A Safe School

If we want to transform our school, we need to have a safe school.  We need to assure parents that their children will be safe while they're in our care, and sometimes, it takes a "crisis" for us to reflect and to improve our procedures.

Schools practice emergency drills at least once per month.  Most of the time, we have fire evacuation drills, but we also have lockdown or sheltter-in-place drills as well as school-wide evacuation drills.  Our Safety Committee reviews our procedures and makes revisions to our plans after these drills.  However, a drill is a drill, and we never know what challenges we might encounter in a real-life situation.

This past week, we were placed on lockdown status by the US Army Garrison as a precautionary measure due to a serious phone threat.  Unlike a drill which usually lasts no more than 30 minutes, this lockdown occurred for three hours and it started during the second of three lunch periods.  Additionally, one of our grade levels was on a field trip and would be returning to school shortly.

Fortunately, all of our staff pitched in to assist and provide support.  Although we were never in danger, we are grateful that the US Army Garrison realized the importance of keeping our children safe.  This lockdown provided us with an opportunity to get feedback from staff and to discuss concerns with our school community.

First and foremost, we need to improve our communication system:  the military with the school and the school with the staff and school community.  Thank goodness for social media!  The US Army Garrison continuously posted updates on their Facebook page, and I was able to inform parents through our school Facebook page.  We also used the mass messaging system to let parents know that we were on lockdown status while reassuring them that we would keep their children safe.  We communicated with staff via our phone intercom system; in our busy-ness, we neglected to send staff email updates.  That needs to be improved.

Second, we need to take care of basic needs -- water, food, and yes, even toileting needs.  A three-hour lockdown made us realize that we need to have a plan to ensure that our students have their basic needs met.    Perhaps our PTO can provide water and nonperishable snacks for students to be kept in the classroom in case of an emergency, and yes, a discussion needs to take place regarding restroom needs because there are no toilets in the classrooms.

Third, our school opened in 1959, and because we live in Hawaii , we have buildings which are spread out and open.  This is great because we can take advantage of the tradewinds to keep our buildings "natural" without the need for air conditioning.  However, the openness of our buildings also means that getting students from one place to another during a lockdown is a challenge, and with the windows and doors locked, the temperature in the rooms was sweltering.  We need air circulation in the classrooms, and thankfully, installation of ceiling fans is part of our school-wide renovation plans with completion in about three years.

I was so gratified to read all the parent comments on our Facebook page after the lockdown was lifted.  Most of the comments were positive, and parents were grateful that their children were safe.  Although they were anxious -- after all, we are on a military base and many students have parents who are presently deployed -- parents waited patiently across the street and calmly retrieved their children instead of panicking.

A real-life situation like this is something I wouldn't wish on any school.  However, I know that we will be better-prepared if there is a next time, and hopefully, our lessons learned will help other schools to review and revise their procedures.

Blogger's Block

I'm been having difficulty thinking of a topic to blog about.  In the past two weeks, I've started and deleted several blogs.  The one with the most promise focused on the power of social media as a professional development resource, but somehow, it didn't quite have enough "substance."  Besides, I'm still a novice who's not confident enough to become an active participant in the discussions.

I really believe that without a support group, principals can burn out or are continuously spinning their wheels.  We are often so burdened by all the requirements of the position that we sometimes forget to step back and look at the big picture and why we became principals.  I also believe that principals don't set aside time for professional development -- not the mandatory trainings -- but professional development based on what's best for our school or for ourselves.

That's why I'm looking forward to my upcoming vacation to visit our son and his family.  My grandson just started kindergarten, and I will be visiting his school and meeting with his principal.  I've never met the principal, but I sent him an email and he welcomed my husband and me to spend some time with him.  I'm really interested in learning about how they fund their international school, how their district's growth model works, how they evaluate teachers, and how they're implementing the Common Core State Standards.  I want to see how they teach in an international school and see if it's something we could consider at our military-impacted school.  Finally, the principal will be showing us their marine lab, and maybe we can have some of our classrooms share about our sea urchin project with their students.

This is the kind of meaningful professional development we should be taking advantage of as educational leaders.  I would love to spend a day with another principal and have him/her spend a day at our school..  We all face challenges, but through collaboration, we can learn new ways to tackle problems.

If it's not possible to make time during the school day to develop these collegial relationships, perhaps an online PLC is the next best solution.  I need to look into joining a group and being an active participant.

Reflections on Quarter 1

Tomorrow is our last day of fall intersession.  Quarter 1 is over . . . how could it have come and gone so quickly?

Intersession is a great opportunity for me to catch up on paperwork, reports, and mandatory trainings.  Right now, my office looks neater than it's been for the past two months, though I don't know how long that will last,  Intersession is also a great time for me to reflect on the past quarter and to look ahead to the rest of the year.

We ended the quarter with over 1,000 students.  I don't know where they came from, but despite the higher enrollment, we actually had a quieter quarter.  It appears that the counselors' actions to provide guidance and support BEFORE problems arise contributed to fewer behavioral referrals.  The Positive Behavior Support cadre also made Tribes more visible by sharing a daily morning message, sponsored a door decorating contest, and constantly reminded students and teachers about working together as a school community.

Our grade levels are reviewing data on formative assessments to make instructional decisions, and the data teams are working through challenges to improve teaching and learning in their classrooms.  The process isn't  "smooth" yet, and there are conflicts in ideas, but disagreements are dealt with respectfully.  I always feel that dissonance is a good thing; we need differing opinions and honest discussions.  The end result, I believe, will be a better product.  I am appreciative of our three Data Coaches who have persevered and are building capacity of the teachers to see the value in  asking tough questions and collaborating to ensure that learning is taking place in all classrooms.

Our fourth and fifth grade blended learning classes are blazing trails!  The teachers have created a rigorous and relevant curriculum which challenges students to be self-directed, critical, and creative thinkers, and students have exceeded expectations with their ability to adapt to this new means of learning.  I had the opportunity to view some of the  individual projects, and I was amazed at the work of some of these students when given the chance to explore something they wanted to learn more about.  I look forward to seeing these students continue to blossom as they take charge of their own learning.

The use of technology is taking hold at our school. Our school webpage is full of information, and almost every teacher has created a class webpage to communicate with parents.  We communicate with parents through Facebook, Twitter, and a Hale Kula Highlights blog.  Students and teachers are using technology and Web 2.0 tools to access, to communicate, collaborate, and create their learning.  All of this is happening despite our school's limited wireless capacity which should be upgraded next school year. 

Our gardens as well as the sea urchin project provide real-world, meaningful experiences which have the potential to have a  lifelong impact on our students.  Look at this  fifth grade garden blog or this sea urchin project slideshow to get an idea of the learning that is taking place for our students. Preschool classes learn while raising flowers or vegetables in their gardens; students are tweeting about their school day; classrooms are communicating with children from other countries through epals, and there are many more examples of meaningful learning experiences.

Finally, I'd like to share about the support from parents and the community.  Approximately 90% of our parents attended their child's parent/teacher conference; we had nearly 100 parents participate in the workshops to share about the Common Core State Standards; volunteers came out in force to assist at the Book Fair, the Complex Cross Country Meet, and in classrooms; and just this week during intersession, Weston Solutions, SYNERGY, and DPW provided funding to pave our outdoor classroom.  We are so fortunate to have such dedicated and caring parents and volunteers at Hale Kula!

As I reflect on Quarter 1 of SY 2012-2013, I am amazed at how much we accomplished in eight weeks. With such a great beginning of the school year, we can certainly look forward to continued success as we exemplify our school vision:  Hale Kula Elementary School - Working, learning, and succeeding together!

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!"