Professionally Developed

Jamie and I have been professionally developed the last couple of days. All of the QSI schools in southeast Asia (10 total) met in Shekou the last 3 days for professional development concerning assessment. The main guest speaker was Bambi Betts who travels to international schools giving seminars in assessment. There were breakout sessions led by many of the staff on all sorts of assessment topics and then job-alike sessions by grade and subject level. Jamie and I led a job-alike session on middle school cultural studies.

It was certainly a very well organized event and one of the better staff development days I have experienced. Most of it was very applicable to the classroom and something we could immediately use. It seems as though staff development back home is not geared toward immediate use or it is designed to shove a particular program or design at the teachers and train them on it for 2 days which should actually take 2 weeks.

So, we'll only have a 3 day week with the students starting tomorrow.

We booked our flight to Thailand for winter break. We'll be traveling to Bangkok on December 15 and leaving out of Bangkok on December 29. In the meantime, we'll travel around the Bangkok area and probably hit the beach for about a week. We are not exactly sure our destinations. Be sure to check the blog around that time as we will be seeing snapping pictures left and right to share with you all.

We hope all is well with everyone back home. I haven't heard from some of you in a while. Take care...