Author! Author!

Author! Author!
Oct 30, 2001, 10:27am

The European Council of Independent Schools publishes a magazine called IS (International School) three times per year. This particular ECIS publication seeks to reflect the professionalism and diversity of international educators. IS draws on five hundred fifty member schools submitting articles. In the autumn 2001 issue, two of the published articles are written by members of our I.C. faculty. This is an achievement we are proud to highlight. Congratulations to Ghada Yared, social studies teacher in the Ain Aar Middle School and Colleen MacDonnell, LMC head librarian!

Ghada Yared's article Another Point of View comes from an inspiration in a human geography class.

Ghada Yared describes her approach to teaching as a partnership with her students. She wants them to participate in decision making and to have ownership of their learning. It was exactly this attitude that enabled her to use her students’ responses in a homework assignment to generate a creative class discussion and give an invaluable life lesson.
In her Human Geography class, Ghada asked students to submit a proposal for planning a metropolitan city. When one student proposed a potentially controversial plan, she was asked to justify it to the class. Ghada accepted the plan because the girl could explain her point of view and her culture is the basis for her conclusions.
Instead of blocking disagreement among students over the plan in question, Ghada invited them to express their viewpoints freely. She helped them “identify and discuss the issue” using progressive steps to develop their own logical process for argument.
The positive ending to the story is the respect and open-mindedness class members learned to practice toward opposing opinions.

Colleen MacDonnell wrote her article titled Balancing the Books after being invited to by the editor of IS magazine.

Colleen MacDonnel spent some years as a classroom teacher in her native Canada before deciding to augment her education with a degree as a teacher librarian. She finds real satisfaction now in combining her training and talent as a teacher with the management and technology skills she takes to quite naturally.
As head librarian Colleen uses an on-line resource known as a ‘listserver’. This is a kind of bulletin board or chat room for professional discussions among international school librarians. Colleen answered some questions posted in a listserver about budgeting for overseas school libraries. The editor of IS read Colleen’s comments in the listserver and contacted her with an invitation to research and write an article.
As Colleen explored her subject, she was surprised at the lack of a list of developed standards. She discovered that not even ECIS (European Council of International Schools) had a formula to use in devising a budget and in fact, in their publication Effective Libraries in International Schools, they make only a cursory reference to budgetary issues.
In her work on the article, titled Balancing the Books, Colleen compiles some figures and information to achieve basic criteria from which to work.