Every School Has Its Challenges

At the recent annual meeting of the Joint Venture Education Forum, our school was the recipient of the  Norbert Commendation Award for our support to our military students.  We worked hard to be considered for this honor, and the process of applying for the award really helped our school to reflect on all the "little" things we do that makes a difference for our students.

Not everyone realizes the challenges that our military students face such as transitioning to a new school every few years or coping with a parent who has been deployed multiple times in their young lives.  Being in Hawaii might sound wonderful, but being away from extended family and support systems can be very difficult, especially when there are children who require intensive medical services or have other educational or behavioral concerns.  I marvel at the resiliency and the positive attitudes of our students and their families; they work with the school to ensure that their child experiences success.

Because we are the school that services the Schofield Inn, a temporary "home" for families while they await their "permanent" housing, some of our students attend three to four different schools in one year.  I can't imagine what these students must be going through especially those who are already struggling academically or socially.  Supports for these students include our Transition Program, Primary School Adjustment Project, counseling services, Triage meetings with Tripler Army Medical Center personnel, and peer reviews with the District and school staff.  Additionally, we screen all students three times a year using a universal screening tool to determine whether students need additional support in the classroom or from the Response to Intervention literacy coach.  Sometimes, because of their movement from school to school, students have fallen through the cracks, and by the time they enroll at our school, they could be two to three years behind academically.  Hopefully, the adoption of the Common Core State Standards by 45 states, Washington, D.C. and DoDEA will mean consistency in academic expectations for each grade level.

Although most of our students seem to adjust to a parent's deployment, there are some who do not.  We encourage parents to let us know if they feel their child will have difficulty adjusting, and our counselors keep tabs on these students, having a talk-story Lunch Bunch or deployment groups on a regular basis.  The counselors focus their sessions on positive actions or thoughts to help students get through this difficult time and  provide them with coping strategies.  For many of our parents, volunteering at school has been a way to meet others and to do something useful with their time while a spouse is deployed.  We really appreciate their help!

Every school has its challenges, and every school uses its resources to address those challenges.  At Hale Kula, we have been recognized for supporting our military students so they can be successful.  We are proud to be recognized as the 2012 recipient of the Norbert Commendation Award. 

Textbooks or Professional Development for Teachers?

This past week, Larry Hahn of the Common Core Institute spoke to our complex area principals about what it means to be College and Career Ready and shared statistics about our nation's poor performance on the PISA assessments.  The Common Core State Standards were created to up-the-ante and ensure that our students are College and Career Ready by the time they leave high school.  He stated that our country was ranked first in one category -- the size of our textbooks.  Other countries delve deeply into content; our country chooses to cover too much in one year.

Our school is struggling to provide the necessary professional development for teachers to implement the CCSS.  It takes much more than reviewing our "old" curriculum and aligning our lessons to the CCSS.  The expectations for teaching and learning are much higher now, and making the change at the school level, in every classroom, is a challenge. Understanding the CCSS takes time, honest discussion, modeling, reflection, and collaborating with our colleagues.  When Planning and Collaboration days were eliminated to balance the budget, we no longer had the opportunity to have those discussions with the entire faculty and to address the individual needs of our school and our students to meaningfully implement the CCSS.

Presently, publishing companies are aligning their textbooks, and states and districts will soon be reviewing these resource materials to select the one that aligns with the CCSS and best fits their needs.  Rather than spending millions of dollars on new textbooks, perhaps we should invest in our teachers by providing planning and collaboration time so they can create relevant, problem-based or project-based learning opportunities which integrate the CCSS as well as the use of technology and other resources.

Larry Hahn stated, "Teachers are good conductors of curriculum, but they should be composers of curriculum."   This statement really resonated with me; there are so many resources available for accessing curriculum as well as for sharing learning, but it takes the competency and the creativity of the teacher to make learning come alive for students.

A few years ago, Dr. Julia Myers, (University of Hawaii, West Oahu) trained our teachers on Lesson Study for math, and the process was  powerful. Lesson Study was developed in Japan and builds capacity of teachers to learn from each other and to observe student learning in the classroom.   Through Lesson Study, our teachers became better observers of students and worked together to design problem-based math lessons and conduct action research focused on a school-wide goal.  However, there were obstacles to full implementation, primarily the cost of hiring substitutes so teachers could develop their Lesson Study plan and ensuring coverage for classrooms so that teachers could observe each other, and debrief and collaborate afterwards.  This is not a problem in Japan where teachers spend 60% of their time teaching and 40% meeting with other teachers to collaborate, plan, and receive professional guidance from mentors.

The CCSS has the potential to change the way teaching and learning takes place in schools.  However, real change will only come about when teachers have the competency to be composers of the curriculum in their classrooms to plan relevant and engaging learning opportunities based on the strengths, needs, and interests of their students.  To accomplish this, rather than spending millions on new textbooks, we need to spend more on ensuring support for our teachers through guided professional development and time to collaborate and learn from others.  Only then will we see meaningful changes in our schools.

Communicating with Parents

I started off my career in education as a preschool Head Start teacher, and I strongly believe in the power of partnerships with parents. Head Start, which is a program for disadvantaged preschoolers, emphasizes that parents are their child's first teachers. I saw, first-hand, the many positive benefits of involving parents in the classroom or at school.  As a young teacher, I realized that we should be creating those opportunities to invite parent volunteers into our classroom to work with students, not just to do clerical types of tasks.  Involving parents as volunteers in the classroom effectively lowered the adult-to-student ratio and had the added benefit of building capacity in the parents to learn skills and strategies for working with their own children at home.

Many university education programs do not teach courses on how to work with or communicate with parents, and therefore, teachers do not always see the benefits of building that partnership.  New teachers are often overwhelmed with the responsibilities of learning the culture of the school, planning standards-based lessons in the different curricular areas, and dealing with classroom management.  They often do not realize the benefits of building strong parent partnerships even before school begins which can start with something as simple as a telephone call or a short note or email/text message to share something positive. When a positive relationship between home and school is fostered, the child is the ultimate beneficiary.

Last year, our school decided to invest in Edline to create a website which communicated more effectively with parents and the school community.  Our school website serves as an information system for site visitors and acts as an intermediary between the numerous stakeholders in the educational process. Our goals are: 1) introducing educational stakeholders to our school, 2) providing opportunities for local and global publication of student work, 3) acting as an intermediary to educational resources and community information, and 4) providing a rich source of locally relevant data. 

Although we continuously updated the website last school year, survey results indicated that  60% of our parents never logged on to Edline to get information about our school.  As a school, we realized that if we are to improve the percentage of parents accessing our website, we needed to give them a reason to get on, and after discussions, we decided that we would encourage teachers to create class webpages. To get to the class webpage, parents would have to access the school site first.

Some teachers had been using class webpages as a way to communicate with parents about upcoming activities or homework assignments, to share information about the curriculum or to post classroom photos. What we noticed was that there were fewer parent complaints from those classes with webpages.  So this year, we "highly encouraged" teachers to create class webpages or blogs.  Right now, about 90% of the teachers have class webpages, although several are still "under construction."  For the most part, I am impressed with the quality of the webpages; they are creative, attractive, and contains lots of valuable information for parents.  We're hoping that the investment up-front will lead to positive relationships and better communication with our parents.

It wasn't easy, and for many of our teachers, we were asking them to do something which was not in their comfort zone.  However, we are fortunate to have teachers who volunteered to help their colleagues get their webpages set up.  Once they got started, some teachers took off, and I am amazed at the individualization of each webpage.  We're sending out the parent activation codes this week, and I am hopeful that this year, our survey results will show an increase in the number of parents who are accessing our school website as a vehicle to get information.   

"Science is an Adventure"

One week has passed since we got our sea urchins.  It was somewhat traumatic - for the teachers :-)  They are concerned that some of their urchins are dying and they want to know if they're doing something wrong.  The urchins aren't eating the specially-designed food, and now it's laying on the bottom of the aquarium.  We don't have the right kind of scale, and we don't know if we're overfeeding or underfeeding the urchins.  Dr. Jones is patient and reassures the teachers that this is normal; we didn't know how the urchins would do when they were moved from one environment to another; we need to try the different foods to see if the urchins will eat them because around November, it'll be harder to get the limu.  He encourages the teachers and tells them that they (and the students) are doing fine, and he concludes his advice with "Science is an adventure!"

I love that line!  Sometimes, as educators, we want everything to come out "perfect."  This is a new experience for us; we have never been part of a project using live animals, and we don't want our urchins to die.  But as Dr. Jones shares, science is an adventure.  That is why I appreciate that these teachers volunteered and are so immersed in this project.  I smile when I read their questions and observations within our edmodo group and I share their concern when things are still so unpredictable.

I remember attending a workshop when I was beginning my career as a teacher back in the mid-1970's. The presenter (Dr. Pickens from the University of Hawaii) wrote this sentence on the board.
      Teachers teach science to students.
He asked us to change the words around to change the whole meaning of the sentence. I was really excited when I figured it out.
      Teachers teach students to science.

As someone who learned science in school primarily through textbooks, this opened up a whole new perspective on how to teach science to my young students.  (Note:  Look up "science" in any dictionary, and it's a noun, not a verb.)  I made it my mission to make sure that students were sciencing in my classroom.  We encouraged exploration and discovery:  we had tools like magnifying glasses, assorted magnets, balances, and even a stereoscope on the science table; students brought in live bugs to feed the green Anole lizard in the terrarium and through their observations, they found out that even if they could catch lots of sowbugs, the lizard wouldn't eat them, so they had to find other food.  We raised butterflies from caterpillars and toads from tadpoles.  I won't forget a parent/teacher conference I had with a father who shared that on the first day of school, his first grader solemnly and very seriously stated, "I like Mrs. Iwase; she has a lizard skeleton on her science table."

Science is not just a subject or a content area we need to teach in school.   Students need to science.  Our sea urchin project, Robotics, and our Hope Garden are wonderful examples of students sciencing.  I'll share about Robotics and the Hope Garden in future blogs.  For now, I'll be encouraging our teachers to teach their students to science and to be adventurers because "Science is an adventure!"

Sea Urchins Project-Based Learning

A year ago, Dr. Rick Jones of University of Hawaii, West-Oahu, came to us with a proposal to raise sea urchins as part of a NOAA grant he had received.  He purchased aquariums and other necessary materials and was ready to serve as our mentor.  Would Hale Kula be interested?  One part of me wanted to say "yes" immediately; however, I realized that the timing wasn't right.  School was just beginning, and teachers had too much on their plates already with the crossover to implementation of the Common Core State Standards.  Sea urchins?  We couldn't count on the kind of interest or commitment we needed from teachers to start something of this magnitude.  Fortunately, Dr. Jones was patient and agreed to put the project on-hold for a year.  The delay allowed us to prepare, a necessity when implementing a project like this one.  This past summer, we received valuable professional development from Dr. Jones and as the teachers learned more, they realized the importance of this project and how our students would now be part of the solution to a bigger problem that is plaguing our coral reefs here in Hawaii.  The teacher volunteers were on-board and committed to participating and learning together.

Yesterday, the sea urchins were delivered.  I wish I could have captured the excitement of the students in every classroom!  They have just started learning about sea urchins, sharing what they already know, asking questions and researching to find the answers.  They are learning to use different resources on-line and in print to discover new knowledge.  These students are not yet aware of why they are raising the sea urchins and the importance of  what they are doing, but by the time these sea urchins are big enough to be released in Kaneohe Bay in about 4 months, the students will  understand about sustainability and stewardship and realize the responsibility we all have to take care of our world.

Our public schools are under fire these days for not "educating" our students to the public's satisfaction.  We hear that our country's scores on PISA are miserable, that our students are unprepared for college, and that America's students are being left behind.  Teachers are being evaluated based on test scores or the growth model (based on test scores).  Companies inundate principals with promises to increase student proficiency in reading, or math, or science if we purchase their product.  As school budgets shrink, principals are forced to make difficult decisions regarding which positions to keep and which ones to eliminate to balance the budget.  Sadly, positions for counselors, librarians, music, and art are often the first to be cut as schools focus their energies on raising test scores to make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) under No Child Left Behind.

As a principal, I need to balance the goal of ensuring that our students have the skills to meet AYP while also focusing on what education can and should be in today's 21st century world.  It shouldn't be only about passing a statewide assessment with a targeted score.  There is so much more to learning than what can be measured on an on-line assessment.  This sea urchin project will be an example of the 3R's meeting the 4C's!   and I can't wait to see the teaching and learning this year!

A Positive Beginning of the School Year

Our first week of school is over, and I can't believe how quickly it went. My favorite part of being a principal is being able to walk into classes and see what's going on.  This year, one of our goals is to build a positive classroom and school culture, and I am encouraged by what I observed on my walkthroughs this week.

At the school-wide level, our Positive Behavior Cadre is tasked with examining data and proactively addressing areas of concern.  Last year, this cadre instituted two initiatives which are really making a positive difference at our school.  One is "Quiet Zones"  and the other is the "Super Eagle Walk." The biggest impact has been in the decreased incidences of student misbehavior in the hallways.  Prior to implementing Quiet Zones and the Super Eagle Walk, we had complaints about students talking and laughing in the hallways, disturbing other classes in session.  We also experienced incidences such as students swinging lunch bags, or pushing others playfully, causing arguments or retaliation.  Now, students know that these kinds of behaviors are unacceptable.  Teachers have stressed the importance of following these expectations, and students quickly get into Super Eagle position and refrain from talking when they are going from one location to another.  It is amazing how we can transform behavior when everyone is on the same page!

The important point to make here is that a positive classroom or school culture needs to be nurtured.  It isn't something that is done at the beginning of the year; it needs to be a part of what we do daily.  Recently, I read a blog by Cammy Harbison about the relationship between student achievement and a strong classroom community.  My wish is that every teacher reads this blog and takes her message to heart.  Students need to feel that they are an important part of their classroom and school community and that they have something to contribute.  Accountability for their own learning starts with a feeling of belonging.  For our highly transient military-impacted students, this is even more important, and this is something we will continue to work on.

I'm optimistic!  We're off to a great start to school year 2012-2013!

It's Time for the Olympics!

Every four years, we watch and cheer as athletes from countries all over the world compete in the Summer Olympics.  I love the Olympics!  Despite the conflicts between countries that may be occurring at that time, it seems that the Olympics embody what the world could and should be. We cheer for those representing our country, but we also cheer for those who may not win a medal but have overcome adversities to be on the world stage. 

I also love the Olympics for the opportunities it provides for students to learn about so many different aspects of the Games. Encourage your students to read articles or books or watch the Olympics on TV to get some background knowledge, then have them brainstorm questions they may have. Here are a few examples:

Social Studies - Where and why did the first Olympic Games begin?  How did the games evolve from those humble beginnings to become the world-wide event it is today?  In what ways have the modern day Olympics changed from its original inception?  What is the economic impact of the Olympic Games on a country? 

Science -- Science is an integral part of the Olympics.  Look at the swimsuits the swimmers are wearing and compare them to the ones they wore in the last Olympics (which are now banned).  How does technology help athletes' performance?  This AAAS Science NetLinks page has wonderful lessons and makes a key connection between science/technology and Olympics athletes.

Math -- The Olympics provide many opportunities for math, not just for graphing medal counts.  Check out these relevant questions related to math in Go for the Gold from the NY Times or review these questions on Olympic Circles then examine the countries that are participating and their population, and predict which countries will win the most medals.  Students can also compare times for the different races and come up with a statement about length of the race and difference in times between the competitors.

Personal/Social -- There are so many stories of Olympic athletes who have overcome obstacles to stand on the podium.  Wilma Rudolph, Jesse Owens, and  Duke Kahanamoku are but a few examples.  Read "Leadership Lessons from Olympic Athletes" and learn what makes these Olympic athletes stand out from others who may be equally talented.  This is a great opportunity to discuss goal-setting and developing a plan of action for the school year.  Students would then track their progress on their personal goal. 

Teachers can integrate other content areas into a study of the Olympics such as:
Health - How do Olympians train to be at their optimal performance level?  What do they eat?
Art  - What is the significance of the artwork on the medals?  Have students design a medal and explain the significance of their design.
Culminating Activity - Have students plan a grade level Olympics.  Wouldn't it be fun to apply what they've learned to plan some fun activities which integrate science, math, art, and language arts?

Resources - These are a few of the resources available for teachers to teach about the Olympics.  (Teachervision is only free for the first 5 resources you view.  After that, there is a cost to subscribe.)
http://www.educationworld.com/a_lesson/lesson/lesson201.shtml 
http://www.teacherplanet.com/resource/summerolympics.php
http://www.teachervision.fen.com/olympic-games/teacher-resources/6651.html

School begins on Monday.  An Olympics interdisciplinary unit is a great way to incorporate rigor, relevance, and relationships into the classroom!