Minister Zweli Mkhize. Scientists will be studying whether or not the AstraZeneca vaccine is effective in preventing severe disease and death against the new variant, Mkhize said.

 

The government will instead offer vaccines produced by Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer in the coming weeks. This newer strain is more infectious and currently accounts for more than 90% of the COVID-19 cases in the country.

 

South Africa plans to vaccinate at least 67% of its population by the end of the year, or around 40 million people. It has recorded nearly 1.5 million infections and more than 46,000 deaths from the virus. (BBC)

 

VACCINATIONS AROUND THE WORLD: February 7, 2021 (not updated for Feb 8)

–FROM JOHNS HOPKINS CSSE–

The Cultures of Dignity Resources for Supporting

Social-Emotional Wellness 

A Final Note: The AAIE COVID-19 Briefing is provided to support your leadership for the school community you serve. We encourage you to use these resources in any way, shape or form that helps you, your communications and toward furthering close relationships across your community.  – The AAIE Board