Unit 31. Philosophy of Global Educational Leadership.

November 04, 2021

 Hi folks, and welcome to my first blog for Module 31 - Unit 2 - Activity 1

This week I sat down with 5 of my teachers who are also in leadership positions. These teachers have been in Xiwai for over four years. As a result, they have a great deal of experience in teaching practices, school culture, curriculum, and fostering a positive work environment at Xiwai. 

1. Will - Head of History and Humanities

2. Ryan - Academic Director

3. Matt - Fine Arts Director

4. Shane - Head of English

5. Norman - Head of Sciences 

I surveyed the teachers through WeCom, which is similar to WeChat but used for businesses and organizations. I asked five questions around two themes.

Theme 1 – Communication (3 questions)

Theme 2 – Extra curricula activities (2 questions)

My questions were quantitative data-based with a section to leave a comment for further elaboration. Only one teacher left any further information. After I exited quarantine and midterms had finished, I sat down with them one on one to explore more deeper how we could fix the underlying problems. I then sat down with them as a group to discuss the overall findings and possible solutions to move forward.

For this activity, I decided to concentrate on communication in the workplace. After discussing activity two with my group (Deidre, Kyle, and Jackson), I decided to concentrate on extra-curricula for my part in activity 2 of the group presentation. 

The results from my communication questions were not surprising as I know it has been a huge issue this year. Most of the surveyed teachers have issues using WeChat for professional use when its primarily used frequently for personal use (chat, banking, shopping, health, and bills). Another issue was the number of groups they get into, including department, subject, year, parent, student, and various leadership groups. Finally, the amount of information and messages lead to too much information slipping through the cracks. 

I then asked the teachers what software they would like for peer communication giving them two options that would be viable in China. These two options were (WeCom and QQ Meetings) and letting them suggest any other platform on the open discussion doc that I created on WeCom for this survey. By far, the majority of those surveyed would like the whole organization to be on WeCom. However, at the moment, it is just the foreign teachers on that platform, so all our communication, including groups mentioned above, is done through standard we chat. 

Moving forward, we agreed that we would slowly start introducing Chinese Teachers to the WeCom platform. We started today by adding just the three Chinese Geography teachers to our Xiwai Forighgn Teacher WeCom organization. We taught them how to view "We Drive" on WeCom, where all our internal files are stored and use shared documents. We showed them the chat options that could be used, especially when communicating with parents, including if others in the group could reply and what days of the week and times of the day they could reply. These settings and many more that are offered on WeCom are not available on regular WeChat.

By conducting this survey, it opened my eyes to the importance of getting feedback from teachers. I learned a lot about the different activities they want at Xiwai and better ways to communicate. It was difficult to conduct this task during Midterms, so timing is critical when surveying teachers—also, sitting down with them individually and then as a group allowed me to go deeper into the questions and collaborate to find solutions