For the past few weeks, I’ve been focusing on the next school year. After opening a Pre-Nursery class in September, and announcing a High School track that will allow our students to extend their unique bilingual education beyond Middle School, there’s no denying that The École is dynamic and agile when it comes to providing the best options for our students and families.
Putting Our Energy to Good Use
I would obviously like not only for that dynamism and energy to last but also for it to nourish and enrich our pedagogical considerations. I want it to help us when we reflect on and question our practices. I want it to be passed on to our students in the way they approach math problems or learn Chinese. I want it to trace a professional path that is stimulating for all of our colleagues.
There is something almost magical about this energy, which we must protect and conserve. We all use it daily, from Philippe and Laurence, whose commitment continues unabated, to our SLAs, who are always present for our students, and not forgetting those who might be less familiar to you, like Nielle, Alice, and Cécile, who often come to our rescue to fill staffing gaps and ensure the school runs smoothly. Parents are also affected and I take this opportunity to thank the PA for their work, which energizes us too!
In this context, it is important to recognize that this driving energy has obvious benefits, but at the same time, we must learn to channel and guide it in order to imbue it with sense and direction. That is what I intend to do in the coming weeks: to work with our various teams in order to define our objectives and common values and to identify our areas for development, enrichment, and renewal.
Our Driving Forces
The École is a largehearted school–that’s why we love it–whether we work or come to school here or are involved in some other way. That fact should drive us to want the best for it, to never rest on our laurels or make do. We should always be striving to make the most positive impact possible on our students and forcing ourselves to seek out complex answers–in the sense intended by Edgar Morin–to complex questions.
I brought a fresh pair of eyes to the school last year and put in place a number of changes that I thought were necessary. On Monday, during the in-service day, I had the opportunity to thank the entire team for their responsiveness because it is no easy task to navigate such periods of transition. Consequently, 2022 will be a year during which we will consolidate those changes and also a year during which we will focus on defining our pedagogical direction as well as establishing the structures that will bring it to life.
In the end, we will have a confident, intelligent, future-forward school that will propose a bilingual program to its students that is as unique as they are.