What kind of school community do we want for our children?

Hey all, David here. Let me introduce to you guys, the guest for this week, Dr. Bertha Richardson. Dr. Bertha serves on our internal Charter Application Review Committee, helping to insure that the particulars of our educational vision are well-aligned with best practices in early childhood and elementary education.

What Kind of School Community Do We Want for Our Children?

Every time I am asked to participate in a worthy educational endeavor, since my retirement from the School District of University City, I ask myself, “How will this effort progress the achievement of our ‘Students at Promise’?” If I can come up with an affirmative answer, I attempt to do it justice with as much intellectual energy and intensive effort as my 34+ years experience in education and my desire to spend time with my grandchildren can muster.

It is through this lens that I look at the prospect of sharing in the intellectually inspiring project of the non-profit organization, St. Louis Language Immersion Schools (SLLIS).

In education, we for years looked for the latest and newest answer to our compelling quest for academic excellence. As far back as Plato and Socrates we have searched for the fountain of truth, a way for all students to develop through strong nurturing, challenging curriculum and caring encouragement. When offered the invitation to become a part of this promising educational project I quickly saw how it has immense potential for bringing children to educational excellence.

From the standpoint of a professional educational consultant, a person who has devoted an enormous amount of time examining the learning and teaching process, SLLIS is a great support to school systems in our community. It allows a diverse group of students to participate in an engaging, challenging and accelerating program. The student population will have access to the latest research-based strategies to promote reading/writing, math, music, science, art, health and physical education skills. Parents will be asked to become involved with a wide spectrum of areas within the school community. Character education is viewed, and rightfully so, as a way to encourage positive behavior and support emotional intelligence.

Make it A DEAR Day!
Dream Big, Laugh often, Sing loud, & Dance (Cupid Shuffle anyone?) when you get the chance!
“I’ve come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element in the classroom. It’s my daily mood that makes the weather. As a teacher, I possess a tremendous power to make a child’s life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or de-escalated and a child humanized or de-humanized.”– Dr. Haim Ginott

Bertha Richardson, Ed. D.
Chief Academic Officer
A DEAR International

Things to look forward to

Hey guys, David here, this past Thursday I attended SLLIS’s Board of Directors meeting. Let me tell you a little about what you can look forward to.

We have just complete the creative design on the new SLLIS website. We are currently contracting it to a web developer who can code it properly for us and then you should see it up and running within a few weeks. While the blog should remain your main source for updates, the Sllis website will provide tons of interesting information such as full board bios and language immersion research. Stay tuned.

The Festival of Nations will be the weekend of the 23rd of August and SLLIS will definitely be there. You can come to learn more about the school, and even meet our Executive Director and members of our Board. The event will take place at Tower Grove Park.

I am sure all of you out there are curious about where the school is going to be located. Our facilities committee looked at several buildings last week and one in particular looked very promising. I won’t disclosed the location just yet, but it is centrally located and in a very safe area (near a corporate campus actually). Keep on the look-out for more updates.

IB…it’s not just harder, it’s smarter

IBO stands for the International Baccalaureate Organization, IB is an international, non-profit educational organization whose goal is produce world-minded and critically analytical students. IB is primarily known for three programs, the Primary Years Programme for elementary level students, the Middle Years Programme for grades 6-10 and the Diploma Programme which takes place in the final two years of high school. (for a more detailed description visit http://www.ibo.org/programmes)

In the United States, Diploma Programmes are the most common. They can range from the full Diploma Programme (like my alma mater) or simply IB classes that students can elect to take if they want a more challenging course load. Diploma level IB classes are generally equal to or greater in difficulty to their corresponding AP courses in the same subject and like the AP each has an accompanying examination at the end. IB scores however are not solely based on the exam but also on unique measures based on the subject matter. For example, the IB psychology score is based on both the final exam and on having executed and written a report on one’s own psychological experiment (I did mine based on the Asch conformity experiments). St. Louis has it’s own Diploma Programme at Metro High School which is often ranked close to 100 in the top public highschools in the nation by Newsweek. (My own highschool ranks consistently between the teen’s and the 30’s)

What I personally got out of the IB program, and what I feel it brings to students is a new way of thinking. The program is designed to both focus and expand the student’s mind. It expands the student’s thinking by highlighting a diverse set of skills as the key to success.  This is reflected in the international focus of the program, the diverse requirements of the Diploma Programme (one must complete 6 different IB exams, and you can’t just do 4 science and 2 math, they must all be sufficiently different), and the exams themselves which as I mentioned earlier promote a diverse set of skills. In addition, the Diploma requires completion of various tasks that demonstrate ability outside of the class room such as the Extended Essay (a 4000 word paper on any subject in any field of study) which highlights independant study and creative thought (my friend compared the comic Calvin and Hobbes to the real life John Calvin and Thomas Hobbes).

And there are CAS hours, similar to the required community service hours that many states have, CAS stands for Creative, Action and Service. Students must complete at least 20 hours in each field, creative could be learning an instrument, action could be playing a sport, the only rule is that they must be completed outside the scope of the classroom. As with CAS hours vs. community service hours, IB takes every thing one step further, and I believe this step is the difference for a student from just going through the motions to get the job done and really learning and experiencing something worthwhile.

Well that’s just a little slice of what I feel about IB, if anything I can tell you that it is not just harder, it is smarter. I myself got only decent grades in middle school, and would not have even a chance of getting into a top university were it not for my acceptance into the IB program (which was a supreme accomplishment of luck and persistence). Yes, acceptance, because unfortunately in most schools IB remains something for the elite or privileged.  Although my school (like many) was a public school and free to all, only the kids with the top 100 test scores in the county got in (of those ranks I certainly was not when I started but am confident to be a part of now). This is why I signed on for the SLLIS project.  I know that the IB turned my life around and the idea that SLLIS wants to make this available for everyone is astounding.  I am thankful for all of the help that I got through the IB and I’m working this summer to give that opportunity to more kids like me.

David M Liu
Marketing Intern and Webmanager

SLLIS at the movies

Hey guys, David here, just writing to inform you that we will be advertising at several kid-friendly Front Yard Features and Cinemania in Grand Center this summer. These are essentially free movies sponsored by local organizations. They are projected on a big screen and are almost always outdoors. Our ad was created by an incredible team of marketing interns: Audra, Katie and Kellie at Moosylvania. Check it out!

Where is SllIS?

Monday, July 14th
French School Project Group meeting
Kaldi’s in DeMun (Clayton) @ 6:30pm
Contact: Amber Simpson amber.simspon@usbank.com
June 26-27
DESE Special Education Training for Charter Schools
St. Louis,MO

June 22-25, 2008
The 8th Annual National Charter School Conference
New Orleans, LA
Keynote Speakers: Geoffrey Canada, Petra Nemcova, Danny Glover, Nelson Smith, Bobby Jindal
http://www.nationalcharterconference.org/

Wednesday, June 18th
4:00pm
German School Project Group Meeting
Webster University
Presentation Room at the University Center
Here is a map of the campus, located off Big Bend Rd. in Webster Groves. We will be in building 15, the University Center, which is part of our recreational complex on Edgar Rd. You may park behind the building.
http://www.webster.edu/campusmap/index.html
Contact: Paula Hanssen hanssen@webster.edu

Monday, June 16th
Spanish School Project Group Meeting
When: Monday, June 16, 2008 @ 6 PM
Where: Panera Bread Company, 6630 Delmar (U.City Loop), 63130
Contact: Amber Simpson amber.simpson@usbank.com

Welcome to the SLLIS blog and updates page

Welcome, this is David M Liu, marketing intern and webmanager for the SLLIS blog and updates page. I am very glad you have shown curiosity about our school. On this page, you can find updates about our facilities, new teacher hires, community events that we will be attending and pretty much everything else. You will also get a chance to hear from people at various levels of our staff, from the lowly marketing intern to our executive director Rhonda Broussard. Please feel free to post any questions you may have (as I am sure you have many) and to comment directly on any issue or to any person you find on this page. We will try our best to get back to you asap.

Just to tell you all a little about myself; I am currently a sophomore attending Washington University St. Louis in the Olin Business School. I graduated from Richard Montgomery High School with a Diploma from the International Baccalaureate, the same program that serves as a model for SLLIS. I really owe a great deal of my academic success to the IB program, it challenged me to think in a broader sense and enabled me to succeed both by helping me get into a good college and in helping me prepare for the increased work load and academic independence that many Freshmen college students are not prepared for. Truly, the IB program taught me not just material necessary to score high on tests but also how to learn and to think with a world view, and without it I would not be where I am today.

Thanks for visiting, and please stay tuned.

-David