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GSIS Gazette – Issue #24
11th September 2020 
The current phase of online learning has now lasted for more than three weeks and we are looking forward to school operations resuming at the Peak and Pok Fu Lam campuses shortly. I would like to extend a warm welcome to our new students and staff who will be joining us on-campus for the first time; it is exciting to be bringing the whole GSIS community back together again.
School Resumption
In our "Roadmap to On-Site School Resumption", you have already gained an insight into the most important information and we are keen to return to the core business of teaching and learning in the classrooms whilst at the same time, doing our utmost to make our school environment safe. Of course the situation continues to be fluid and we may need to add measures or adapt our approach if new guidance from the Hong Kong government is issued.
Online Learning Programme (Surveys)
In order to continue the excellent learning outcomes from our online learning programme, we ask you to help us to identify any areas of improvement for future remote learning practices and online student support programmes by completing the online survey which was shared with you today. The previous surveys gave us a greater insight and understanding of the areas needing attention to help us better meet the needs of our students and our remote learning provision was adapted to reflect this. We do not want to rest on our laurels now. We will continue to work on further developing the quality of our online learning for future phases and will seek your constructive and helpful feedback to help us evaluate our provision. Whilst writing, I would like to take this opportunity to thank you all - teachers, students and parents, for your ongoing efforts around home learning and your patience.
School Holiday Calendar (2020-21)
As an international community, we cannot help but contemplate how the 2020-21 school year will pan out. Many of our community haven’t seen their families overseas for many months and it is very possible that the two week quarantine may still be in force beyond 31st December.
The Senior Management Team has been working intensively to investigate whether there is a way to enable families to travel overseas and still have sufficient time to quarantine on return before school recommences, if required. I would therefore like to share with you our proposed changes to the school calendar to give our community the opportunity to see loved ones over the Christmas period. Please note that these plans are subject to Board approval.
Autumn Term (Term 1)
- The Autumn break will remain as we believe that without this holiday, the academic term is very long.
- Discovery Week is cancelled and will be replaced with the usual timetabled lessons.
- The Christmas holiday will be extended by four days and term 2 will now start on Monday, 11th January 2021.
Spring Term (Term 2)
- Should the quarantine period be extended beyond 31st December 2020, compulsory online learning will take place for all students for one week beginning from Monday, 11th January. On-site school resumption will start on Monday, 18th January 2021.
- Please note that if the quarantine period is not extended beyond 31st December 2020, classes will resume on-campus on Monday, 11th January 2021 and not Tuesday, 5th January 2021.
Summer Term (Term 3)
- In order to allow for the extended holiday at Christmas, the Summer holiday will be shortened by three days. The last day of school will now be Wednesday, 30th June 2021.
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I wish you a good weekend and best wishes to you and your family.
Ulrich Weghoff
Principal
Email
I believe that school leaders have a critical role to play in building trust and mutual understanding between schools and communities. Trust is nurtured through information, through knowledge, through interactions and relationships. I am therefore pleased to share that on Friday, 9th October from 8.30am, I will be hosting an Information Coffee Morning for parents in the Middle Building Library, Peak campus. These will be held regularly on the first Friday of every other month during term time and will be an informal opportunity for you to drop-in and join me and other available members of the Senior Management Team for questions and/or suggestions you have. I do hope you can join us and a reminder will be posted in the Gazette closer to the event.
Reopening schools is naturally at the forefront of everyone’s minds, our detailed full-day resumption plan has been submitted to the EDB and like other peer schools, we are waiting for confirmation, but we are ready! Our Faculty teams have responded with an outstanding online learning programme while our Administration teams have shown their dedication to the school by enhancing our facilities and services at our campuses, allowing teachers to focus on students’ learning remotely. We are really looking forward to school life being as close to ‘normal’ as possible. We will all take much pleasure in having the warmth and fun of the atmosphere back at GSIS.
We have made good use of the summer holidays. We’ve not only made detailed preparations for the reopening of school, with the safety of our community being our key focus in these preparations, but we have also, as promised, ensured that the quality and selection of food we offer in our Cafeteria has been dramatically improved. Lunch in the Three Mackerels Cafeteria is almost a festival of nutrition in its own right now! During the initial school resumption when a full swing meal service is not yet allowed, you can pre-order your packed lunch at the link here:
Please keep us informed if anyone in your household is showing signs of possible Covid-19 and don’t forget that if your child has a temperature above normal (37.8℃), please do not send them to school. We shared the School Resumption Plan with you all last week. I encourage you to read it thoroughly and follow any Departmental-specific communication, as well. If we work together, we can minimise the risk to all within our community.
Clare Chiu
Managing Director
Email
The Yearbook will shortly be ready for distribution and is available for pre-order now. As last year, we will only be printing a limited number to reduce our ecological footprint, so if you would like to pre-order a copy, please visit the From Head of German International Stream
Dear Parents
Finally, life will gradually return to the school buildings at the Peak and Pok Fu Lam campuses from next week on, at least during class time. We are very much looking forward to this, as we have all been waiting for this moment for weeks. Now we can truly say: Welcome to the new school year!
I hope that school closures and online learning due to Covid-19 are now a thing of the past and that we can quickly return to school normality, which includes teaching and our many extra-curricular activities. Unfortunately, some events had to or will have to be cancelled, postponed or held in a different format in the near future. We will try to find alternative dates and will of course keep you informed and update our school calendar accordingly.
With best wishes for a good weekend and a soon reunion at the Peak or in Pok Fu Lam
Grit Cichon
Deputy Principal / Head of German International Stream
Email
Kindergarten Corner
Updates and Announcements
Primary Corner
Dear Parents,
After you have received the "Roadmap to On-Site School Resumption" on Tuesday, we would like to give you detailed information about the primary school.
Please read this information carefully for the respective campus. If you have any further questions or concerns, please feel free to contact us.
We would also like to take the opportunity to ask you for your opinion on our modified Home Learning programme. Please complete our survey by Tuesday 22 September 2020.
As you can learn from the school calendar, we had to postpone or cancel some events. These include the sports days, all HKSSF sports competitions in September and October, the class trips of K03 and K04. We will send you the new dates and they will be visible in the school calendar.
This week you had the opportunity to borrow books from our library for the first time again, more than 100 orders were received and more than 300 books are now with the children. I hope that this offer will continue to be used and that the children will have fun with the new books at the weekend.
 Priska Erni |
 Inga Riedel-Narayan |
Updates and Announcements
From Head of English International Stream
The Future of Schools
It was with great sadness that I heard of the recent passing of one of my educational heroes, Sir Ken Robinson, whose TEDTalk on creativity in schools is one of the most-watched of all time (currently just half a million short of the population of the UK!). He had long been an advocate of moving schools away from an industrial model of education towards a more personalised system focused on inspiring students to engage with dynamic learning rather than standardised testing and rote learning. His books, Out of Our Minds and The Element, encourage us to seek to achieve our creative potential and outline how finding our passion can change everything. Both certainly worth a read.
Robinson spent the last ten years examining how schools might evolve away from the reliance on testing and dogmatic learning, which can have the combined effect of disenfranchising students from their own education. Whilst I am confident in the impact and effect of a GSIS education, we still need to be responsive to an ever-changing world and ensure that our students are developing the economic, cultural, social and personal skills necessary to confront the challenges ahead.
Dr. Conrad Hughes, Campus Principal at the International School of Geneva and senior fellow at UNESCO’s International Bureau Education, has identified three ‘challenges to humanity’ of which we should take note as they will influence the skills, aptitudes and personal qualities that we need to build in our children:
- Human economic and consumerist activity is modifying and ultimately destroying the planet.
- High-performing algorithms, the exploitation of behavioural surplus by tech companies and the outsourcing of human labour by artificial intelligence is challenging what it means to be human and the skills that will be needed in the market place.
- The gap between rich and poor is widening, extremist ideology is on the rise in many countries and conflicts break out regularly across the globe.
Hughes, C. (2020) The Universal Learning Programme
Date accessed: 25th August 2020
This is the world that our children will need to navigate so we must equip them appropriately, not just academically but also, through the synthesis of everything we do, to ensure that each child develops the resilience, integrity, self-respect and self-awareness to ensure their intellectual, emotional and physical wellbeing.
Our challenge is to transform GSIS into an increasingly dynamic place for learning and teaching for all students and staff supported by an inspiring environment and a dynamic infrastructure. Our collective aim is to evolve into a continuously self-improving school that understands what it does well and what it needs to do to improve. The school’s Strategic Development Plan will ensure progression towards these goals and will drive our decision-making over the next twelve months as well as bringing our horizon into sharper relief.
KPR Elections & Communication
Thank you to all the parents who joined the Klassenpflegschafts-Representative (KPR) meetings over the past two weeks in the English International Stream; I look forward to working with you over the coming months. The role of the KPR is an important one that helps support open communication between the school and parents, serving a vital function as we seek to rebuild our community over the coming year.
Nevertheless, we would again like to urge parents to contact school directly with any individual issues to do with their child as we are best placed to deal with any concerns. Also, we would encourage you to please think carefully about what you share on school-based WhatsApp group chats. I do not belong to any of these myself but some of the comments that have been shared with me have been quite inflammatory whilst others are downright disrespectful. As a community, we need to commit to open, honest and respectful communication.
I offer the following suggestions for group chats that might help promote a more positive atmosphere for communication:
Try not to write or send anything in a moment of heightened emotion.
Check facts before posting.
Never write a post about someone that you would not be willing to say to them directly.
Please challenge any inappropriate use of group chats and in extreme cases bring them to the attention of the school.
Return to school
And finally, we are all very excited at the prospect of seeing some of our students again next week during our soft opening phase and in increasing numbers the following weeks.
With kind regards
Simon Misso-Veness
Deputy Principal / Head of English International Stream
Email
Kindergarten Corner
Updates and Announcements
Primary Corner
Dear Parents,
Thank you to the parents who have volunteered to serve as KPRs this year. We appreciate and value your time. In this week’s Gazette, we have a Primary Parent Survey for feedback in regards to the online learning your child has been engaged in since the start of school. We also have attached our On-site Resumption Plan, giving details of what you and your child can expect when they return to the campus.
Events to be cancelled or moved:
- Camps for Years 3-6 will be moved from October to spring if an acceptable date is found.
- Sports Day will be moved from October to March.
- All sports competitions in September and October have been cancelled by the HKSSF.
Staff changes
Due to family circumstances, Mini Franks has announced her resignation as of 31 December 2020. The EPD will greatly miss her spirit and contributions to student and staff well-being, but we also understand the need to put family first. This position will be posted shortly, and we hope to find a candidate with as much enthusiasm for sports as Mini!
Warm regards,
Updates and Announcements
Secondary Corner
