AGIS Conference 2024 Potsdam

This workshop is an opportunity for staff working in the student support realm in grades 5-12 (Learning Support, Pastoral, Counselling, etc.) to connect, network and discuss critical issues facing international schools in Germany.

The first session will be a presentation style on Bavarian International School's journey to aligning services to support students. The second session will be guided by the discussions and areas of need discussed in the first session.

Some areas of discussion will be:
- Policies for Student Support/ Handbooks
- Behaviour policy/ flow chart creation and roll out (At BIS)
- PBIS (Positive behaviour system influence)
- RTI influence (Response to intervention)
- Tracking systems for students accessing supports
- GDPR regulations and working within the law

The team would like to gather feedback prior to the day to understand the needs of the participants.

A self-confessed PowerPoint addict invites you to explore and consider how we present information
to learners; how to do it better, how to do it differently and (whisper it) how to do it less. We’ll briefly explore how a 30+ year old form of business software and its imitators came to dominate so many of our classrooms, share our experiences and consider some alternative approaches with a sense of humour and open minds.

Recycling properly is a clear and visual signal to students and families that we care about the planet and are serious about our responsibilities. However, doing it properly and diligently can be a challenge. SOLUTION: get students involved! A student-led scheme teaches stewardship, streamlines the Hausmeister's workload, and improves waste management across the school. Come see one success story. Could it work at your school?

Over 5 years into the GDPR and through the course of a pandemic, GDPR compliance programs in German international schools have matured, and yet adhering to the principles of the GDPR still remains a daily challenge for most schools given an ever-changing landscape of technical possibilities in the EdTech world (e.g. AI), vendors, and EU/German regulations and court decisions.
This session is designed to share best practises in privacy compliance in an English speaking international school in Germany, looking both at the everyday core components of a compliance program as well as how schools can embrace the principle of Privacy by Design in their own values and practises to ensure that our right to data privacy does not have to quash innovation. The session will be in an open forum where participants are invited to share their knowledge, experiences and best practises at their schools.

In our multimodal world visuals and moving images have become an increasingly popular means of communication to express ideas and convey emotions. It is our task as teachers to support our students in building a sound visual literacy that enables them to evaluate images and make meaning of them.

Images are a wonderful tool to inspire students to write not only because they activate prior knowledge but nurture students’ imagination to create their own stories. We will be looking at paintings, photos, films, and wordless books and find out how decoding and analysing their visuals work best. The three following questions will steer our workshop: How am I going to embed visuals meaningfully in my classroom? How can my students be supported in making meaning of images by not only asking them to describe what they see? And how can I sparkle their imagination in order to support them grow as independent writers by producing narratives, biographies, as well as non-fiction texts? “Stepping into the picture and going on an inquisitive journey” as well as “leading a dialogue with the characters depicted in the visuals” are only but a few strategies to mention that support students in analysing pictures.

This is a chance for the AGIS Sustainable School Working Group, and any other like-minded educators, to come together and discuss sustainability school projects during this one-hour round table session. What projects are taking place at your school? How are students involved? How are other community members involved? Has sustainability become a part of any decision-making when it comes to: purchasing, travel, facilities or other areas outside of the educational side?

This session will give us the opportunity to share ideas and problems we have encountered and give us new ideas on how we can tackle problems to make our schools more sustainable.

This one-hour session will focus on support systems that educators can build in their schools in the event of a mental health crisis of students with learning needs and/or SEL (social emotional needs).

The session will include the following components:

-Crisis definition and examples
-Case scenarios and vignettes (blinded and anonymous cases) and how to manage a crisis in the moment
-Students with Learning Needs and/or SEL needs and build your Crisis Team:
-Informing parents, supporting the student and the affected stakeholders, informing teachers and build a short -term support system
-Follow up with support (long-term)

The participants will form small teams and work on table top scenarios as drills.

Additionally, the presenter will distribute a helpful toolkit with Resources, Websites and Books/ sources for further reading and research.

This session, most importantly, offers resilience building, upskilling of AGIS educators and response-readiness.

Would you like to incorporate more hands-on “Maker” activities in your lessons?
After completing online PD from Project Zero at Harvard, I would like to share what I have learned. You will have the opportunity to practice several visible thinking routines and engage in a “Maker” activity, and I’m confident that you can transfer these routines into your own practice. After this session, I hope you will become better friends with your Hausmeister and some strangers on the internet!

Rough draft of presentation here.​​​​