TAS News

Head of School Dr. Grace Cheng Dodge addresses parents on how TAS prepares students for success

By Lindsey Kundel, Director of Communication Head of School Dr. Grace Cheng Dodge, in collaboration with Director of College Counseling Ms. Melanie Brennand Hamre and Director of the Tech Cube Mr. Matt Fagen, spoke to lower school parents on January 19, 2022 on the importance of failure for students at Taipei American School. A decade ago, Dr. Dodge herself led the college counseling team at TAS. “I was asked by the former lower school and middle school principals to address parents of younger students as to how TAS prepares students for a life after graduating from TAS or from another high school,” said Dodge. “What are we teaching your children and why do WE think it’s important?” The answer? Taipei American School wants our students to fail, a concept which they discussed for over an hour with parents. “Regardless if you and your family stay at TAS until graduation,” Dodge said that she hopes the presentation will give both “reassurance and optimism” as to what an American-based curriculum at an independent school can do for children. Failure isn’t wrong, she warned. But a lack of failure in a child’s life can wreak havoc on their growth. She went on to explain that at TAS, we care more about our student’s entire KA-12 learning journey and the empowerment that we want each student to feel while in school. That, said Dodge, is why we work in this KA-12 environment. One important takeaway Dodge hopes parents understood is that a school is no longer a place of rote memorization, says Dodge. Instead, Dodge reminded parents that it is those students who can acquire and apply both soft skills and a depth of character to every problem they need to solve and interaction they will have who will thrive in today’s world. “We hope you are not thinking how to strategize crafting a child who will be a strong college applicant,” said Dodge. “Instead, we hope you are thinking of how you allow your child to be their best self, best self-advocate and allow that individuality to blossom.” A child’s best self is not determined by a test score, nor is their self-worth determined by which college they attend – a point made by both Dodge and Hamre. Ms. Hamre discussed in detail the college application process for juniors and seniors. Their journey is to find a college that is a good fit for their individual passions and potential and not just a name brand. Hamre says that failure is an important part of the college counseling process because a student needs to have developed both resilience and a growth mindset prior to graduation in order to be considered a successful applicant at many colleges today. “Many articles, research, shows this is a continual process and skill to be nurtured and practiced. Failure is a critical component of this and not something to be afraid of,” said Hamre. Ms. Hamre encouraged lower school parents to begin to see risk-taking and acceptance of failure as a key soft skill that parents should want to see from their children. This will help them throughout their time at TAS, and it will help them as they begin to think about which college they might want to attend and beyond. The presentation culminated with remarks from Matt Fagen who shared his own personal experiences with failure and (eventual) success. When he began his teaching career, he found that the lecture-based model of teaching he experienced as a student only reached a few students in each class. “I changed my approach, and the results were dramatic,” said

Director of the Tech Cube Mr. Matt Fagen shares his story about how failure provides an opportunity for learning

Director of College Counseling Ms. Melanie Brennand Hamre discusses the importance of developing resilience in the college application process

Fagen. “I started teaching physics in a hands-on style where students got to decide on physical projects that demonstrated the principles we were studying. Same material, but when students got to not only experiment, but decide on how to experiment, and when they started to fail, and realize everything wasn’t prefabricated with a predetermined outcome for success, something really beautiful started to happen in the class. The students were all engaged. They felt there was something real at stake. It was exciting to them that I didn’t know the correct answer and how the experiments would end up. And they came to life. And comprehension went way up! Not just for a few students, but for a majority of students.” He says that the secret to his (and the Tech Cube program’s) success is that the Tech Cube isn’t actually about robots. “[Robotics] is a chance to figure out their value and what they can contribute to a team, and that each person is valuable for a different reason, and it’s a chance to learn to take joy in trying and failing,” said Fagen. “This is a skill they will absolutely need in our future.” All three speakers wove a common theme, that of encouraging our community to more closely align our definitions of success with joy, and to let all know that failure IS success – or at least the only possible path there.

By Lindsey Kundel, Director of Communication Another TAS student is in the news again for presenting their learning at an international conference. Senior Elaine T. was chosen to present at the 15th European Conference on Games Based Learning, which took place online from September 23-24, 2021. Elaine’s presentation is titled “Development and Assessment of A Board Game for Learning Compound Solubility.” According to her teacher and advisor, Steve Anderson, she first approached him with an idea to develop a card game meant to teach and reinforce solubility rules. “She loves card and board games and was able to parlay that interest and her love of chemistry into the game, which she not only made but also tested out with test groups of students and measuring improvements,” said Anderson. “She ultimately submitted a superbly written paper for the conference.” Elaine agrees with her teacher’s assessment. “In my household, board games aren’t just a hobby,” said Elaine. “They’re more like a passion. We have roughly 103 different board games at home.” To Elaine, board games are the perfect stress reliever for a person of almost any age, and she strongly recommends them to her upper school peers. “We all struggle academically, and we all need some support. Board games can offer that for students,” said Elaine. Anderson says that Elaine is a natural teacher. “Early on last year [in AP Chemistry], Elaine discovered that her best study approach was to explain concepts to other students,” said Anderson. “This realization was the impetus behind her establishing a group help chat she called ’Elaine’s Help Desk.’” Elaine ended up creating the game when she was preparing to serve as a TA for Anderson’s summer Honors Chemistry class. Even though the class ended up being canceled due to COVID-19, Elaine still delivered this game idea from initial brainstorming to the eventual prototype in service of her fellow students. “Most of my favorite classes are in the STEM subjects,” said Elaine. “And so for this current game, I asked myself, what is something that we all struggle with in chemistry? I quickly realized that many of us struggle with the same thing: memorizing the solubility rules. I spent more than one semester designing the game and improving it.” Elaine has since taken her game development to the next level. She is currently manufacturing the game on a small scale and investigating different platforms on which to sell the game. Her ultimate goal, however, is not to make money, but to continue to help other students through gamification of learning. In the future, Elaine hopes to be able to combine her love of STEM with her love of helping others by studying computer science and education. “I hope that I can develop something cool for future students and continue to work on games that give students a fun learning experience,” said Elaine.

By Amanda Jacob, Interim Academic Dean For the last two school years, the TAS community has committed itself to fostering “a culture of justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion that embodies anti-bias action and accountability” and to doing “the work necessary to maintain an inclusive, diverse, and welcoming environment for all.” The school-wide JEDI committee, divisional JEDI committees, and the TAS Cultural Connection (TASCC) parent group are working hard to make this commitment a reality. This excerpt from the report focuses on what TAS students are engaged in. For the full JEDI Committee report, including sections on Faculty, Staff, Parent, and Alumni involvement, please visit the TAS News website. The four goals of anti-bias education that anchor the work around the world are: • Identity – Each child will demonstrate self-awareness, confidence, family pride, and positive social/group identities. • Diversity – Each child will express comfort and joy with human diversity, accurate language for human differences, and deep, caring human connections. • Justice – Each child will increasingly recognize unfairness (injustice), have the language to describe unfairness, and understand that unfairness hurts. • Activism – Each child will demonstrate a sense of empowerment and the skills to act, with others or alone, against prejudice and/or discriminatory actions. Across the three divisions, faculty are finding ways to infuse this work into the students’ days through advisory, integrated work within the curriculum, and opportunities outside of class.

• During the first day of Middle School, children met with their homeroom advisors to learn about and discuss the School’s JEDI goals. They built charters for their homerooms to help make the goals a reality. The Middle

School also planned five extended advisory lessons across the year with pre- and post-discussions during regular advisory sessions. The extended lessons have focused on the language we use to talk about identity, diversity, empathy, gender, advocacy, and privilege. • Middle school librarian Carol Youssif has joined Project

LIT and hosts monthly book club talks when she shares books around a monthly diversity theme (for example, physical, gender, ability, socio-economic differences).

There is a lucky draw, and one child walks away with one title. Carol continues to research, purchase, and promote diverse books within the library and with

English teachers. • Upper school librarian Cassy Lee has been working with her student group, The Archivists, to display and recommend diverse books. The group asked English and history teachers for book recommendations for

Black History Month and have been featuring the books that have had an impact on them on Instagram and the

Upper School Information Commons website. The

Archivists are also planning a Human Library event for

May when they will invite in people from marginalized groups to serve as “human books,” sharing their experiences with small groups of students. • All students in the Upper School read the graphic novel

“American Born Chinese” over the summer. Follow-up sessions during advisory helped students explore their own identities and those of the characters in the book.

The author, Gene Luen Yang, spoke with the students about writing the book and his experiences moving to the US. • Motivational speaker Anthony Kelley met with our

Grade 9 students to watch and discuss his documentary,

“A Journey Through Conflict and Identity.” As the students asked questions about his life, Anthony shared tools for managing emotions, stress, and anger. Knowing the importance of students reading literature that provides them with mirrors in which they see themselves and windows in which they come to understand people with different identities and experiences, the lower school language arts representatives for each grade level researched new own-voice titles and books with more diverse characters to add to the classroom libraries for read-aloud and independent reading. The representatives have also been studying and piloting effective ways to use read aloud to help students explore identity, diversity, and fairness. During the next school year, they will share the effective practices they have learned with the rest of their grade level team. In all divisions, faculty are finding ways to weave JEDI goals into the existing curriculum. • In the Lower School, Grade 2 students study how needs and wants are met within a community. This year, the teachers helped the students focus on the unmet needs of less privileged members of the community. • Grade 5 students and the upper school students in the

International Relations course partnered up for a multipart learning exchange involving research projects and podcasts about Taiwan and what it means to be

Taiwanese.

Grade 9 students watch a scene from motivational speaker Anthony Kelley’s film “A Conflict Through Conflict and Identity”

“American Born Chinese” Graphic novel author Gene Luen Yang spoke with middle and upper school students about his book

• In the Middle School, many JEDI-related goals have been woven into the history curriculum through discussions of how different people have been treated by governments and cultures over the years, including one especially poignant example in Grade 7, where students learned about the industrial age’s racist immigration policies through an interactive game. • Another example includes offering diverse choral selections representing different cultures and languages for the winter concert, which has historically focused on music from Christian cultures. This year’s offerings included songs in English, Hebrew, Latin, and Scottish

Gaelic, among others. Upper school curricular offerings, in particular, continue to abound and expand. • The Grade 10 English classes read a collection of essays, novels, poems, and articles about identity and privilege

to support in-depth conversations and analytical writing. • Anthony Kelley and Tobie Openshaw worked with 50

IB Global Politics and International Relations students for 6 class periods on the question of reconciliation within a human rights context. They evaluated three case studies: South Africa Apartheid, Black Lives Matter, and Indigenous Taiwan. They compared the processes of reconciliations within the framework of each human rights violation.  Fish Tung led an additional lesson to this class on Indigenous Culture focusing on her own affiliation with the Amis tribe of Taiwan. She has been asked to assist with lessons in both the Lower and

Middle Schools later this spring. • Since SY2016-17, the Upper School has continued to offer Dr. Erika Soublet’s Honors Seminar: History of Minorities in America with strong enrollment and interest (with the exception of one school year). The class was originally created to provide more diversity

Yosifu, an Amis contemporary artist, shared his personal journey with TAS students and also inspired them to create self-portraits

in the history curriculum, something which the JEDI task force will continue to help examine and address over time. This class, which is open to juniors and seniors, examines the history of minorities – women,

Black/ African Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic-

Latinx Americans, Indigenous Americans, people with disabilities, and the LGBTQ+ community – from their perspective as opposed to other perspectives. Students explore how current events have been impacted by history to develop a deeper understanding of the interconnected histories of marginalized communities and explore solutions. Students are also getting involved in JEDI-related activities outside of the curriculum through extracurricular and club activities.

• The Middle School continues to offer two important clubs for students interested in DEI topics: Rainbow

Tigers and Project LIT. • The Upper School, with almost 80 clubs, has multiple offerings for students including the DEI group, Rise Up leadership summit, ChildAware Club, Girls in

STEM, Indigenous Impact club, Initiative Formosa,

International Culture Club, LGBTQ Alliance,

Neurodiversity Club, Walk for Refugees, World Vision and others. The DEI group was started by a group of upper school students interested in creating a safe space that welcomes all upper school students to discuss social issues within the TAS community and the greater world.

Already this year, they have discussed identity, privilege, neurodiversity, and calling in/ calling out. Upper school sponsors Ryan Haynes, Erika Soublet, Kendra Ing, and

Chase Williams help the group accomplish their goals. Our work toward making the goals of the JEDI Community Commitment a reality is just beginning. This is something we freely admit because it will take time and ongoing commitment to make sure that TAS is “an inclusive, diverse, and welcoming environment for all.” We are committed to the work ahead because we believe that it will make the world a more just place and help our children succeed wherever their future takes them.

By Lindsey Kundel, Director of Communication

On Friday, October 1, 2021 and Friday, January 14, 2022 Taipei American School was able to provide first and second shot COVID-19 vaccines on our campus to consenting middle and upper school students as part of a larger governmental vaccination program aimed at increasing the vaccination rate of the younger demographic in Taiwan. Students who were born on or before September 1, 2009, were eligible to take part, and their families had to complete a governmental consent form to register for both vaccination sessions. For both clinics, students in the Upper School were scheduled to receive their vaccines in the morning, whereas middle school students received their vaccines after lunch. Both divisions adjusted content and activities to ensure that if students were not feeling well after the vaccine that they would not miss essential material. TAS had professional medical personnel on hand to assist with and ensure the well-being of each child. The process for vaccination included verifying student names, taking temperatures, and a brief evaluation by a doctor before receiving a vaccine behind a privacy screen. After the 30-minute observation window, students could return to class unless they felt unwell. Head of School Dr. Grace Cheng Dodge said that she was "very happy" that the Taiwan government matched TAS with Yang Ming Hospital to provide vaccines to eligible students. In addition to medical personnel from Yang Ming Hospital, the TAS health, administrative and counseling teams, along with employee volunteers from around the School, spent much of the day in the gym caring for students before, during, and after they received their vaccine. Upper school psychologist Sherri Grande described the event as "historic," noting that when she was growing up, it was commonplace for vaccinations to take place at school. She acknowledged that this is not the norm nowadays, but expressed both happiness and gratitude for being able to support our students in yet another way to keep them safe. The COVID-19 vaccine is not currently required to attend Taipei American School, but if students have received full vaccinations, the Health Office encourages families to submit that health data to its office in order to keep up-to-date vaccination records for students.