Category: Senior Leadership Team (SLT)

Ms. Rachel MacKinnon holds a Master of Arts in Education Management: International Schools from Oxford Brookes University and a Bachelor of Education with Honors and Qualified Teacher Status from the University of Plymouth. She has experience with three of the four International Baccalaureate (IB) programmes – Primary Years Programme (PYP), Middle Years Programme (MYP) and Diploma Programme (DP). Ms. MacKinnon has served as a workshop leader, school visitor, consultant and curriculum connections provider for the IB Educator Network since 2005.

Ms. MacKinnon also has experience with the Cambridge International, British National, and Australian National Curriculums. Officially trained as a CIS/WASC/NCCT accreditation team member, she has served as an Accreditation Officer in schools. She is familiar with Cognia (formerly AdvancED) and is a member of the Academy for International School Heads (AISH) and the Association for the Advancement of International Education (AAIE). She is currently the President of the Kosovo International Schools’ Association (KISA) and also serves as a member of the Board of Directors for an International School in Cairo, Egypt.

Ms. MacKinnon is fortunate enough to have lived in Albania, Australia, China, England, Germany, Greece,
Solomon Islands, Sri Lanka, The Bahamas, USA, Wales, Zambia and now, Kosovo!

Ms. Rebecca Bowery has been teaching French for 26 years. She is from the Commonwealth of Virginia in the United States and has a Bachelor’s Degree in French from Radford University in Virginia. Ms. Bowery taught middle school and high school French for 14 years in the US before she decided to teach overseas. Overseas she has taught French for two years in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, four years in Dubai at GEMS World Academy Dubai (where she gained my experience in MYP French Language Acquisition and DP French B and French Ab Initio), one year in Mexico (Grade 3), and she is currently in her fifth year at Albanian College Durres. Ms. Bowery’s experience at ACD includes PYP and MYP French Language Acquisition, and DP French B. She is also TEFL/TESOL certified and is certified to teach English to young learners, online learning, business and resort English, and English for standardized examinations. Ms. Bowery’s love of French language and culture started at a very young age. As soon as she could she started studying the language, and in university she decided that she wanted to share her love of the language and culture with others and completed her university studies as a teacher.

Ms. Bowery has completed a summer undergraduate course and a teacher course at l’Université Catholique de l’Ouest in Angers, France. In the US she was very active in French activities with her students, and promoting the study of French in her region, which lead to an invitation to a thank you dinner at the French Embassy in Washington, D.C. by the ambassador.

Ms. Bowery has also been involved in a sister-city program between Fréjus, France and Fredericksburg, Virginia. She is still friends with her sister-city host family and has visited them every year for the past 19 years. I love to travel and decided that I wanted to teach overseas in 2008 and have been traveling all over the world since then. I have had the pleasure of leading students on several Week Without Walls trips to Vietnam, the United Arab Emirates, Sri Lanka, France, and China. At her current school, Ms. Bowery was part of the PYP, MYP, and DP teams which achieved all three authorizations in one year in 2017. This is an endeavor that not many schools dare try and of which she is very proud.

Christine (Christy) Dervishi is from the United States of America and has a Master’s Degree in International Education from George Washington University in Washington, D.C. She has both Primary and Secondary teaching credentials in several subjects. She is a workshop leader and school visitor for the International Baccalaureate in the Americas, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. She has taught Primary, Middle and High School classes over the last 25 years and has been in leadership and curriculum development for over 10 years in the US, Thailand and Egypt. She speaks Spanish and Thai fluently, but still considers her Albanian language skills to be ‘evolving.’ 

Christy was previously the IB Curriculum Director at ILG School for the school year 2019-2020, and in that time launched and supervised the Candidacy for the PYP, MYP and DP.  However, much like many families around the world, her family was impacted by the extenuating circumstances related to the COVID 19 and the disruptive ripples that extended from this extraordinary world event. For the past year she served as a member of the Senior Leadership Team at an international school in Cairo, Egypt and we welcome her and her children back to our community this year. 

She is married and has four children. Her oldest child is attending George Washington University, carrying on the tradition of being a GW Colonial.