Yesterday's Elementary Division Meeting

Ever wonder what happens when K-5 faculty get together for a division meeting? Here's a window into that world, in the form of a narrative about yesterday's meeting.

We began by reviewing our groundrules:

Everyone participates*

Different opinions are welcome

Limit side conversations

Respect time#

Maintain your sense of humor

We review, and re-affirm, these ground rules at the beginning of each meeting, in order to "ground" us in a shared space of expectations. The * denotes that active participation can look very different for different people, from talking to listening to note taking, and that we need to put aside any judgement about how others are choosing to participate, and also participate to the best and most that we are each able to do. The # means both to be on, and end on time; and, to monitor one's own "airtime", or how much one is speaking, and allow others the time and space to speak as well.

The conversation then moved on to housekeeping. Among the items we discussed were celebrating the successes of Back to School Night, updates on ongoing admissions, information sharing about progress report language and class calendars, and previews of both the 10/5 faculty meeting and 10/7 professional development day.

A presentation from MaryBeth Ventura on the Student Success Team process followed, since Jodie Barton, our K-5 learning support coordinator, was unable to attend. Jodie and MaryBeth have clarified and streamlined the process that was developed last year, in the form of 8 phases:

1. initiation/consultation

2. gathering data

3. sharing data

4. initial intervention

5. review

6. parental intake

7. collaborative SST meeting

8. creating the Student Success Plan

From here, the conversation flowed very easily into the social and recess facilitation work that Kate Klaire is spearheading, as teachers wanted to understand the intersection of Kate's work and that of Jodie and MaryBeth. We clarified that Kate's work is a curricular component; she is working with all teachers and classrooms, and from this, may do some 1:1 work with a particular student. This in turn may lead to initiating the SST process, or it may happen parallel to the process, in which case Kate's perspective would get pulled in as another data point about the child. The other major aspect of Kate's work right now is helping classrooms create a faculty council to develop consistent recess agreements for our entire campus to follow, and we worked through some of the logistics of this work.

The meeting concluded with a conversation led by Nancy Nash about extending the purpose of the council beyond creating recess agreements, and using it as a mechanism to have students take agency over creating and solving other programmatic elements. For example, Nancy would like to work with the council to develop a consistent and coherent approach to doing community service, whether inside or outside the school.

Although we had several at the beginning of the year, division-wide meetings only occur once a month for the Elementary division as the year goes on. I'll try to remember to share after each one, as they are one of the important ways in which we build our community.

New site feature: blogroll

I've added a new feature to the blog - a blogroll, or list of sites that I am reading regularly. I have been and will continue to write in response to what I read on these and other sites, and I encourage you to check them out directly, if you're interested in delving into the public discourse on a wide range of educational topics.

Thinking about the site

Last week, Mitch, Mohammad, Randy and I met to iron out the process for managing regular site issues that arise. This was a very useful, and needed, discussion, and a clear process and protocol for responding to immediate site issues was developed during the meeting; Mitch and I work directly with the faculty to determine what needs to happen to make the site and environment most effective for student learning experiences, and then give concrete tasks to be executed to the Business Office, who manage the implementation. This is a scaled-down version of what has already been in place in our approach to major capital expenditures, and it's great to have both the intentionality and the clarity as we deal with emergent site needs.

Following this meeting, I met on Friday with the K/1 team to discuss how we can improve the playscape space behind building 3. We generated a sizable list of actions, from the mundane - establishing a schedule to regularly sweep the sand into the sandbox, purchasing two new hoses, and buying some new storage systems - to the remarkable; waterproofing the awnings above the back doors, replacing the hay bales with a real fence, moving the apple tree, relocating the water spigot, and finding a better solution for the pump. We didn't finish the conversation, either, so I know more ideas are coming about how to improve that space!

Another example of an issue needing immediate attention is the windows in the Depot. In the first few weeks of school, students have been very distracted by cars, people, and life passing by on the street outside of the North Gallery, which is now our Spanish classroom. As a result of the meeting last week, I've written to the site committee to ask if anyone has an immediate, effective, and appropriate solution for curtains in the Depot. The trick is two-fold; we want to get the "right" curtains the first time, and we want to make it uniform for the North Gallery, the EGG office, and the library. My sense, having gotten two responses in the the first 24 hours since my query, is that arriving at the "right" solution will take some time, and so we need to put up a temporary (2-4 week) solution while the design process works itself out. I've just communicated this to Mitch and Mohammad; my hope is to have that temporary solution up and in place before school begins on Tuesday.

Speaking of the library, I want to give a HUGE appreciation to TBS K-5 Curriculum Coordinator Laurie Schoeffler, who has been donating countless hours towards getting the library set up. Laurie was instrumental in positioning the shelving units, creating a good space for the curriculum resources and leveled library that are shared by the classroom, and supporting our great parent volunteers Jean Marstens and Jenny Scholten, who are steadily unpacking and shelving all of the books. Our goal is to have the library open by the end of next week, and I think we'll be able to pull it off! Jean and Jenny put incredible effort into all aspects of the library last year, from creating a mission and determining a collections policy to hosting an author visit, and I'm looking forward to seeing kids once again finding books to support their pleasure and growth in our library.

Classroom observations

What I saw in the classrooms this week:

Blackberry students playing Guess My Rule, using the ELMO document camera, and a class read-aloud during Siesta....

Laurel students playing Attribute Castle, teachers scribing for students describing their pictures, and cleaning up after a work period and transitioning to recess....

Sweet Briar students creating multi-media self-portraits (now hung on the East wall of the classroom), and preparing a scavenger hunt for their parents on Back to School Night....

Temescal students creating artful displays of how the Earth revolves around the Sun, and how the tilt of the Earth affects the seasons....

4th grade students explaining the different strategies they used to solve the problem 7x8 (skip counting, creating arrays, and using the distributive property)....

Strawberry students creating maps of the basic topography of California, and discussing different waves of human immigration to the state, all the way back to the theory of the Bering Straits land bridge....

Cerrito students discussing poetry, and becoming intimately familiar with the classroom library by re-alphabetizing it....

4th and 5th grade students having the process of writing Reading Response Letters modeled for them in both classrooms, and writing their own letters for the first time this year....

Texting, Tweeting, and Literacy

Remember when you could program the family VCR, but your parents could not? Children have always been forward-thinking when it comes to technology; perhaps it's their innate imagination and creativity that enable them to envision a future differently from adults operate, or their ability to question patterns, or the high neuroplasticity of their brains.

Since our children are aware of - and in many cases using - the newest technology as it emerges, and because we are thinking about both their present and future lives, I want to share a great video making the rounds these days about the impact that technology is having on literacy, featuring professor David Crystal. His ideas make total sense, and yet are challenging to many assumptions we have about the impact of technology on written literacy.

For a fuller summery on the video, check out George Couros' post on edsocialmedia.com

Three articles I read this morning

"Guatemalan Schools Built from Bottles, Not Bricks": A short, interesting article on the website Good about a non-profit doing cool work in Guatemala.

"US Must Bolster Civic Learning in Schools": A medium length, important article from the wonderful site Education Week.

"What if the secret to success is failure?": A long, excellent article from the NY Times (thanks to parent Will Courtenay for passing this one on!).

The Power of Dominos

I used this short video today while talking with a Kindergarten student who had hurt another child. It turned out, not surprisingly, that there were a whole series of events that occurred before the culminating incident, and I was thinking about how to show, and not just tell, the child both the impact of his decision-making, and the idea of escalation. The concreteness of the dominos effectively helped the child understand that a small decision can lead to another decision can lead to another decision etc, and that the way to avoid knocking down the dominos is to make a different decision at the beginning.

The year's first admin team meeting

On Friday we held an unusual admin meeting. What made it unusual, besides the fact that the meeting was held from 3:00-5:00 pm on Friday, and besides the fact that this was the first time every administrator at the school had gathered together since the new school year had begun, was what we did during the meeting.

Our meeting began, as they always do, with a check-in. However, the day's check-in was not a rundown of tasks and projects; it was an opportunity to name how we were feeling on both a professional and personal level, using some metaphorical vehicle to communicate our status, include equations, song titles and first lines, drawings, and haikus. As a former English teacher (and ongoing poet), my choice of form was obvious:

Have you ever seen

a cheetah racing across

the Serengeti?

Besides honoring the two components of the haiku form (the famous syllabic lineation, and the lesser-known tradition of capturing of a moment of natural beauty), I was aiming to convey the sense I have that right now life is racing past, both personally and professionally. Every day is jam packed from before I even walk in the door, and every evening when I return home, so much is or has happened for my family as well.

Mitch then presented the restructuring of the administrative team that he has developed, in conversation with others, over the summer. Last year's model consisted of three groups that met regularly - the Admin Team (all admin except Registrar and Associate Business Managers), Educational Leadership Team (Head, ECC Director, Associate Head), and Business Office (Business Manager, Associate Business Managers, and Accounting Assistant). In the new, reconfigured approach, at the center of the team is the Senior Admin Team, consisting of the Head of School, Business Manager, and Advancement Director. A slightly larger group is the Director's Team, consisting of all Directors - Head of School, Financial Aid, Business, IT, Communications, Advancement, Admissions, ECC, and Elementary Division. Other groups include CAD (Communications, Admissions, Development), Front Line (CAD + Office Registrar and Assistant to the Head), and Site Team (Business Manager, Associate Business Manager for Site, Custodian),while the Business Office and Educational Leadership Team continue their work. There's a nifty diagram that shows the relationships of the group, but I don't have it yet (I'll post it when I do). The point that matters is that by meeting regularly, with clearly defined (and overlapping) realms of foci, these various administrative teams will be assuming responsibility and authority for issues, such as marketing and site maintenance, that formerly fell in murky areas of individual positions, rather than collectively onto a team.

The second half of the meeting was a reprise of the activities through which Mitch led the full faculty in the first faculty meeting of the year, back during fall work week (which most admin had not attended). He began by having us read, and discuss in pairs, the poem A Martian Sends A Postcard Home by Craig Raine. This is an exercise in interpretation and description designed to lead one to question assumptions about the meaning of what one sees. From there, we were asked to respond to 10 statements about what it means to be learning-centered, identifying the one with which we most and least identified. Then we shared which one of the statements we find ourselves actually doing most often, in our daily work. The 10 statements about learning were the following (areas in bold were in bold in the original handout we received):

1. Learning is fundamentally about making and maintaining connections; biologically through neural networks; mentally among concepts, ideas and meanings; and experientially through interaction between the mind and the environment, self, and other; generality and context, deliberation and action.

2. Learning is enhanced by taking place in the context of a compelling situation that balances challenge and opportunity, stimulating and utilizing the brain's ability to conceptualize quickly and its capacity and need for contemplation and reflection upon experience.

3. Learning is an active search for meaning by the learner -- constructing knowledge rather than passively recieving it, shaping as well as being shaped by experiences.

4. Learning is developmental, a cumulative process involving the whole person, relating past and present, integrating the new with the old, starting from but transcending personal concerns and interests.

5. Learning is done by individuals who are intrinsically tied to others as social beings, interacting as competitors or collaborators, constraining or supporting the learning process, and able to enhave learning through cooperation and sharing.

6. Learning is strongly affected by the educational climate in which it takes place; the settings and surroundings, the influences of others, and the values accorded to the life of the mind and to learning achievements.

7. Learning requires frequent feedback if it is to be sustained, practice if it is to be nourished, and opportunities to use what has been learned.

8. Much learning takes place informally and incidentally, beyond explicit teaching or the classroom, in casual contacts with other beings, in family interactions, in active social and community involvements, and in unplanned but fertile and complex situations.

9. Learning is grounded in particular contexts and individual experiences, requiring effort to transfer specific knowledge and skills to other circumstances or to more general understandings and to unlearn personal views and approaches when confronted by new information.

10. Learning involves the ability of individuals to monitor their own learning, to understand how knowledge is acquired, to develop strategies for learning based on discerning their capacities and limitations, and to be aware of their own ways of knowing in approaching new bodies of knowledge and other disciplinary frameworks.

What I like about this activity is that it acknowledges that if we are to be a learning-centered school, the administrators need to be thinking in and working with the language of being learning-centered, just as the teachers, students, and parents are and will. It both honors the way in which our work is so different from that of most adults in the school (the faculty), and also holds us responsible for engaging in the same thinking routines as the faculty.

Having read these 10 statements, what jumps out at you about what it means to be learning-centered? If you had to pick ONE to characterize the learning experience that you would wish for your child, which would it be? And, which ONE is the one that you most experience in your own professional workplace?

The meeting closed with some brief logistical housekeeping, and a round of genuine appreciations. This was an atypical meeting in the sense that it was designed to get us thinking and sharing together, not commenting on reports or having a working meeting on a specific topic. Those are the sorts of meetings to which we are much more accustomed, and frankly, the kind that are much more boring, and do far less to develop collegiality (constructive congeniality centered around doing good work) than an meeting such as this.

Recess Before Lunch

Here's the letter that went home this week about our implementation of Recess Before Lunch.

***

Dear K-5 families,

As you may have heard from your child(ren), we are holding recess before lunch (“RBL”) this year. After successfully testing the program with the K/1 classrooms in the spring of 2011, we’ve decided to fully implement the program for grades K-5 for the 2011-2012 academic year.

RBL fits closely with our school’s emphasis on considering children’s social and emotional needs, along with their nutritional ones, as we design a program that is developmentally responsive. Our own experience, and the substantial research done in the field, shows that RBL leads to kids eating more lunch, since they aren’t in a hurry to get out to recess, and it also leads to a more courteous environment during the lunch period, as the kids have already had the chance to run, play, and get the gross motor exercise they need. Additional benefits that we have observed include decreased conflicts during recess, a smoother transition back into academic experiences in the afternoon, and improved afternoon attentiveness from the students.

If you are interested in learning more about RBL, I encourage you to read a widely distributed article that appeared in the NY Times last January. Additional info is available at the websites of Peaceful Playgrounds, the Montana Office of Public Instruction, and the School Nutrition Association, among many others.

Many of the other best practices of our lunch and recess program will continue. Like last year, the 2/3 students will have recess in either Strawberry Creek Park or Berkeley Way Mini-park once a week, while the 4/5 students will have recess in the park three times a week. Fortunately, this year we are also able to coordinate the 6^th grade to be with the 4/5 once a week as well. Teachers’ close supervision on the playground during recess is being augmented by the work done by Kate Klaire, our Recess and Social facilitator (and EGG Director), who is currently working with the students to establish recess agreements. And of course, we are continuing to supervise student hand-washing before they eat.

If you have any questions, please ask, and thank you for your continued support.

Sincerely,

Zachary Roberts,

Associate Head of School

Bridging the Gap

Today I met with Nancy Lieblich, who has worked at TBS for over two decades as an Early Childhood Campus teacher. This year Nancy has moved out of the full-time classroom to take on a series of special projects uniquely suited to her 20 years of working with Kindergarten age students. She'll be splitting her time between the ECC and the University Campus, and along with me, Mitch and Andrea, will be an integral part of supporting the programmatic bridge between the campuses that we are constantly trying to strengthen.

At the ECC, Nancy has five foci. The first is running the ECC-5 program, for the oldest students on campus. Once a day, for an hour a day, the nine children in this program are pulled out of their classrooms and given special small group time together under Nancy's tutelage. The second is working with the ECC faculty to develop a comprehensive curriculum and calendar, as part of the curriculum review work that we are doing this year. The third is to assist teachers and administrators in observing and identifying children who need a higher degree of differentiated support than others. The fourth is designing and coordinating an outdoor program that addresses the needs of young children and enhances their outdoor experience. And the fifth is to support the follow of curriculum and ideas back-and-forth between the ECC and K/1 faculty.

That's a pretty hefty set of tasks, and so our meeting today was to discuss the scope of the work that she'll do with the K/1 faculty. A wide range of possibilities emerged as Nancy and I talked about what she might do on the University Campus, including being available to talk about kids, work directly with the K/1 students, providing curriculum support, and subbing for teachers as they observe at the ECC. Ultimately, we decided that for the first few months, Nancy will focus on supporting teachers and students as they make the transition into school, and observing and contributing to the math curriculum by connecting what the K/1 teachers are doing with concepts and materials that are in use at the ECC and in the Montessori tradition, and cross-pollinating those across the levels.

I'm excited to have Nancy's insight available as a resource for the K/1 program, and I'll post updates about her work as the year continues.

More moments from my days...

Yesterday: In Sweet Briar and Blackberry, students shared ideas at different steps in the process of making class agreements...in Cerrito, students completed the "Grow Your Garden" activity the faculty first learned about three years ago when we introduced the Positive Discipline curriculum to TBS...in Laurel, each student made a small card that was pasted onto one poster for a birthday child....in Strawberry, students finished decorating and setting up their writing journals.

Today: In 5th grade math, students worked on the concept of greatest common factor using arrays....In Blackberry, K/1 students selected from five options during reading workshop; the listening station, a read-aloud with the teacher, making blank books, and more....in 3rd grade math, students began investigating the concept of data...in Strawberry, 4/5 students wrote their first Reading Response Letter, following a model provided by the teachers....in Laurel, students choose among fine motor, gross motor, and studio art activities during choice time.

Reading with the K/1 students

In the last two days I visited both K/1 classrooms and shared Tubby and the Lantern, my favorite book from childhood (I still have the battered copy I owned as a child). The story centers around the adventures of a boy named Ah Mee, and his friend

Tubby the elephant. They float away from home on a giant paper lantern, narrowly escaping one dangerous situation after another - from falling into the ocean, to escaping pirates - by relying on their friendship and quick wits. Ah Mee's parents are barely present in the story (though their love for the two is evident), allowing the lives of the protagonists to take center stage. It is a vivid, complicated book that honors the emotional and imaginative lives of children, and I think that's why I liked it so much.

After reading the book aloud, students we

re given a choice of activities to deepen their connection to and understanding of the book, varying slightly by classroom. Building pirate ships out of blocks, re-enacting the story in the dress-up area, and creating flip-flap books of events in the text were just some of the options. It was a wonderful way to meet the new and returning K/1 students, share my love of reading, and see the classrooms in action.

Thanks to Blackberry Creek for these pictures!

Moments from the First Day of School

Ah, the first day of school. The excitement, the anxiety, the surprise, the wonderment, the exhilaration....and, the learning! Today I was able to walk through the K-5 classrooms and observe each for a few moments. Here's what I saw:

In both Blackberry and Laurel (the K/1 classrooms), choice time followed the cool-down "siesta" period that comes after lunch. Students had opportunities to engage in group play such as dress up, board games and blocks, or more solitary activities such as art making, working in the sand table, and reading in the library.

In Temescal (2nd/3rd grade), students were working

on collaborative posters titled "All About Us". Using words and pictures, they worked to answer seven questions about each member of the group: What is your name? When is your birthday, and how old are you? What is your favorite animal? What do you look like? What is something you really like to do? And, what question would you like to have the answer to? What are some things you would like todo in your life? Similarly, but different, in Sweet Briar (2nd/3rd grade), students created "Get to Know You" Glyphs based on this handout.

In Strawberry (4th/5th grade), I walked in during a short 15 minute period between a class conversation with Kate Klaire, our Recess Facilitator, and the start of the recess/lunch hour. Students used the time to finish previous work - some continued or finished decorating name tags that will go on their indoor cubbies, others "shopped" for in, or read books pulled from the classroom library, and others talked with the teachers about the relative merits of using online sites such as www.coolmathgames.com for teaching or homework purposes.

And in Cerrito, the students gathered in the back room - the library - to discuss their experiences as readers this summer, and get oriented to the reading that they'll be asked and encouraged to do this year. This was exciting to see because I know that Mike worked hard this summer on rethinking his approach to teaching reading, and that the passion for reading that he discovered in himself was truly

driving his instruction.

Some patterns emerging already: reading, play, structure, choice, group work, and self-knowledge.