At XLIS we have ten Schoolwide Learner Outcomes (SLOs). Our teachers carefully plan these into their lessons in order to help students to achieve our goal of international mindedness. In order to further align its curriculum the school chose the IB Learner Profile Attributes as its SLOs.
Currently skills such as rote memorization of large amounts of content and replication of work are not perceived to be useful to students in their futures. Skills such as being able to work cross-culturally (open-minded), creativity (communicator) and empathy for others (caring) are perceived as skills our students will need for the future. Currently these skills cannot be replicated by artificial intelligence but the former can. This is one of the main reasons that XLIS is dedicated to the pursuit of international mindedness for our staff and students.
In this article I would like to share how in our recent Performing Arts assembly our students demonstrated our SLO or communicator. To be a communicator at XLIS means: they understand and express ideas and information confidently and creatively in more than one language and in a variety of modes of communication. They work effectively and willingly in collaboration with others. Let us see how our students are meeting this outcome.
At Xi’an Liangjiatan International School, we are encouraging students to become effective communicators. In performing arts classes, students explore different ways to communicate through different art forms. In our recent assembly performance, students in our P4-P6 classes demonstrated how they can work as a team to create music. Some classes composed music in their pieces and worked in small groups to write their own instrument parts. Students communicated with their small groups for the purpose of creating music and a performance. Some classes experimented with different art forms and added dances or acting to accompany the instrument playing and singing. They also communicated their pieces and their learning effectively to the audience.
I asked some of out students their thoughts on the assembly:
Shae Fordyce (ECEB1) – “I loved the dancing and singing.”
Keke Zhang (P2A) – “They do that music and they do dance.”
Henry Cui (P4A) – “We were caring by including everybody in our performance.”
Lily Lee (P6B) – “I was a communicator because I made a song with other friends.”
Please support us by researching what the meaning of these ten SLOs are and making them part of your discussions at home.
Authors:
Brian Lalor (Primary Principal)
