–NEXT WEEK'S CONVERSATIONS–

with International School Leaders from Around the World

In response to our recent online CONVERSATIONS where we keep asking the question, "How do we keep our faculty and parents focused on the prize of keeping school open, while ensuring everyone takes responsibility for preventing community spread of the virus?", Sean Truman and his team will help answer the question. We will also provide more information on how best to lead through pandemic fatigue and to maintain community solidarity for teaching and learning.   

 

Everyone– this is a session that we hope you include and encourage your senior leadership team and board trustees to attend. The committee of expertise that Sean is bringing to the session is exceptional.  We also invite you to send to Mark (mark@aaie.org) any key questions you might have on the topic as we will run the session like a panel discussion where your voice will be important.   

Join our weekly CONVERSATION  between School Heads and Senior Leaders. Our discussions continue to be contemporary, important and a time we teach each other.  Thanks to Will Richardson who has facilitated each Thursday since the very beginning. 

A weekly CONVERSATION  between School Heads and Senior Leaders within the AMISA (new name for AASSA) and the Tri-Association regions. Although the CONVERSATIONS focus on specific issues within Central and South America, all school leaders from around the world are always welcome.  

Next week our session will focus on PART II of our investigation of the third PRINCIPLE:  Learning:  We ensure dynamic, engaging, impactful, and joyful learning experienced owned and driven by learners. Our curators Gwyn Underwood and Rachel McKinnon will bring essential research and our discussion as a group will focus upon implementation strategies. 

 

Anytime is a good time to join in on the NEW SCHOOL discussion...we need many voices and perspectives.   

Testing, testing...
The Pandemic Has Prompted Questions About High-Stakes Exams

School closures have disrupted the education of close to 1.5bn pupils since the start of the year. Governments have been forced to make difficult decisions about whether and how to conduct important exams. These have revived long-running debates about the fairness of high-stakes tests. That could result in changes that last far beyond the pandemic.

 

Many countries have plowed ahead with big exams. On December 3rd half a million youngsters will sit South Korea’s fearsome matriculation exam. Face-masks are mandatory. Papers will be brought to hospitals for any candidate needing treatment for covid-19. Pupils lost at least five weeks of face-to-face learning when the pandemic closed their classrooms; cram schools closed, too. But one 18-year-old from Seoul does not feel hard done by. When classes were forced online pupils “talked less and studied more”, she says.

 

In July some 10m people sat the gaokao, China’s school-leavers’ exam. The two-day test took place a month late; exam centres set aside quarantine spaces in case candidates developed symptoms while it was happening. Provincial governments in Germany also agreed that their school-leavers’ exams should go ahead, though they account for only a small portion of students’ final grades. Spain suffered one of Europe’s worst outbreaks and imposed one of its strictest lockdowns. Its university-entrance exam still went ahead, though it covered less material than usual.

 

Some countries allowed exams to go ahead but with alterations. Italy called off written tests for school-leavers, but allowed an oral examination to proceed. Austria and Hungary did the opposite. In America, Advanced Placement exams—optional courses that some teenagers take to impress university admissions offices—went online. The papers were shortened to 45 minutes and covered only material candidates were likely to have studied before they were booted out of their classrooms.

 

Some countries, including Britain, France and Ireland, cancelled exams. That had least impact in places where pupils rack up marks before any final tests. Other governments asked teachers to help decide students’ grades. These were higher than usual, according to data collected by uk naric (see chart). To produce results comparable to the previous year’s, Irish moderators would have had to lower 60% of the grades teachers had suggested for final-year students registered to sit the most difficult papers. They let all but a fifth stand. In France 96% of pupils earned a school-leaver’s certificate, up from 88% in 2019.

 

Some countries had begun making changes before the pandemic hit. Reforms in France mean that from this year school-leavers are supposed to enter their final exams with 40% of their marks already in the bag; previously everything depended on the tests. A few years ago England moved in the opposite direction by abandoning coursework and reprioritising end-of-course exams. In 2019 an admissions scandal forced South Korea’s government to say it would review a program that seeks to make exam scores less critical to university applications. Chinese officials talk endlessly about shaking up the gaokao, but have only tinkered with it.

 

The pandemic may amplify calls to get rid of exams that some already thought unnecessary. Universities in America traditionally ask applicants to sit the sat or act, tests which are not required by the public school system. This year many universities waived that requirement after many exam sittings were cancelled. This delighted critics of testing, who say the exams advantage richer applicants who can pay for test-prep. About 70% of American universities offering four-year courses now operate “test-optional” admissions policies, up from around 45% before the pandemic.

–TODAY's POEM TO CONSIDER–

A poem, just for you ...

(thanks yet again to Bob Hetzel)

“Shakespeare Never Used the Word ‘Ping’ and Neither Should You”

 

When you say
“ping me,”
I want to punch you.
It’s true.
“Bio break,” too.
It makes me cringe.
And, if I am being honest,
I don’t care about your ducks or the row they’re in.
I don’t know what “net-net” means
unless it’s being said by an excited tennis announcer.
Come to think of it,
let’s not circle back
or drill down
or take a deep dive
or take it offline
or level the playing field
or create action items.
And I really don’t care
if this won’t scale.
And may I add that,
going forward,
I would like to park this project.
And this job.
I quit.
Now.
Sorry.
I have a hard stop.

 

–John Kenney, Love Poems for the Office

STAY FOCUSED ON COVID-19 SCIENCE

–THE NEWS of COVID-19–

61,403,420

Cases Worldwide (Johns Hopkins CSSE)

– thanks to David Toze

AstraZeneca Admits a Mistake, Raising Questions

About the Efficacy of its Vaccine

The announcement this week that a cheap, easy-to-make coronavirus vaccine appeared to be up to 90 percent effective was greeted with jubilation. “Get yourself a vaccaccino,” a British tabloid celebrated, noting that a shot of the vaccine, developed by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford, costs less than a cup of coffee.

 

But since unveiling the preliminary results, AstraZeneca has acknowledged a key mistake in the vaccine dosage received by some study participants, adding to questions about whether the vaccine’s apparently spectacular efficacy will hold up under additional testing.

 

Scientists and industry experts said the error and a series of other irregularities and omissions in the way AstraZeneca initially disclosed the data have eroded their confidence in the reliability of the results.

 

Officials in the United States have also said that the results were not clear. It was the head of the U.S. federal vaccine initiative — not the company — who first disclosed that the vaccine’s most promising results did not reflect data from older people.

 

The upshot, the experts said, is that the odds of regulators in the United States and elsewhere quickly authorizing the emergency use of the AstraZeneca vaccine are declining, a setback in the global campaign to corral the devastating pandemic. (New York Times)

 

South Korea Reports its Biggest One-Day Jump

in Cases in Eight months.

South Korea reported 583 new cases of the coronavirus on Thursday, the biggest daily caseload since early March, as health officials struggled to contain a third wave.

 

South Korea reported more than 800 daily cases in late February, when a mass infection clustered around a church in the southeastern city of Daegu set off a first wave. The second wave hit the country in August, with cases peaking at 441, after the virus spread mainly from a church gathering, participants at an outdoor rally and nightclub customers in Seoul.

The latest surge in infections started this month, spreading through smaller clusters across the country, with outbreaks reported in apartment-block saunas, dance halls and military training camps, health officials said.

 

In the past week, officials have tightened social-distancing rules, banning gatherings of more than 100 people, shutting down nightclubs and allowing only takeout services in coffee shop chains.

“We are now in a situation where virus outbreaks can happen at any place, infecting the young and old, men and women, alike,” Health Minister Park Neung-hoo said on Thursday. “With the third wave getting bigger and spreading fast, we must strictly follow social-distancing rules.” (New York Times)

 

Pope Francis: A Crisis Reveals What Is in Our Hearts

To come out of this pandemic better than we went in, we must let ourselves be touched by others’ pain.

 

So many of the nurses, doctors and caregivers paid that price of love, together with priests, and religious and ordinary people whose vocations were service. We return their love by grieving for them and honoring them.

 

Whether or not they were conscious of it, their choice testified to a belief: that it is better to live a shorter life serving others than a longer one resisting that call. That’s why, in many countries, people stood at their windows or on their doorsteps to applaud them in gratitude and awe. They are the saints next door, who have awakened something important in our hearts, making credible once more what we desire to instill by our preaching.

 

They are the antibodies to the virus of indifference. They remind us that our lives are a gift and we grow by giving of ourselves, not preserving ourselves but losing ourselves in service.

With some exceptions, governments have made great efforts to put the well-being of their people first, acting decisively to protect health and to save lives. The exceptions have been some governments that shrugged off the painful evidence of mounting deaths, with inevitable, grievous consequences. But most governments acted responsibly, imposing strict measures to contain the outbreak.

 

Yet some groups protested, refusing to keep their distance, marching against travel restrictions — as if measures that governments must impose for the good of their people constitute some kind of political assault on autonomy or personal freedom! Looking to the common good is much more than the sum of what is good for individuals. It means having a regard for all citizens and seeking to respond effectively to the needs of the least fortunate.

 

It is all too easy for some to take an idea — in this case, for example, personal freedom — and turn it into an ideology, creating a prism through which they judge everything.

 

The coronavirus crisis may seem special because it affects most of humankind. But it is special only in how visible it is. There are a thousand other crises that are just as dire, but are just far enough from some of us that we can act as if they don’t exist. Think, for example, of the wars scattered across different parts of the world; of the production and trade in weapons; of the hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing poverty, hunger and lack of opportunity; of climate change. These tragedies may seem distant from us, as part of the daily news that, sadly, fails to move us to change our agendas and priorities. But like the Covid-19 crisis, they affect the whole of humanity.

 

Look at us now: We put on face masks to protect ourselves and others from a virus we can’t see. But what about all those other unseen viruses we need to protect ourselves from? How will we deal with the hidden pandemics of this world, the pandemics of hunger and violence and climate change? (New York Times Opinion)

 

Remote School is Leaving Children Sad and Angry

Some children are doing fine with remote school; some even prefer it. But many others are suffering emotionally, mentally and even physically from so many hours, often alone, in front of a computer screen.

 

To gauge the struggle, The Washington Post asked parents nationwide to share stories and artwork produced by youths participating in the mandatory home-school experiment, garnering more than 60 responses from families living in 18 states.

 

School-age children are losing interest in food. They are complaining of back pain and burning eyes. They are developing feelings of depression.

 

It is unsurprising, even predictable, experts say, and likely to get worse the longer school campuses throughout the country remain shut down.

 

“The strain on kids is enormous,” said Matthew Biel, chief of the child and adolescent psychiatry division at Georgetown University School of Medicine. “Your 7-year-old wants to be recognized when they raise their hand. Oftentimes doesn’t happen on Zoom. They want to be able to make a comment, make a joke with a peer — can’t do that, no chatting allowed. Wants to be able to get up and walk around the classroom and move — can’t do that, we need to see your face on screen.”

 

He said it can be particularly hard for children with special needs, developmental delays or social struggles, but it can also be challenging for youths who simply crave friendship and the comfort of school rituals.

 

Especially for younger children, Biel said, the only way to express shock, sadness and displeasure is through emotional, sometimes violent outbursts and tantrums. And, although parents across the United States are rushing to reassure their children, they cannot provide the one answer that would help most — telling children when the pandemic will be over.

 

“This is just how life is now,” Biel said. “None of us can really share with our kids when it is going to end. We don’t know.”  READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE   (Washington Post)

–Tracking the Virus Around the World–

–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