Ted Mockrish

Hello and welcome to the Canadian International School Website!

We are thrilled to share our new website with everyone- it represents a year’s worth of thinking about who we are as a community, and how we could best represent that to the world. 

We believe strongly in co-creation. This means teachers and students and parents in classrooms co-creating what it means to be a CIS learner.

It means everyone in our community coming together to co create our Vision, Mission, our Definition of Learning, and how we define our Core Values.  It was a privilege to facilitate the co-creation of our School’s new Vision and Mission statements you will find here and throughout our campus.  Over 50 students, teachers, parents, staff and leaders came together for a weekend retreat to examine what is important to us as a community, and how we strive for these ideals each and every day together.

We co-created our Definition of Learning in 2019.  
We believe that learning is a transformative process; That everything we learn can be nested under our Three Cs of learning: Conceptual Understanding, Competency, and Character Development.  By using three simple sentence stems: “I understand that…”  “ I am able to…”   “ I am becoming (more)...” we can simply and clearly describe our goals and learning to everyone in the community from PreK to Grade 12.

We believe in collective efficacy and we strive to be more collectively effective in our classrooms, on our campus, and in our community by focusing on our Vision, Mission and Definition of Learning.  We also know that to be at our best as a community, we need to care deeply about each other, each other’s success and place in our school, and that we all feel that our contributions matter.  To be collectively effective, we all also commit to get better at what we do through professional growth, a commitment to a growth mindset, providing feedback to each other, and reflecting on our own learning.

For students this means participating actively in school, sharing your ideas and feelings openly, listening with respect and caring about your peers and teachers.  For parents this means being willing to look at schooling in a new way.  What we do on campus does not look like school did when you were there.  Nor should it!  We ask parents to embrace being a little uncomfortable and learning and growing with us by participating in the learning on campus and online.

We look forward to greeting you on campus and  having you join us in what we do each and every day.

Here’s to another wonderful term of learning together!

Ted Mockrish Ed.D
Head of School