Ensuring all students receive the highest possible standard of teaching is a driving philosophy at CIS, and a key factor in achieving this goal is supporting our staff through professional growth and curriculum development. The CIS’ development programme is multi-faceted and it is implemented throughout the school’s strategic planning and individual staff members’ continuous improvement plans.

Throughout the year, principals, programme coordinators, coaches and teachers provide a broad range of internally generated workshops related to the curriculum. These can cover either an entire grade level or specific subjects, and we focus on both horizontal and vertical alignment. Individuals and groups of teachers also attend external IB and regional educational conferences, seminars and specialist subject network meetings. These sessions are led by curriculum leaders in each subject area and, at CIS, we are very fortunate to have a growing number of our teachers, leading these IB and subject specific workshops.

An integral part of our commitment to professional growth and improvement is the opportunity for all staff to undertake focused, in house, professional development. This includes our two day professional development workshops in October, and a language focus workshop in November. To maximise these opportunities, we bring in global and regional educational leaders to work with specialist groups and teams.

The professional development days in October provided a broad range of professional workshops and CIS will often invite global experts to present. This year we brought in Dr. Marian Small, a highly respected international leader in Mathematics teaching and learning. Based in Canada, Dr. Small worked with all PYP class teachers. The focus of the workshop was developing the skills and understanding of mathematics that ensure a depth of thinking, creativity in mathematical problem solving and the associated skills of critical thinking and analysis. Dr. Small also visited classrooms prior to the workshop and provided direct feedback to teachers and coordinators.

To support recent subject specific curriculum development, three IB in-school workshops were provided: Play Based Learning for the Kindergarten team, Arts, Creativity and Design for the members of the Arts and Design teams and Physical Education for the P.E. Department. Other workshops have included a focus on Approaches to Learning for our MYP and DP teachers, supporting the Personal Project and Extended Essay in Secondary, French and Chinese language acquisition development and ELL in the mainstream classroom.

Internal and external leaders are encouraged to contribute to teacher development sessions.This year, Robyn Treyvaud, an internationally recognised leader delivered a session on supporting schools to plan and implement effective Digital Citizenship, Ms. Suzanne Anderson facilitated Crisis Response Planning, Rafael Mendoza conducted a session on Approaches to Learning for our MYP and DP teachers and Mr. Nishant Kasibhatla led the session on the 3Ms for Success for our Educational Assistants. The CIS professional community is very diverse and these workshops are indicative of this diversity.

In addition to the CIS based workshops we also hosted the Asia Pacific Regional IB workshop and conference for 3 days from the 9 – 11 October. This primarily consisted of IB Diploma workshops, and was a first for CIS as we hosted approximately 400 delegates from schools across the region. Mr. Mike Pelletier our Head of Educational Technology, and Mr. Dion Norman our Kindergarten to Grade 12 EdTech Coordinator were both keynote speakers at the event and they shared the exciting and innovative journey CIS has taken in developing educational technology across the school.

In November, we invited globally renowned language expert, Mr. Greg Duncan, to visit the school. Greg played a key role in the development of the American Council of Teaching Foreign Languages (ACTFL) Standards. He visited Bilingual and Additional Language / Language Acquisition classes and also shared his expertise at parent seminars. A critical component of Greg’s visit was to provide ongoing guidance and feedback to the Senior Administration team regarding programme success and opportunities to further enhance the learning for students. Over a weekend, Greg worked with approximately 60 teachers from CIS on developing an increased understanding using the ACTFL standards in programme design and student proficiency assessment.

Teacher development is critical for ensuring CIS is at the cutting edge of global educational developments and ‘best practice’ teaching standards.