All-staff conference began last Friday!! We began with a time of worship to focus our attention on our Lord and Savior who has brought each one of us here for such a time as this.
After a time of worship, we moved to new staff testimonies. I think this is most everyone's favorite time of our all-staff conference where new staff members come up and share how God brought them to Germany. Many times, their stories feature current or past staff members who shared their story and God impacted other hearts to come!
Who are our parents? What are they saying?
After our time of new staff testimonies, we head into different featured topics for that day. Today, we looked at the two questions posted above and first read through survey responses that past and current student parents have shared. We read through negative and positive responses then had some time to discuss in groups how we were thinking that BFA could do a better job partnering with our families; both dorm and home families. We received a Google form later to write down thoughts that we had in our groups. We also passed around a microphone to different groups so they could share some good ideas that were discussed.
Our presenter also asked for 20 volunteers to come up and gave them props to represent our different parents; calculators for business parents, Bibles for missionary parents, blue lanyards for staff parents, large trays for parents whose children are in the dorm, normal sized plates for parents whose children are home students, etc. Our presenter, Kristi read statistics about our student's parents to give us a picture of who we are serving. The photo above and below gives you a peek into this time.
We have a lot of different departments within BFA that in the past, each had a slot to come up and share about their department and how we could be involved. Sometimes, this could be a snooze fest, so a few years ago, someone came up with the genius idea to create a Department Speed Dating activity! This has all of us moving around giving the presenter about 10 minutes to share, then 2 minutes for us to get to the next room.
Here are a few tidbits from each department:
Maintenance shared about borrowing vans (need to be BFA certified), how to handle a fire extinguisher and their need for volunteers to help lock up the campus each evening.
Communications shared about information, photos, logos, etc. that is available on the Drive that we can use in newsletters, support raising and more. They also shared who in their department does what as in video, podcasts, social media and other stuff.
For Athletics, we have a new director this year so he shared his love of sports, experience with coaching different sports, need for only one coach (all the others are covered!) and put in a plug for pickle ball!
The Chaplains department described their different activities of small groups and mentoring and how their desire is to help students create relationship that point them to Christ. There is also a Spiritual Emphasis Week happening in the high school the third week of school and one for the middle school happening in January. Then, high school retreat happens in the spring! And maybe service project trips again...stay tuned.
ResLife is our dorming program for students whose parents live in another country. Our presenter began by sharing statistics of how many males vs. female students, how many dorms we have, the ones in town, out of town, the dorm parents and RAs for each dorm, the mission of our dorm program and how we can pray and support our dorm students.
We have a lot of students who come from Korea and a few others from other Asian countries so we have Asian care to help bridge the gap between our Asian students and Western students, Asian parents and BFA teachers, then Asian parents and their children after they have lived in Germany for 1 year or more. She provides meals one night a week for our Asian students, has an evening each week to talk about theology and besides that, is available for their questions and just to talk.
HR stands for human resources and they have lots of forms to fill out if one feels like filling out forms! ;) He also shared the roles of everyone under HR and who to contact for what.
We have counseling at BFA for our students which is great! Our head counselor explained who is working in the counseling office this year and how we can support our students mentally.
The IT department is always important! They explained their role and ways they can support us this year.
The health department means our school nurses of which there are 3! They had a fun video to introduce their nurses and why a student may need to come to the nurse's office.
After lunch, we had some teacher learning sessions. A few years ago, we were introduced to the Danielson model for teaching and we have been using this ever since. Today, we had volunteer teachers who made up a classroom and modeled some of the different clusters or topics in the Danielson model then we discussed and pointed out what was good and what could be changed and improved. It was a fun balance of laughter at co-teachers acting like middle school students and helpful discussion.
Finally, we were given options of different teachers who offered a training session where they focused on one of the topics or clusters. I chose Classroom Management and got some great tips for setting up my classroom this year! I wrote my notes on my Framework Clusters handout below. We ended at 3:30 which gave us the rest of the afternoon to set up our classrooms and plan for the first few days. Not much time for that today, but we will get more time for setting up later this week and early next week. I hope you enjoyed a small peek into a day of our orientation!
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