Dear Parents:
As promised last week, we’d like to share a summary of our Key Take-Aways and Next Steps for the December Hybrid Learning Survey with you.
- Enhancing Student Connection, Engagement, and Motivation
- Students and teachers feel motivated to be in class, and teachers think the planning time they have supports lesson plan development and preparation. Our secondary students feel being on campus is very important. They believe the teachers are effective; however, large homework loads and motivation are concerns, especially at high school.
- Many parents and families expressed a desire for more time for learning or being on campus, and our recent changes to our hybrid and distance learning schedule support their interest. For example, almost 70 additional students opted-in for our upcoming module than in our previous one, for a total of 88% of students being on campus for module 5!
- Many parents, teachers, and students indicated that the live streaming technology’s sound quality needed improvement. As a result, CNG purchased additional microphones that allow teachers to be more mobile when conducting a lesson. Those microphones are being installed for all Primary School and Elementary School teachers and partner teachers (if applicable). We are also targeting specific secondary classrooms which have requested additional microphones.
- Our students in remote learning expressed being ignored while on the Zoom call with their classroom. With the challenges of hybrid learning and simultaneously meeting the needs of groups on-site and online, our teachers and support staff are working hard to create singular, inclusive classrooms. We continue to support teachers in unifying classrooms through equitable instructional practices. Two professional development opportunities on January 18 and March 1 with a distance learning specialist Dr. Douglas Fisher, provide teachers with specific teaching and assessment strategies to use and help student engagement overall. Moreover, we plan to help teachers design tiered interventions in flexible groupings at primary and elementary levels, whether students are remote or in-class.
- Enhancing Teacher Instructional Strategies
- In our survey results from over 235 staff, teachers have high motivation to plan engaging hybrid lessons using dynamic engagement strategies learned from previous professional training opportunities offered throughout the school year. Teachers at primary and elementary indicate greater opportunities with the revised schedule to provide better intervention services, including Spanish, mathematics, and literacy services. Staff also expressed that they are more comfortable using the variety of technology tools and applications available to guide student learning in the virtual or physical classroom.
- Overall, our students shared that they are receiving more timely, actionable feedback during their lessons and the variety of assessments teachers use. Interestingly, parents expressed a need to provide more guided practice to decrease independent student work, most notably at earlier grade levels.
- Student Assessment and Progress Monitoring
- At our earlier grade levels, academic intervention teams responded that they are better equipped to assess and monitor students who need more support. They can assist much earlier in the school year as a result. There are still challenges with the hybrid schedule to find time for more extensive progress monitoring. Teachers are working to find creative ways to use and standardize assessment records online during the pandemic. With better monitoring, teachers are also identifying more students who need intensive instruction in reading.
- Students at high school express a desire to have more asynchronous time and feel the workload is too high. They also would like to have more one-on-one help and support from their teachers.
- Teachers across CNG are using more varied assessment tools available to them to monitor learning in their classrooms. Video recordings, student polling, written reflections, formative checks are examples of the assessment tools used.
- Social/Emotional Support Structures
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Overall, parents indicate that they feel their children are more emotionally connected and motivated to be at school, especially with a greater number attending on-campus instruction. They are pleased that teachers meet one-on-one with students and more parents seem to be attending teacher office hours. Parents are pleased with the steps CNG is taking to increase instruction and learning time, and teachers feel their planning time to support hybrid instruction is also favorable. Teachers expressed how much energy goes into juggling all the nuances associated with teaching in a hybrid setting. Still, they felt they are continuing to adjust and be effective in this new reality. Student responses from students in the upper grades think a more balanced schedule is needed but value being back on campus. High school students surveyed shared they had a lower level of motivation and wanted more non-academic time.
Warm Regards,
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OODC is Back!
Now that we are back in Hybrid, students are invited to participate in 2 monthly Out-Of-Dress-Code (OODC) days. Students may come OODC in exchange for a minimum suggested donation of COP 3,000 for Fundación Hogar Nueva Granada (FHNG).
Your family may either send in the exact change on Fridays with your student, or you can make a one time donation of COP 30,000 equivalent to the 10 OODC days this semester via the FHNG website. Please go to this link:
and use the Open Donation section.
Once again, thanks to all the families that contributed to the OODC campaign from August to December we raised $20.445.674 pesos for the 470 students that study at Colegio Fundación Nueva Granada! Well done CNG!
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Make sure to bookmark the Parents As Partners HUB on your phone and laptop for easy access. All important information for CNG parents is linked in the different sections, including Hybrid Modules, Athletics and Condor activities!
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HS High School
From the Principal’s Desk
We hope you all enjoyed the extended weekend. I think we all needed that break! Last Thursday we had two big events at the same time; the visit from the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Education and the “Día de La Colombianidad”. Both events were highly successful! We passed the Ministry inspection with “flying colors” and Colombia was celebrated all day long.
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MS Middle School
Dear Parents,
Colombia Day was a wonderful celebration of culture and language- thank you to our Sociales and Espanol departments for planning these activities excellent this week! Many thanks to all who participated on campus and at home. Also, a big thank you to our on campus students for a great visit from the Ministry of Education this week- our kids adhered to all our biosecurity protocols- well done! Please see this week’s video HERE.
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ES Elementary School
Dear ES Families,
It’s Hybrid Module 5. Welcome to 20 more opt-in students, giving us 90% of our students on campus. Just joyful!!! Please know that with every opt-in cycle we will have to move students to balance classes. On a positive note, this presents opportunities for students to develop new relationships and friendships. Your partnership and support are deeply appreciated. Thank you!
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PS Primary School
Dear Primary School Parents!
We hope you were able to enjoy this four day weekend and disconnect from screens, zooms, emails and seesaw. Parent teacher conferences are coming up on Friday, March 19th. The conference scheduler will open up on Monday, March 08th. Look out for your teacher´s newsletter for more information regarding how to schedule your conference.
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Dear parents,
As Module 4 of Hybrid Learning comes to an end, we all begin to settle into a new routine. This new routine comes with many benefits, giving everyone a greater sense of normalcy and reassurance that little by little we are getting at least part of our lives back. However, we know the road is long and that there are still many challenges for our children, for our teachers and for our parents. Our purpose is to always serve as a resource for all and to be supportive to our community in any way we can. This week, we want to share the New Frontiers Weekly Parent Forum. In this forum, every Thursday at 5:30 pm parents gather to discuss strategies in supporting our children as they continue to navigate changing circumstances. To register for one or more of these forums, click here. It is absolutely free and people who join can either participate by asking and answering questions or simply listen in on the conversation.
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Counselors
Dear CNG Community,
This is our last post about Kindness.
The word Kind comes from the Middle english Kinde. It meant “friendly, well-disposed, tende”. Ness is a noun suffix and is used to denote a quality or a state when attached to an adjective.
According to the Cambridge dictionary, Kind means doing things to help others and showing that you care about them. Kindness is defined as the behavior of being Kind.
Houston Kraft, the author of Deep Kindness, founder of our Character Strong program, explains that Kindness is a concept we globally believe to be a good thing but are not necessarily very good at it. This means that we, collectively, need to work at it because as Kraft explains, Kindness does not come naturally, and there is a big gap between our belief in Kindness and our ability to practice it well. We should, however, work consciously, purposefully and with courage towards it being the normal standard and premise in our relationships with others and ourselves. To be kind should be the norm.
The pandemic has undeniably taken us back to the basics: the importance of good physical and mental health, and meaningful human connections. These require a conscious effort to better care for ourselves and others and, to put it simply, to be kind.
But how to be kind? Kraft talks about a first and important tool: language, or kind communication as he calls it. We are all too familiar with compliments. Most commonly, we compliment people on a daily basis with their appearance, clothing, accessories, etc. However, 90% of the time these compliments are devoid of true meaning. We want to fill silence with a compliment, or we think someone will like us better if we say something nice. But do we really mean it?
Being more mindful and intensional in what we say to people is part of meaningfully being kind. Try, today, to say something nice to someone. But say something you really mean and think. Take yourself out of the equation: take away your own intention of wanting that person to like you, and say it rather because you want that person to feel good about what you say. And try NOT to say something about the other person's appearance, clothing, or accessories… that's too easy. Think about the person's character or something that that person did that made a difference, articulate it, and have the courage to say it out loud.
Let's make true kindness normal.
“Kindness is the most important tool to spread love among humanity”
- RAKtivist
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Athletics & Condor Activities
Patience has prevailed. After one month of successful Condor Activities and Athletics, we can now progress towards an Athletics pilot program on Saturdays; in compliance with biosecurity measures. Beginning (March 6 (Group A), March 13 (Group B)), registered athletes who have opted-in to learning sessions will have the opportunity to participate in on-campus athletic activities. After the Saturday pilot program is successful, it will open more opportunities in the future for Condor Activities and Athletics.
If you have any questions or concerns, please contact:
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