Weekly Message from Head of School 2024/5/20-2024/5/24
Dear Keystonians,
Happy Friday! What an energetic week on campus. After bidding farewell to the 12th graders last week, this week we opened our secondary school Chinese drama, Zhu Ding (A Monumental Journey). If you haven’t seen it yet, you have two more chances at 7 pm on Saturday and Sunday.
Zooming up and out, I am excited to share that Keystone is in the early stages of preparing our next school-wide strategic plan, which will shape our focus for the next season of learning at our school. Our last action plan was drafted in 2019 and was written to conclude in 2024; and we have made great strides since then.
The purpose of a strategic action plan is to, as a community, answer the following question:
Where must we focus our energy now to ensure we live up to our mission and best serve our current (and future) students?
Look at our mission (below) which was re-affirmed by Keystone’s leaders in sessions this week. Our mission is important and drives all that we do at the school.
In the coming months, we will gather community feedback on our collective hopes for Keystone’s next learning season. The leadership team will be gathering these insights and continuing to refine our plan for the years ahead. Please stay tuned for opportunities to contribute to this thinking both in person and online.
I am excited to dream with you about how we ensure that Keystone's next decade builds on the amazing success of the first and positions us for the future.
Yours,
Emily
Keystone Academy is a new model of education in China. It blends distinctive traditions in eastern, western, and international education, creating a new world school with a liberal arts program that is academically outstanding. All our endeavors are framed by five shared Confucian values: compassion, justice, respect, wisdom and honesty.
At Keystone, we embrace a world that is dynamic and ever-changing. We learn from and we learn for this enterprising, global, and diverse community.
Our keystones are:
? bilingual immersion in Chinese and English;
? building character and community throughout our residential setting;
? promoting Chinese culture and identity in a world context.
Our ambition is to share successes generously and to learn from failures bravely, to open our doors to many, and to engage fully with the world of education, and the world at large, beyond our gates.
Our students are hungry for opportunity, bold in their thinking, and creative in their instincts. They are encouraged to become expansive in their dreaming, determined in their actions, collaborative in their teamwork, and humble in their achievement. They learn to be stewards of the environment and to be at ease with otherness.
Our teachers are passionate about learning, rigorous in their standards, and inspirational in their methods. They are respectful listeners, attentive caregivers, interrogative thinkers, compassionate mentors, and world-minded citizens.
Our graduates will possess the intellectual, cultural, and ecological fluency to navigate gracefully the colleges, careers, and communities of their choice. They will know how to apply their emotional intelligence, character, and zest for learning to help develop and improve the communities in which they live.
