Page 11 - FIS World

help us understand how well our school is instilling these in the students. Together with conventional metrics, they will give us a comprehensive insight about the quality and success of FIS as a leading international school in the future.”
The 2016-2019 Strategy is a balanced transformational plan: a plan for change built upon its core mission and commitment to the IB ideals and learner pro le. It aspires to take strong academic results further while rolling out key changes. Key to transformational growth is the student as a centered person, someone able to easily nd their “center,” the dynamic inner balance core one comes back to when life, stress, emotions and con icting truths push us o balance. “If we can get excellent students that are not self-centered, but just centered – that’s transformational,” says Dr. Fochtman.
Good strategies – the ones that work – are easy to take to heart, de ne clear choices, actions and goals, and use appropriate target metrics to check that the plan is working as it should. Some say that good strategies are also about what they choose not to do. In an ever-changing world that’s in love with disruptive innovation, social media and
cute robotics, the students, parents, faculty, sta and board members that labored over the new strategy since the spring of 2015 chose not to fall into common comfort traps of most strategies in unstable times – sticking to the tried and tested, or going the opposite way and leveraging leadership capital to carve a spectacularly disruptive edge.
Instead, the new plan wisely embraces discomfort and the unknown. It is an emergent strategy that constantly watches for change and makes corrections, not a rigid plan on a one-year review prescription. It chooses transformational over disruptive growth, and places its bets on the excellence of human social character and top results going hand in hand. It says, don’t strive only to be the best, don’t just do your best, be your best – and touch others with that in the world beyond FIS, wherever you will go.
This new strategy supports a leadership mission: educate students to be human bridges of friendship across borders and makers of ripples of global future excellence. In doing that, it supports an intangible without which we’d be lost: it supports a vision of hope.
Maria Monteiro FIS Parent
February 2017 FIS World 9