Next steps!

This past June, I accepted a vice-principalship position at the school I first began teaching at, after 10 years of being away. I am looking forward to working at home again, and many of the staff are my friends or at least, acquaintances. Among the usual July rest and relaxation, I've been thinking also regarding this new position.

No doubt, my experiences as administrator and leader in this district has prepared me for this move, and even though I don't know exactly what my role will be in the school as yet, I am reflecting upon what I can bring to the students and staff at St. Andrew's. What is it that I want to say to my colleagues on the admin team? What will they want from me? What is it that I want to say to students? To parents?

I'm also reflecting on how this will change my blogging. This blog was a first attempt at a professional blog. I want the next one to be more indicative of what I want to do with my professional life and I would like it to be more interactive.

I've been thinking about my beliefs and values and my vision of teaching and learning. To coin the words of the Man in Motion, Rick Hansen, I would like to inspire the people around me to become "difference makers". I would like to inspire a connectedness with and in the world; stewardship of our earth and the peoples in it; belief in God and in each other; life long learning and teaching.

A new name for a new blog - hmmm! What would describe who I want the world to see and what I want to do with my life here on in?

Year 2 of the Northern Tier Leadership Course - for Year 1, see the previous post.

This last year, I added to my resources, Michael Fullan's Motion Leadership and Mike Schmoker's Focus on the Essentials. I was so taken by Schmoker's book and the simplicity of it that I garnered a copy for each of my certified staff. We read it as a book study and listened to a webinar of highlights. We continue to use this resource as a guide in our multi-age, multi-level classrooms. When we find it difficult to manage so many different levels and curriculum outcomes, we focus on the essentials. Fullan's book is a reminder for me not to go too fast and to take my staff with me on the journey.

This year I spent more time and energy enabling others to act and it's paid off big time. Staff have taken the lead in the creative side as well as working with students to improve their learning. Teachers have been taking turns to be my designate when I have to be away from the school and the teacher I share a class with has become more confident in her own abilities. I have been able to trust and entrust the student learning to capable hands. Supervision has become a two-way street. I know that we still have a ways to go, but I'm sure that we are heading in the right direction.

At the beginning of the year, and now here at the end, we revisit our vision, fine tuning as we go. We involve our students, each other, and the parents in the decision-making process. The newest version of the vision will be created in poster format and hung in the classrooms and common areas with pride for next year and for new staff coming on.

We continue to solidify relationships and keep our culture and environment positive. Students who were once sullen and acted out are now focusing on their learning more often and seeing a glimmer of hope in their futures. We still have some students who don't believe they can succeed, but we will continue to work on them, breaking down their barriers and giving them encouragement. We focus on a small number of goals, use high-yield strategies and are more specific and direct in our actions to meet the needs of our students.

So what did I learn? I learned that I need to share my vision of learning and teaching because it is the right thing to do; this vision inspires learning and teaching in others. Encouraging the heart is possibly the most important aspect of developing relationships, modelling the way motivates others to do the same, and challenging the process facilitates change for the better. These last two years, I have taken many risks and have been rewarded ten-fold. The added benefit - improved learning for kids!

Northern Tier Leadership Professional Development

For the past two years, I have been involved in a leadership course designed for the Zone 1 administrators. On May 2, we had our last workshop of year 2 and we were asked to reflect on what we learned. It's difficult to wrap it all up with string and present it, but here goes.
In Year 1, I learned that I needed to show my staff, students and community what my vision is for the school and keep it front and center when making decisions and entertaining change. I spent most of year 1 continuing to build relationships and facilitate culture change for the better. The staff were beginning to trust me and believe me when I said I would do something. That's because I did it. There were a few issues I had to deal with, but because the staff could see the benefits of change, and because I kept them in the loop, they came along with me. By working on the vision together, and designing it to suit our students and community, we were able to make it happen. Through the use of a connections tool that I appropriated from another leadership course, we were able to see the individual contribution to the vision and the growth in each other as an instructional team. Individual encouragement and acknowledgement made people feel valued and inspired them to take risks and talk about their accomplishments. We had people talking about their lessons in the staff room and willingly staying after school to discuss a strategy!

Kouzes and Pozner's The Leadership Challenge had me modelling the way, encouraging the heart, and challenging the process. I don't expect staff to do something I'm not willing to do myself. For example, my supervision schedule is just as heavy as any teacher on staff. I take part in the professional development that the staff do and I teach half time, sometimes more than that. We began challenging the process by timetabling for literacy programming, taking time to develop overarching questions to answer in the core subjects, and improving learning for kids by looking at what they need and teaching them that particular skill or knowledge. Some curriculum outcomes took a back seat while we taught students to be kind to one another, to read, to learn basic math facts and so on. If the students were interested and engaged in a particular project, we would keep it going, building in skills all the while the students thought they were having fun.

Our resources included the Alberta curriculum for sure, but we added Dawn Reithaug's Three Tiers of Intervention for Reading from the year before and Making a Difference from Alberta Learning's Setting the Direction initiative. We established a school wide approach to encouraging creativity by timetabling our options to include a wide range of choice and mixing up the grades so as to create a more family oriented atmosphere. We were successful and many of our fun activities involved the Junior High students planning activities that would include their younger counterparts. We all ate together and played together. An enormous amount of energy was expended, but it takes energy to make energy. I have never felt so alive!

For year 2, see the next post!

Goal Setting for Students

How soon do we begin goal-setting with our students? That is, at what age are children ready to reflect upon their learning, set goals accordingly, and work to achieve those goals.

All students, I would not hesitate to guess, can look around themselves and compared with their classmates, come up with a judgement as to how they are doing in comparison. There seems to be a competition already in first grade. Boykin and Noguera (2011) maintain that it is a combination of the assets a student brings to class, the relationships between the student and the teacher, and the environment a student finds in the classroom that will determine the ease of which a student might gain a sense of self-determination that leads to achievement. More simply, if a student feels safe enough to take a risk or venture a suggestion or set and achieve a goal, that student will have the confidence to be in control of his or her own learning.

Therefore, a teacher could and should begin setting goals with students as soon as the classroom climate allows it. Once students feel they can set and achieve goals, they should be allowed and encouraged to do so.

Another approach to learning goals grows out of conception known as self-determination theory (Ryan & Deci, 2000). This conception is itself an outgrowth of White's (1959) seminal work on the notion of competence. The claim is that accomplishing a challenging task and causing a desired effect to occur are inherently enjoyable. The logic follows that the more self-determined the act, the more a sense of competence ensues. Being  guided by self-determination, while engaged in an activity, results in optimal motivation levels. It is further postulated that people are more self-determined when they feel a sense of autonomy in their pursuits, rather than when they feel their pursuits are controlled through coercion, external rewards, or guilt/sham avoidance. Autonomy is conceived as a distinct from notions such as individualism and independence. (p. 84, Boykin & Noguera, 2012)

As soon as students feel confident enough to self-regulate and reflect on their learning, they can be expected to set and achieve goals.

Students also need to feel safe and secure in the knowledge that their teacher is looking out for their best interests, believes in them, and allows them the space to learn or not as the case may be.

Parellels?

In Creating the Opportunity to Learn by A. Wade Boykin and Pedro Noguera (2011), parallels arise between the racial achievement gap in the U.S. and the inequalities I'm finding in teaching the aboriginal students in our small rural schools. Our Alberta government is striving to close this achievement gap, but I'm finding it difficult to actually make it happen on the front line.

Boykin and Noguera maintain that "countering the normalization of failure must be seen as the first step in any effort to close (or at the very least reduce the achievement gap." (p. 35) I find this statement encouraging. At the grass roots level, we hold all of our students to the standard. However, like these researchers, we also see that we need to understand the culture that these students come from and provide the supports they need before we can expect the same from them as from our students that already have the supports they need.

Much of the U.S. data, according to Boykin and Noguera, has been gathered through self-reporting data and instruments chosen by the investigators. They are concerned that may studies have asked indirect questions regarding the actual learning processes that are at play and that factors or conditions possibly leading to "gap-closing performance outcomes" may or may not actually gain results.

That said, certain trends emerge and by coupling these trends with what works for all students, hope is evident in the general scheme of things. "the most proximal factor to achievement outcomes is student engagement in academic tasks. Engagement is the bellwether for enhanced student achievement. It is the precursor to gap-closing academic outcomes. It is the beacon of greater opportunities to learn for all students." (p. 40)

I am intrigued by this book as I can see parallels to our own concerns with the aboriginal students in our small school. As I continue to read this book, I will continue to reflect upon how they are related and what I can take from these researchers to improve my own practice.

What works in effective school cultures is...

What works in effective school cultures is 'tough love' that allows kids (and their parents) think they want or need.

It is a sense of genuine affection built on mutual respect. It is unconditional love that accepts people as they are, finds what's right in each person, sees what the other person can become, and never gives up.

(p. 122 in "Don't Teach the Canaries Not to Sing: Creating a School Culture That Boosts Achievement" by Robert D. Ramsey)

My two favorite phrases in this quote - mutual respect and  never gives up.

Essential Questions and Performance Assessments

Since September, my fellow teachers and myself have been involved in a project with the Alberta Assessment Consortium. We've been learning how to create good performance assessments.

Our certified staff decided we would create and plan for a performance assessment in Science as it is sometimes the most difficult to plan for in a multi-grade classroom, due to the wide range of unit themes there are across the curriculum and throughout the grades.

We first looked at the curriculum and created the essential questions we would answer at the Grade 3, 6, and 9 levels.

For Grade 3:
- How do living things grow in order to adapt to their environments?
- What characteristics of rocks and soil make them useful in the community?
- What decisions need to be made in order to create the best product possible?
- What makes sound, sound?
For Grade 6:
- How can humans make informed decisions about their actions on a forest ecosystem?
- How can we pose questions and make inferences based on investigated evidence?
- How can we use what we know about air and aerodynamics to construct working flight models?
- How does the position of the Earth in the universe affect humans?

For Grade 9:
- How can humans make informed decisions about their actions on ecosystems and the global environment?
- Why is it important to understand reactions of matter in your environment?
- How has the development of technologies contributed to the exploration and understanding of space and the to the benefits on Earth?

Once we had the essential questions formulated, we took the outcomes according to the Alberta curriculum from Grades 1 to 9, cut and pasted them along a continuum so that they would lead to answering the questions above. We then decided to create a performance assessment that would cover as much of the curriculum as possible while going deep into the learning in order to answer the essential question we decided to focus on during this project.

The essential question I wanted to answer in my Grade 1,2,3 classroom was dealing with the construction of a product that could serve a real life purpose. Because there is a unit of study in grade 2 as well as Grade 3 dealing with construction, and because the Grade 1's in this class were very hands on oriented, and could use some instruction and  review in using the tools and materials involved, I chose to create a performance assessment that would link the product creation essential question to something very real in their lives.

Now that we have completed the construction process and are reflecting on the skills developed during this project, I can see that some of the students were stretched in the area of directly related skill development. More importantly, several of the students exhibited growth in confidence and were able to throw out some of their ideas and begin again without the previously exhibited temper tantrums.

This was huge for them and for me!

The Resourceful School

These are the days when we begin looking at next year's budget in light of the government education budget and speculation as to what they expect us to do with it. The United States seem worse off than Alberta from what I am reading in the Educational Leadership Journal. The December 2011/January 2012 edition of this journal is entitled "The Resourceful School". Looking at this edition and reading several articles has given me some insight as to what schools in the U.S.A. are doing to offset the economic recession.

To quote Michael A. Rebell in his article, "The Recession--and Students' Rights", In California over the last three years, the average amount spent per pupil has dropped by about $4,500, causing many school districts, including Los Angeles, to cut 8 to 10 instructional days from the school year. Last year, average class sizes in Los Angeles bumped up to 30 and were more than 40 in some high schools, and Hawaii furloughed teachers and canceled classes for 17 Fridays in a row. For 2011-12, school districts in California and South Dakota cut back the number of school days to four per week; the Miami, Florida, schools eliminated after-school programs for 4,500 students; Illinois eliminated funding for advanced placement (AP) courses for school districts with large concentrations of low-income students, and Texas terminated preschool services for 100, 000 mostly at-risk students.

Rebell is questioning whether or not, the constitutional rights of students get put on hold during a recession. Other articles go into the whys and wherefores of the cuts being implemented.

Then, in an article entitled "Turning Crisis into Opportunity" a North Carolina school, Ashley Park PreK - 8 School in Charlotte, North Carolina shows how they are a resourceful school. Intriguing changes in how they operate have me stopping to think how our small school can be more creative and think about our resources in different ways so as to meet the needs of our students within our budget constraints.

Grouping students and having them take the electives through the services of paraprofessionals allows teachers to plan lessons together, analyze data, talk about students, and call parents during a block of time each day while students are taking their electives. Individualizing instruction allows the cultivation of close relationships between teachers and students, and combining English Language Arts with Social Studies in a larger class enables teachers to create more flexible groupings, allowing for more differentiated instruction.

Other resourceful ideas include going to year-round schooling, lengthening the school day to have one third planning and two thirds teaching, and focusing on project-based learning. Some of these ideas would not be feasible in a small school such as ours, but they do give food for thought. If this school can look at their resources in different ways, so can any other school.

Looking ahead

The staff and students have gone half a year with low enrollment in classes and we are surviving. More than that, we are excelling in some areas. While I can only speak directly about the the class I teach, I see successful students and staff all over the place. So many of our students are excited about reading and writing. Some are sitting down and reading novels 2 to 3 inches thick and hardly putting them down to have lunch. Some are dragging around their writing journals all over the school, even during the break. Some are challenging each other to solve problems. Some are creating a class play.

The staff, too are creating exciting and challenging performance assessments, taking courses and excelling. Just this morning, I called all the support staff into the morning assembly and lined them up in front of the students and asked the students what these people had in common. The usual answers ensued, they're all girls! they work here! they're all moms! Then I told them that these people were also students. I explained that they had taken their first aide on Monday and Tuesday. I also pointed out that they all got honors on their exams. "This is what an honors class looks like!" Wow! The students thought for a moment and then applauded! I am so proud of our staff! The students are too!

How do we get this out to the public without bragging about it? one staff member asked. I answered, "maybe it's time we started bragging!" We are doing great things and the community should be hearing about it.

The month of February is famous for budget pooling meetings and brainstorming for improvement for the new year. The general public might think it's early, but experience has taught me that it's really never too early to think about next year. Soon it will be March and ads for early registration will begin appearing. I want to be ahead of that game this year. So, I took it to the staff today after school. I showed them what is the beginning of an advertisement inviting prospective students and parents to register with our school and gave the staff an assignment. They were to use 2 sticky notes, write down two ideas, comments, or questions regarding the ad and stick it to the poster. We also revisited our values list in our school handbook. The list was way too long - we need a short list, something we can use as a mantra and easily slip it out to community and each other when we are talking about what's happening at the school.

My plan is to also ask the students and the parents to do the same thing. I'm hoping to ensure that we don't lose what our present students, staff, and parents like about our school when I'm at the same time making considerations for changes and/or improvements.

Building a Performance Assessment

With the assistance of the AAC (Alberta Assessment Consortium), we are developing our skills in using performance assessments in the classroom. To begin with, we decided to get some expert help in honing our skills at the school. Pat Sachs, from the AAC, has worked with us for two professional development days already, giving us planning templates and feedback on our work.

When we first began, we agreed that we needed to plan with the end in mind using universal design strategies. Therefore, we developed essential questions that needed answering in Science by looking at the Alberta Science curriculum, at the PAT (Provincial Achievement Test) years.

Grade 3:
How do living things grow in order to adapt to their environments?
What characteristics of rocks and soil make them useful in the community?
What decisions need to be made in order to create the best product possible?
What makes sound, sound?

Grade 6:
How can humans make informed decisions about their actions on a forest ecosystem?
How can we pose questions and make inferences based on investigated evidence?
How can we use what we know about air and aerodynamics to construct working flight models?
How does the position of the Earth in the universe affect humans?

Grade 9:
How can humans make informed decisions about their actions on ecosystems and the global environment?
Why is it important to understand reactions of matter in your environment?
How has the development of technologies contributed to the exploration and understanding of space and to the benefits on Earth?

We then unpacked the curriculum outcomes at the Grade 3, 6 and 9 levels by cutting and pasting them on a bulletin board so that we could see the alignment from the early grades to the later.

In our next professional development session, we decided as teachers which essential question we would focus on in the creation of a performance assessment. Because our classes are multi-graded and have a variety of levels within each grade, we decided that we would focus on a question that could be answered at all of the levels in the individual classrooms to some degree. As teacher of the Grade 3 Science curriculum, I chose to answer the question involving product creation. I felt that I could comfortably provide instruction at the Grade 3 level and tier it down for the Grade 2s and 1s, without changing the focus.

Once the essential question was selected, an assessment plan had to be created. The assessment Planning Template includes the Alberta Program of Studies Enduring Understandings, that is, what we want each student to learn at each level that is worth remembering past a test. It also includes the outcomes written in students friendly language, the list of evidence we will expect as a demonstration of the learning, and the enabling tasks or activities that we will have the students do in the process of answering the essential question.

Moving on from the assessment planning template, a performance assessment task needs to be created, a scenario that would appeal to the students and give them real life connections. For my Grade 1, 2, and 3s, I created a Santa's Workshop Scenario. Several of Santa's elves have retired since this last Christmas and he has just advertised for several new positions that are available. The new elves would have to demonstrate that they can create a variety of objects with a variety of uses from a variety of materials. The new elves would also have to explain why they chose the materials they did and the process of creating these objects.

Taking this scenario to the class, I put it to them that they had decided that they would like a job in Santa's Workshop. They liked this idea.

In order to be successful in getting the job, I told them that they would need to impress Santa and his head elf. They would need to:
- Ask questions and make predictions about how they might be successful in getting the job.
- Design an object that Santa would like to have in his workshop.
- Identify, select, and list the materials and tools they will need to create the object.
- Learn some building skills by building 3 practice objects.
- Create an object to present to Santa and his head elf.
- Practice safe construction techniques.
- Present the object to Santa and his head elf for inspection.

The performance assessment task has rubrics at each Grade level, from Grade 1 to 3, a check list of embedded tasks the students would have to complete as they are building the objects, with space for teacher observations, and a student self-reflection sheet, where the students would be asked to reflect on their performance of the criteria and embedded tasks.

The three practice objects are taken from the Grade 2 building things unit of study: a flower vase made from a paper roll, a napkin holder made from cardboard and/or plastic, and a gift box made from cardboard, plastic, and/or wood. With each object, the students would have to fill out a planning sheet and answer one or two reflection questions designed to assist them in improving their skill level in the next round. In the first practice, the students would be asked what they did to make their vase stable enough to hold a flower. In the second practice, students would be asked if they could do the project all over again, would they do it the same or differently, and if they would do it differently, what would they do? In the third practice, students would be asked to reflect on the materials and techniques they have used so far. They would be asked to present their object to their flexible group and/or the teacher, stating how they built the object, listing the materials they used, and describing the building techniques they learned in this section of the project.



Students will build the object or toy for Santa, will self-reflect and revise if necessary, and will present the object or toy for inspection. Students efforts will be documented and pictures will be taken of the students with their practice objects. Their final presentations will be recorded using video. If students' parents agree, these final presentation recordings will be uploaded to the school website for publication.

Did you ever have one of those days?

Things were not going right from the moment I left town. The roads were slick in places and the half inch of snow was blowing around creating limited visibility. Between the on route phone calls that staff couldn't make it due to inclement weather, the challenge of covering classes and supervision with remaining staff together with combating the virus that had been plaguing me since Christmas, I was feeling like it was becoming one of those days. You know, the one where you wished you could have stayed in bed and that someone would miraculously ride in and save the day.

My knight in shining armour did not arrive at the same time I did, so I went down to cover supervision for one, arranged to pull an educational assistant from two of our programs, met with a student who had blown up the day before, put off a parent meeting until after school, met my students in the breakfast room, sent off a couple of emails asking for help, and this was all before school. Thank the good Lord that our staff is flexible enough and care for our kids enough that they are willing to do just about anything for them.

I then went to class because I also teach half time. My class is a mixture of Grade 1, 2, and 3 students of various abilities, needs, and personalities. By lunch time, they had fixed me with love. One of the boys gave me a hug leaving the gym, saying, "you're so nice". One of the girls that I need to remind every few minutes to stay focused gave me a hug, telling me, "I love you." Smiles and hugs come from all directions just when you don't think you can do it.

Among other things, we had a spelling test, practiced our bumper words, created new words, read our library books, practiced being good listeners and good speakers during social, and worked on building a vase in Science. Even during Math class, students who usually don't want to even open their math books, had something to show me. We had to do without our reading assistant, but the students picked up and performed anyway. They were patient and kind to one another. Even when I had to send one of my grade 1's out of the gym at lunch time for pushing, she went quietly because she knew did a wrong thing and she recognised that I wasn't mad at her, that she just needed to leave.

I am so proud of the students and staff at my school. They work hard; they try to help each other and they care. Even those that sometimes give you grief still show up because they know you want the best for them and you'll try your best for them. By the end of this day, I said to myself on the way home, it was one of those days! Thank goodness!

"Bring on the Learning Revolution"

Ken Robinson is a wonderful speaker, funny, but truthful and he gets you to think...

I just watched his TED talk at http://www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson_bring_on_the_revolution.html

He speaks of "creating conditions under which students flourish rather than creating students to fit the industrial model." His last quote from WB Yeats, "tread softly, for you tread on my dreams".

It's worth watching (under 20 minutes).

Compelling Case for School Learning Networks Part 2

Why would any school need to be networked and networking?

Learning is changing all over the world. All of what we know and can do is available on the Internet. More than two billion people are connected to the Internet and these two billion people are potential teachers to our students once they are connected to the Internet. The fact that many of our students are already connected to the Internet via their computers at home or the phones they carry around all day makes it impossible to ignore personal learning networks. As educators and as the people who are responsible for our students six or seven hours of their awake time, it is our duty to teach students how to use these networks well. We would also be remiss if we did not employ these networks as tools for our own learning and teaching. The Internet could possibly be the most powerful learning tool ever invented, should we decide to assist students in publishing their work online and enlisting the help of experts in the field who are also online. The possibilities are endless!

The Internet can help level the playing field, cutting out some of the barriers to learning that they might experience in a small community. In small rural schools such as ours, the students do not always have the same learning opportunities on site as in the large urban schools. Therefore it is critical that we access what we can online. Personal learning networks for teachers can expand access to education experts and provide sounding boards thus enhancing professional development. Using the world wide web expands learning and teaching for all. However, the professionals need to be aware of what is available for students and staff and be able to model ethical and responsible use of the Internet. We need to devote time to develop and use our own personal and professional networks in order to be good models to our students and to be able to teach our students how to develop and use personal learning networks online. Staff and students who develop a personal learning network, could seek out expert opinion and feedback on their own work, thus improving their own learning. Once established, these connections could expand teaching and learning on an ongoing basis, thus extending the learning beyond the school day and the school year.

Our students deserve the same learning opportunities as any other student. Devoting time and resources to developing personal learning networks for staff and students would go a long ways in solving the problem of inequity in education.

Can you see the possibilities?