A Month in the Life of a Busy School

Dear CAISL Community,

As some of you head off on mini-vacations to take advantage of the upcoming All Saints’ Day holiday on November 1 and the "ponte" day CAISL is taking on November 2, let me outline for you some of the upcoming events in the life of CAISL, its students, parents, and staff.

 

By the time you get this the Halloween festivities will likely be concluded with the Elementary Parade and Parties. Although Thursday and Friday are "no class" days, there are two major activities which will be occurring over this long "no class" weekend.

One is the Varsity Volleyball Tournament. CAISL is part of AMAC "the Association of Mediterranean Activities Council" which organizes 3 tournaments each year, one Volleyball, one Basketball, and one Soccer for Varsity students.



The AMAC Volleyball Tournament was scheduled to be held in Tunisia, hosted by the American Community School of Tunis (ACST). As you may be aware, ACST was recently vandalized quite severely, with the elementary wing of the school and the elementary library gutted by fire and most movables such as computers taken from the secondary. Therefore, ACST was not able to host the tournament nor, considering the political unrest, would CAISL have attended. To ensure that the AMAC Volleyball Tournament went ahead, CAISL offered to host and this offer was accepted by the other schools. So on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday students from Rabat, Tunis, Cairo, and Barcelona will join CAISL students for the Tournament. The schedule of games is available here.

In addition to offering to host the tournament, CAISL is engaging in fund-raising activities to help ACST rebuild. ITAU, CAISL’s catering company, will donate its profit from its lunch service during the tournament to ACST and various CAISL student groups are organizing other fund-raising activities.

At the same time as the Volleyball Tournament. CAISL is hosting the Mediterranean Association of International Schools (MAIS) teachers’ conference. MAIS is a regional organization whose sole purpose is to provide professional development opportunities. MAIS is held annually somewhere in the Mediterranean region and this year it is CAISL’s turn to be the host school. The conference, held at the Palácio Hotel, is on Friday and Saturday with eminent guest speakers from the USA. Almost all of CAISL’s faculty will attend.

 

After this very busy long weekend, Ms. Katie Morris, Elementary Principal, and Mr. Nate Chapman, Secondary Principal will hold a workshop for parents about MAP (Measures of Academic Progress). This will be held on Tuesday, November 6, at 08h45. The purpose of this workshop is to help parents understand MAP and how to read their own child’s report. More information on this workshop will be sent shortly.

After this very busy long weekend, we move rapidly into two more events. One is the visit of EmTech, an IT consulting firm which is going to do an audit of IT services and programs at CAISL. EmTech did an audit of our IT about 10 years ago and its resulting feedback helped guide us in our organization and planning. We look forward to EmTech again providing us with feedback on how our network infrastructure, our IT services, and our educational program can be improved and with guidance on planning for the future. EmTech will be on campus on November 7 and November 8.

Overlapping by a day with the EmTech IT audit is the Iberian Model United Nations program, which is held at CAISL beginning the afternoon of Thursday, November 8 (a half day of classes) and continuing all day Friday, November 9, and Saturday, November 10, at Centro Cultural Belém. IMUN is one of the premier programs at CAISL. Under the leadership of Mr. Peter Andrews, MUN Coordinator, students learn about the world, about politics and economics and geography, about diplomacy and debate, how to organize and lead.

This year, 350 students are coming from 22 schools in 12 countries. (see this link to learn about the participant schools and countries) Each student comes prepared to represent the political views of a country not his/her own in formal debate.

In addition to engaging in debates, CAISL students organize the conference with the support of Mr. Andrews and, once the conference starts, it is completely "student-led"—meaning that the students are responsible for ensuring that everything that needs to be done is done and for organizing, monitoring, coordinating, and supervising the work of the student delegates.



Last year's team with teacher Peter Andrews



Such roles include



The Student Officers, who run the conference and have authority overall. All are CAISL students except for the Vice-President of Security Council who is from the International School of Stavanger in Norway. (Secretary-General: Guilherme Reis; Deputy Secretary-General: Francisco Gonçalves; President of Special Conference: Bernardo Branco; Vice-President of Special Conference: Diogo Anliker; President of Security Council: Carlos Gonçalves; Vice-President of Security Council: Rachel Ecclestone.)

The Administrative Staff, under the leadership of Mariana Matias, ensures organization and logistical coordination.

The Student Press, with Editors-in-Chief Mariana Domingues and Inês Lacerda, will publish both print and online newspapers before, during, and after the conference.

2011 CAISL Thanksgiving Dinner

The Fall Tournament for Boys Basketball and Girls Soccer for Divisions 3, 4, and 5 will be held at CAISL from Thursday, November 15, through Saturday, November 17.

Followed quickly by the PTO-organized Thanksgiving Dinner at Centro Cultural de Cascais the evening of Tuesday, November 20, leading on to the 4-day weekend of American Thanksgiving which is on Thursday, November 22.

The Life of the CAISL Community is not always quite so busy but is always filled with community spirit, opportunities for students to engage, learn, and grow, and opportunities for us to support their activities and enjoy them and learn from them as well. Thank you for being part of the CAISL Community!

CAISL and School Rankings

Dear CAISL Community,

On Saturday, October, 13, Publico published the annual “rankings” of public and private Portuguese schools.  Someone is sure to ask where CAISL is in these rankings or why CAISL is not in the rankings at all. 

The answer is very simple—CAISL students do not take the tests on which the rankings are based and so, of course, does not appear in the rankings at all.   Schools which follow a non-Portuguese curriculum do not take the tests and thus are not in the rankings.  A few of the international schools also have separate Portuguese sections and these will be in the rankings. 

Several years ago, the CAISL faculty who teach Portuguese as a Native Language suggested that we should take the Portuguese Language tests.  We explored this with the Ministry of Education which said we were not allowed to take one test only.  If we took one, we had to take them all.  And we would not be allowed to have only some of our students take the test and not others (i.e. only those in the Portuguese Native Language Program but not those who do not speak Portuguese!).  Obviously, we dropped the idea.

Many of you have heard me expound before on one of my personal, strongly-held frustrations with education—the use (and misuse) of school “rankings” or, as they are called in the UK, “league tables.”

Tests serve two purposes educationally—

1.       to assess a student’s academic achievement so that the educational program can be tailored to needs of each student.  This is called formative assessment as it helps “inform” the next steps in a student’s educational program.

2.       to judge a student’s academic achievement—to put a grade “on the record.”   This is called summative assessment as it “sums up” achievement.

To use a blunt analogy:  formative assessment is like a medical diagnosis while summative assessment is the autopsy.

Rankings/League Tables are based on summative assessments. 

So what is so wrong about “ranking” schools based on summative assessments?

I could give a lot of reasons (and pages and pages of writing!) to answer that but the most basic answer is that there is no way to know which students are being tested.  Two examples follow.

First, obviously, schools have different student populations.  Public schools enroll students from a wide variety of social and economic backgrounds—and increasingly in Portugal linguistic backgrounds.  Private schools have admissions requirements often based on prior achievement including ability in the language of instruction.  Additionally, there is the fact that only those who have the economic resources can go to private schools (except for the rare scholarships) and every study ever done on academic achievement shows a correlation between economic resources and academic achievement. 

Second, there is no way of knowing which students a school decided to test.  Were ALL students in the grade tested?  Or did the school not test students who, for example, have special educational needs or who are not fluent in the language of instruction?   Did the school test only those selected students likely to do well?  Usually testing rules forbid this but it still happens.

I am always interested to read the rankings and the league tables as there are frequently schools praised for “going up a lot in the rankings” from the previous year.    On occasion, a school will jump from a low to a high ranking and then invariably the press will hold that school up as a model for others.   I refuse to believe any school can go up fast in the rankings through increased effort, curriculum revision, professional development of faculty, etc.  The only way to rise in the rankings very fast is to ensure that only students who are predicted to score well take the test.   This is done by just selecting students who will take the test or forcing students to transfer to another school.

 

CAISL students in grades 2 through 9 are currently finishing their fall MAP tests.  These Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) give teachers and parents detailed information on each child’s knowledge and skills in English Language Arts and Math.   These are formative assessments.   If you would like to read more about these tests, the web site is http://www.nwea.org/.

A workshop on MAP will be held on Tuesday, November 6, at 08h45.  This will be conducted by Katie Morris, Elementary Principal, and Nate Chapman, Secondary Principal.   The purpose of this workshop is to help parents understand MAP and how to read their own child’s report.   More information on this workshop will be sent shortly.