POCIS conference at TBS on Saturday!

The POCIS Northern California annual Lower School Conference will be held at TBS this Saturday! Titled Building Blocks: Creating Community and Connecting Our Identity, participants will engage in interactive workshops and explore identity. Facilitators will utilize case studies, data, and personal narratives to construct restorative justice action plans. Workshops for adults and students alike! Interested? You can register here.

Prepping for MAP implementation

We've been gearing up for the switch from the ERBs to the MAPs for several months, and it's exciting to have Implementation Day just around the corner (or weekend, literally). In case you aren't familiar with the Measure of Academic Progress (MAP), you can read all about our decision to switch from a standardized test to a formative assessment, about which I am absolutely ecstatic: we'll get useful data about student learning that can inform instruction in a timely fashion, and that's really cool.  This testing is also so much better aligned with our constructivist philosophy about how children learn, and the purposes of assessment! 

Today we had Steven Davis from NWEA walk six administrators and six teachers through the login protocol, and train us in how to proctor the exams. From a proctor's computer, a teacher can see which exam each student is taking, which question each student is on, how long the student has been on that question, and can pause, suspend, or terminate the test as needed. Undoubtedly we'll have a few bumps as we put our new technology (upgraded wireless routers, and several brand new chromebooks) through its paces, but hopefully the students will feel good about the experience.

If you are interested, you can read about Steve's perspective on his day at TBS over at his blog. He'll be coming back on Friday, October 11th -- our scheduled Professional Development day -- to help train us on making sense of the reports and data.

Today's K-5 division meeting

In the spirit of making learning visible, here's the agenda from today's K-5 Division Meeting, interspersed with some details of what was discussed or done during that segment of the meeting. 

1. Review ground rules (5 min)

Proposed Ground Rules for K-5:

Start & end on time

Be present and engaged

Maintain a sense of humor

Assume good will

2. Celebrating successes (5 min)

-BTSN

-K-3 configuration work

-Master schedule revision

-Sharing from the group

3. Professional Development report (20 min)

Jeff: Using the Think-Puzzle-Explore Thinking Routine from Project Zero, with The Railway by Edouard Manet as the provocation.

4. Meaningful Faculty Evaluation process (10 min)

- this is a means to an end, which is a strong and aligned culture

- Page.2B has professional expectations

- Complete p.1-5 so we can meet to finalize your PD plan for the year.

5. Sharing craft knowledge (5 min)

Daniel: tool for sequencing monthly mini-lessons

6. Site expectations (10 min)

At The Berkeley School, all spaces will…

o   make learning visible

o   demonstrate intentionality

o   demonstrate care for the environment and materials

Activity: Break into groups and create Y-Charts (see below for the posters faculty generated)

7. Calendaring (2 min)

Protocol for setting up field trips

Getting level-based program events on the proper Google calendars

8. Math differentiation (10 min)

Sima and Renee: their roles and resources

CAIS Regional Meeting at Head Royce

The California Association of Independent Schools held the Northern Regional Meeting at Head-Royce School yesterday. Attending from TBS were Sima Misra, Mike Sinclaire, Kim Headlee, Kate Klaire, Mitch Bostian and myself, along with around 2000 other teachers and administrators from independent schools throughout northern California. This year we linked attending the event to submitting a proposal to present, and all four of the faculty presented the following workshops at the conference:

Using Visual Patterns and Thinking Routines to Deepen Mathematical Understanding (Mike and Sima) : Math has been described as the science of pattern-finding and relationships. Visual pattern finding and manipulatives allow students entry points into deep thinking and mathematical conversation. We will describe patterns with the language of mathematics (equations, order of operations, variables), and connect to upper elementary concepts like factors, multiples, and growth patterns. We will offer thinking routines the presenters learned from Harvard Project Zero that provide a framework for developing student understanding. 

Affinity Group: Student Council (Kate): Student councils are a wonderful opportunity for your school to develop service learning, community building, and establishing a voice for all students. This affinity group meeting is intended for those currently facilitating a student council and/or for those interest in how to get started. This will be a generative workshop focusing on a range of ideas and possibilities for overseeing student councils, including common constraints, and how to problem solve. Please come share your wisdom and curiosities.

Affinity Group: Performing Arts in Elementary School (Kim): Attention K-6 music, dance, theater teachers! Are you in need of new ideas to implement in your program? Do you have successful activities you love in your own classroom and would like to share? Come join us to share, learn and get inspired from fellow teachers. Bring at least three activities to share: movement, games, songs, etc., and be prepared to describe or lead each one. Fel free to bring handouts or activity instruction copies to distribute.

A sample of the workshops the six of us attended includes, by title:

Books, Rehearsal, Action!: Tools for Disrupting Gender Role Stereotyping in Elementary School

Building a Positive School Culture

Head's Session with CAIS Executive Director Jim McManus

Never Enough Time! Creating a Comprehensive, Effective, and Engaging Math Program

Ukelele - Strum and Sing

What are Little Boys Made of?

Heart to Heart & Hand to Hand: Singing and Movement Games from Many Cultures

As the Administration representative on the committee that helped plan the event, I spent the morning at the presenter check-in table, helping people get their name tags, figure out where  they would be presenting, and problem-solving the various issues that arise in any convention (signage, room changes and cancellations, etc). I greatly enjoyed doing this, to the point that I took an extra long shift at the table! I was also responsible for cultivating the selection of workshops specifically for administrators from among the submitted proposals, which was very enjoyable and also informational -- especially because I have begun to submit proposals to present at various conferences lately.

Stay tuned for a write up and newsletter with pieces and perspectives from each of the TBS attendees  coming out soon!

NAIS in Philadelphia

The Liberty Bell hangs just a few
blocks from the Convention Center

I feel so lucky to be supported - nay, expected(!) - to attend to my professional development here at TBS. This past week I attended the NAIS Annual Conference in Philadelphia, where I was able to attend several workshops, network with other school administrators from around the country, catch up with members of my cohort from the Fellowship for Aspiring Heads, and have the thrilling opportunity to present a workshop for the first time.

The best general session of the conference featured Jim Collins, author of the Good to Great books and coiner a number of notable organizational metaphors, including "the bus" (as in, who is on it) and "hedgehog" (as in, know and be yourself). Jim is a fantastic public speaker and he inspired the crowd to forgo good in the pursuit of greatness.

This copy of the Declaration of Independence is the one
that was read aloud to the citizens gathered in the courtyard
of Independence Hall immediately after the signing event.

Of the many workshops I attended, three stood out for their usefulness and applicability at TBS. Two were focused on the topic of faculty evaluation, and the third looked at models for developing an inclusive and diverse faculty body.

My workshop came during the third session of the first day of the conference, on the topic of "Changing School Culture at the Division Level".

This is thought to be the George Washington's
final proof copy of the Constitution.

The process of developing the Powerpoint presentation was an interesting one, as my first draft was overly reliant on images, in response to my concern that I not bore attendees by simply reading the slides. After a test-run with Kate Klaire, I reworked the slides to be more focused and less representational, as well as changed the order of some of the content for improved coherence. This work paid off in multiple ways; I felt great about the presentation, and the response of several of the attendees who came up afterwards to ask me for digital versions of the presentation offered a confirmation of my efforts.


The Liberty Bell and Independence Hall are just a few blocks from the Convention Center, so I made sure to nip over during a break and take in some amazing history.

Positive Discipline

TBS K-6 Music Teacher Kim Headlee submitted this report on a recent professional development training she attended about Positive Discipline, a paradigm for thinking about interactions with children that forms one of the foundations of our approach to classroom management.

Positive Discipline with Lori Onderwyzer

October 26/27, 2012 at Mills College, Oakland, CA

After reading about Positive Discipline, it was an unparalleled experience to have the chance to practice and discuss it among a diverse group of teachers, counselors, and administrators. All equally passionate about making a positive difference for children, we came from a wide diversity of experience: from public to private schools, from 1^st year to retired teachers, from pre-K to high school. We spent two full days exploring ourselves as both learners and teachers, and delving into practical theories for the modern classroom.

Positive discipline is based on Alfred Adler’s idea that all humans have a basic need for belonging and significance, and uses this idea to foster connection and mutual respect, and to empower children to realize their own capabilities. For example, Positive Discipline emphasizes encouragement over praise; the first creates intrinsic motivation and self esteem while the latter builds worth only through external means, which disappears with external source. Encouragements are about the student; praise is about the teacher. Praise and other external motivation like rewards and punishments create a fixed reality with no room for improvement, only regression. For example, think of how, “I’m so proud of you!” feels as opposed to “You should feel so proud of yourself.” 

Positive Discipline, along with its guiding principles, suggests simple classroom management tools. A few of my favorites are the one word redirect, and using 10 words or less whenever possible. Remember Charlie Brown’s teacher? Another is providing the “wheel of choice,” a set of problem solutions that kids can do themselves, including “apologize,” “count to ten,” and “use an ‘I’ message.” Lastly, asking “what” and “how” questions (not “why”) put the onus on children to follow their own learning process. It is this learning process we strive for as educators; after all, the root of the word is “ēducāre,” which means “to draw forth.” And the root of the word “discipline?” It’s “disciplina,” which means “to guide.”

Oct. 5th Professional Development Day

We are always thankful and excited to get the chance to gather as a faculty for a professional development day. I was excited to lead the second segment of the morning's work (the first was spent working on curriculum mapping), which focused on improving our progress reports. This summer I had a series of meetings with Kathy (our Early Childhood Division Head), Gretchen (our Middle School Division Head), and Jeanne (our database manager) to discuss this topic. We generated the following problem statement to drive our work: How can we make our progress reports more effectively and efficiently communicate students growth for both faculty and families?



We decided that to best capitalize on the precious time the entire faculty body had together, we would focus the discussion on one essential component of the reports: the terms we use to describe the stage of developmental mastery a student has reached for each criteria. To do this, we drew on the thinking routines of Project Zero to create an activity that helped faculty make their thinking visible to each other, and to foster a conversation grounded in shared experience and understanding.


Hung up around the room were several pieces of chart paper: one had our current K-8 terms (emerging, developing, comptent, effective, mastering), another had our current ECC terms (not yet observed, in progress, consistently, area of strength) and nine others contained alternative sets of terms we had gathered from various other public and private schools. Some examples of these other sets include novice, apprentice, practitioner, expert; below expectations, developing, at expectations, above expectations; needs support, inconsistently, usually, consistently; and below, approaching, proficient, advanced. Teachers put sticky notes with their thoughts, responses and questions to each set of terms on the appropriate piece of chart paper (or wrote them directly on the sheets).


Faculty were also asked to respond to two other questions. First, were there other sets of terms that they wished to suggest? Second, what did they think about having different sets of terms for different divisions (Early Childhood, Elementary, Middle School)? After about thirty minutes spent posting their ideas and reading the comments of their colleagues, we held a spirited discussion about what terms (and associated definitions) would help us improve the effective and efficient communication about student growth.


After lunch, the faculty worked in divisions. At the K-5 level, we spent most of the time continuing our (re)training on the DRA2 reading assessment that we implement. While this is our third year using the DRA2, we believe it's important to regularly retrain all faculty in how to use the tool to ensure that the assessment data is reliable and valid (and, we have new faculty this year who have not used the DRA2 before!). This was the second half of our training (at Wednesday's division meeting, we reviewed all of the materials and procedures): we watched video of an assessment given last week, and each faculty member scored the oral reading fluency of the student reader, after which we compared and discussed our results in pairs and as a whole group.

The goal of this activity is to both give faculty practice taking oral reading records (which use specific notation to indicate miscues, omissions, repetitions, etc), and to develop inter-rater reliability (thereby improving our reliable and valid use of the assessment). Faculty then looked through the folders of their current students to review assessments from prior years, and, combined with their understanding of the students in the last month, determine the level of text on which to assess each student during the upcoming assessment window.

The Brain's "Air Traffic Controller"

Today Kate, Kim, Renee and I gathered in the conference room for a free lunchtime webinar on executive function ("EF") led by Dr. Bill Jenkins and sponsored by Scientific Learning, where he is Chief Scientific Officer (and also a Founder). Dr. Jenkins is a former associate professor at the Keck Center for Integrative Neuroscience at UCSF, and he keeps a very interesting blog on all things neuroscience. Pleasantly, he didn't try to sell or push the company's products, but instead remained focused on the nueroscience of executive function. 

Dr. Jenkins described EF as containing three distinct and inter-related components that function as the "air traffic controller" of the brain. Working memory allows us to do tasks such as hold and manipulate information for a short period of time, hold multiple step instruction without reminders, and make decisions in social interaction such as turn-taking. Inhibitory control allows us to master and filter thoughts and impulses, hold of distractions, and select and focus attention. Cognitive flexibility helps us switch gears, adjust to new demands and experiences, consider new perspectives and change our speech and actions based on context. To give an example of how all three parts work together, consider the situation in which working memory allows you to hold two rules in mind, cognitive flexibility allows you to select which rule to follow in the moment, and inhibitory control prevents the "off" rule from being followed.

The stand-out takeaways for me from the webinar included the importance of providing scaffolding for students (such as establishing routines, providing cues, and breaking large tasks into discrete units); that EF takes decades to fully develop; that EF skills aren't automatically developed and because children will not necessarily outgrow certain behaviors, explicit intervention might be needed; and that EF development underlies success both socially and academically. The webinar concluded with some suggestions for developing EF, including allowing children to select high-interest topics for some schoolwork, providing both quiet time and time for detailed, extensive work at school, and encouraging participation in both team sports and/or drama activities as ways to learn to manage complex sets of rules and behaviors, and thus develop EF.

Update: Check out this video on adolescent brains sent to me by Kim, in follow-up to this webinar.

Results of my Division Head assessment

A pair of articles on the Harvard Business Review's blog network have hit home recently. The first was Heidi Grant Halvorson's post  calling for rethinking the common use of reflection alone as a means of gaining insight into the hidden areas of ourselves, based on the thinking of Timothy Wilson as laid out in Strangers to Ourselves - ideas I incorporated into my dissertation research on faculty supervision. The second is Anthony Tjan's post offering a simple recipe for successfully self-aware leaders: know thyself, improve thyself, and complement thyself. The goal of knowing myself was explicitly incorporated into the emotional intelligence work that I did this year, and I am a big fan of self-improvement as well, which is why back in May I asked the elementary faculty to complete a significant assessment about my work, (follow that link to see the entire device). 10 responses were returned (one of which was anonymous), which is a large enough sample to carry validity for the purposes of this project, and I spent some time this summer digesting the results and considering the implications.

I was excited by the areas that faculty identified as strengths in my practice:

Utilizes feedback to enhance effectiveness of the division

Maintains high professional standards and models behavior expected of others

Acts with integrity - Though not directly tied to a specific personalized PD goal, this was the most exciting result of this assessment for me.

Behaves in a manner that is consistent and fair

Listens carefully and with an open mind -  this was gratifying to see because it relates directly to Objective #1 of my personalized PD plan last year (to improve my communication) and Objective #3 (improve my emotional intelligence).

Effectively plans, organizes, and leads faculty division meetings -  this was gratifying to see because it relates directly to Objective #4 of my personalized PD plan last year (to improve my leadership of meetings).

Promotes positive, effective relationships with parents -  this was gratifying to see because it relates directly to Objective #1 of my personalized PD plan last year (to improve my communication).

And I was also excited by the areas that faculty feedback helped me identify as opportunities for growth this year:

Treats others with respect - While this is a decent response, I would like to hold myself to a higher standard and shoot for all respondents to see me as at least effective in this regard. 

Fosters an administrative structure that is responsive to teacher needs.
Teachers identified that while much of our admin structure and many of our institutional issues aren't necessarily my responsibility or authority, they would still like to have more regular meetings and check-ins with me on a 1:1 basis.

Encourages collaboration between and amongst faculty and administration.
Comments in this area ranged from "be more comfortable with executive decision-making" to "too directional to be fully collaborative", and from "I  like the approach of creating faculty task forces" to "delegate more transparently". What I take from these mixed messages is that I have work to do being clearer about when I am deciding, delegating, or being non-directional.

The last two growth areas get bundled together:

Offers appropriate feedback concerning curriculum and instructional issues.

Is able to offer useful feedback in lesson observations.
 While I was called "a master of objective observation", faculty were very clear that they would like me to be more present in their classrooms, do more observations, provide more feedback on instruction, and have more curriculum-design conversations - not to mention which, this would improve my understanding of both our program, and the developmental arc of our students.

NAIS 2013 Annual Conference presentation proposal

Today I submitted the following proposal to present at the NAIS 2013 Annual Conference (which will be in Philadelphia). Writing this was an interesting process, as my first draft - which flowed from ideas to writing quite quickly - was about twice as long as the maximum character limit allowed, so I wound up having to edit it down to the essential ideas (a good pre-lesson for what I'll need to do if/when I actually prepare this presentation). I'm hopeful that my proposal is selected, as sharing this work and engaging in conversation with the field of professionals will be an exciting opportunity!

1. Title: Changing School Culture At the Division Level

2.  Description of Presentation (1000 character maximum including spaces).

This presentation arises from the project I undertook for the 2011-12 NAIS Fellowship for Aspiring Heads. The first third will be an investigation and review of the concept of culture, including definitions of terms such as culture (values and beliefs that drive action) and climate (the feeling or tenor of a group), and identifying the levers that administrators can pull when trying to shift cultures. The middle third will be a case study of my work with the Elementary Division at The Berkeley School, including the action plan I created to manage this project, and the successes and failures I experienced. The final third will be an opportunity for participants to begin applying the concepts within a pragmatic framework for work at their school sites. The learning outcomes for participants include a theoretical basis for thinking about the concept of school culture, detailed understanding of a particular case, and tools and methods for initiating culture change at their sites.

3.  Conference Program Abstract (375 character maximum including spaces).

School culture needs to be cultivated and developed through intention and effort to support and align with a school’s mission. Learn about the theories behind how cultures form and mature, delve into a case study of one school’s work in this area, and leave with pragmatic tools and ideas for nurturing the culture of your school at a division-wide level.

Aug.22 Update: My proposal was accepted! Huzzah! I hope to see you at this workshop in February, and I'd love to begin a dialogue about it in advance, so be in touch if you have questions or ideas.

Math anxiety and brain function

A fascinating piece of research has just come out of the Stanford School of Medicine that confirms what seemed likely: math-specific fear interferes with the brain's information-processing capacity and its ability to reason through a math problem. In other words, math anxiety leads to decreased mental functioning in areas of problem solving, memory, and numerical reasoning when trying to engage in mathematical thinking!


What are the implications for classroom practice? First, we need to identify when students are experiencing math anxiety. Second, we need to educate students about the neurological impact that anxiety has on their brains (since it actually decreases their ability to successfully solve math problems) - we already know we don't like the experience of anxiety, but we need to understand how it actually affects us. Third, we need to teach students strategies to manage that anxiety.

One strategy I have been utilizing recently in my own practice of mindfulness (drawn from my reading of Fully Present: The art and science of mindfulness) that I think has potential application here is "R.A.I.N." R = recognize the emotion or experience. A = accept the emotion's existence (rather than suppress, repress, or fight it). I = investigate how the emotion makes you feel, on a physical level (not intellectual) - does your jaw get tight, breathing short, foot start to bounce, etc? N = non-identify, or tell yourself that this emotion and accompanying physical sensation is temporary and non-permanent, and that you are not that experience.

NAIS Annual Conference, Day Three

The final day of this year’s NAIS conference began right at 8:00 am with the first of the day’s three workshops. Since the theme of the conference is innovation, I choose “Innovative Schools, Innovative Students” by Jonathon Martin, Head at St Gregory’s (AZ). I’ve enjoyed reading Jon’s blog and his posts to the Independent School listserve, and was excited to hear what he had to say about innovation. His presentation was essentially an overview of the concepts presented in some select recently published books on innovation, including Drive, Where Good Ideas Come From, and The Innovator’s DNA, which was useful from the standpoint of a data-dump on the concepts, but not in thinking about how these ideas are specifically applicable within schools. Unfortunately, as he ran short on time he accelerated the pace and volume of his speaking – choosing content coverage over depth.

For my next workshop I attended “Innovator’s Challenge Promotes Cross-Curricular Collaboration and Innovation”, presented by Penny Summers and Burn Jones of The Canterbury School (NC). They told the story of how they attempted to foster curriculum improvement through a specific project that arose from their leadership team’s shared reading of Curriculum 21 by Heidi Hayes Jacob (a book that has been on my reading list for some time). Listening to the narrative of the project was interesting, and I especially appreciated the constraints that they built into the project; that teachers work cross-disciplinarily with another teacher, that they connect with an outside organization, and that the project be considered within the context of the real work of the professionals in the field (biologists, writers, etc).

I had have a wonderful lunch conversation with Mary, Anne, and Mo Lan from The Trinity School in Menlo Park. I had been on their campus for a CAIS accreditation training in October, and Anne lives in Oakland and worked at both Bentley and Beacon previously, and we built on those connections to discuss a range of issues, from accreditation to enrollment to strategic thinking.

For the final workshop of the conference, I picked “Moving The Mountain: Changing Faculty Culture from Within” by Alice Moore at Marin Country Day School (CA) and David Colon at Collegiate School (VA). This workshop took a widely divergent pedagogic approach from the others, in that the presenters posed a series of questions to the audience, giving us time to talk in small groups and then report back our answers, before sharing some other considerations and moving on to the next question. I appreciated the attempt to provide a structure that would allow for active thinking and engagement, in contrast to most of the other workshops of the conference, though my hope for an increased understanding of, or even a few pragmatic nuggets about shifting faculty culture was not satisfied.

The conference’s closing general session featured Amy Chua, Yale Law School professor and author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. After all the bad publicity her book had received, I was fully expecting to hear views that are widely divergent from my own, and thus was utterly shocked to hear how incredibly funny, self-deprecating, and thoughtful Amy actually was. Her perspective is far more complex than the media have depicted, and I found myself agreeing with many of the things she discussed, including the need to have high expectations for children, the importance of having them develop resiliency, the fact that genuine self-esteem comes from succeeding as a result of trying hard to do something challenging, the importance of balancing choice and freedom, and that happiness and success do not need to be mutually exclusive. Ultimately, her point is that Western parents have much to learn from Chinese parents, and vice-versa; that Chinese parents need to learn to nurture the whole child and cultivate the social and emotional lives of their children as well as the academic. In many ways, she was advocating for the exact sort of progressive education that we provide at TBS!

NAIS Annual Conference, Day Two

The theme of this year’s conference is innovation. The opening general session this morning began with an address by NAIS president Pat Bassett that made me feel extremely good about the work that we are doing at TBS. He began by proposing that the work of independent schools is to teach students to be “critical, creative and inventive thinkers”, which ties directly to our school-wide learning outcomes. He then went on to proclaim ten promising innovations in education:

1. adopting backward design and mapping of curriculum around skills, rather than subjects

2. documenting student outcomes via formative assessments and “demonstrations of learning” and digital portfolios

3. connecting appreciative inquiry, the strengths approach, and growth mindset – all subsets of the positivist psychology movement

4. globalizing independent schools

5. stage II greening of schools

6. “STEM and beyond” signature programming – the great differentiator of your program

7. professionalizing the profession – 6 or 7 day schedules to get all teachers with an affinity free on a certain day; different teams (brain based learning, flipped classroom, differentiated instruction)

8. public purpose of private education initiatives

9. online learning consortia for independent school-branded courses

10. teaching and using design thinking

I’ve italicized the five innovations on the list that we are currently utilizing, which I think is a great starting point for TBS given the enormous change pressures that we have experienced in the last five years. I also believe that we’ll be in position to begin pursuing items #6 and #8 above in the next year, in explicit initiatives and programs.

Unfortunately, I was entirely underwhelmed the presentation of the keynote speaker, Bill Gates. His talk was centered on four aspects of technology that he believes can revolution education: reimaging textbooks as interactive, scaling our best teachers via online videos, connecting thru social networks, and personalizing learning. While there are tremendous possibilities in these mechanisms, Bill’s storytelling was flat and lacked humor, his visuals were overly simplified, and he essentially dodged the tough questions during the Q+A. Here’s an example:

Q: What skills do you think will be needed in the future?

A: The basic ability to use the latest software.

After the opening session came the first one-hour workshop period of the day. I selected a workshop titled Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, presented by Helen Landry and Laurie Reider-Lewis. I struggled with buyer’s remorse for the first twenty minutes; though this workshop connected directly to one of my personal PD goals for the year, I was also interested in a workshop on changing school culture, and the initial introduction by the speakers didn’t instill confidence that the conversation would yield substantive growth in my understanding of the concept of mindfulness. It was only when we did the first exercise – a “body scan” – that I was able to slip into a more mindful mode, and thus become content with the structure of the workshop and open myself up to the learning possibilities it could present – for which I was promptly rewarded with several nuggets about using mindfulness with students. Being in this mindful state carried over for the remainder of the day, and had a positive impact on my engagement with the other workshops of the day.

After lunch and conversation with Mohammad, and browsing the exhibit hall, I headed to a workshop on implementing design thinking with students, given by Kim Saxe at Nueva School (CA). In 2007, Nueva partnered with the Design School at Stanford to launch a design lab, giving over 3500 square feet to a design studio. Learning how Nueva implements and teaches design thinking to students, and used it in the development of their own program, was inspirational and exciting. Design thinking is the process that Laurie Schoeffler and I are using to improve our K-5 literacy program this year, and this workshop gave me several good ideas about how to integrate the approach with our ongoing curriculum review as well.

For the final workshop of the day, Mohammad and I went to hear John Medina, author of the book Brain Rules (about whom, and which, I’ve blogged before). I’d read the book earlier this year, so I was a little disappointed by his presentation, as it was a case of “read the book, or go to class, but not both”. He focused on two of the twelve brain rules in his book – exploration and stress – and you can get the basic ideas of these concepts by watching the videos below.

The day closed with a series of social and professional connections featuring a revolving cast. First I met with Nancy Foy, a member of my Fellowship cohort, for a conversation about her upcoming transition to a Head of School position in Richmond, VA. After this I attended a gathering of progressive educators hosted by Peter Berner-Hays, head of The Little School in nearby Bellevue, to discuss marketing and presenting the idea of progressive education in modern culture. Next, I gathered three Bay Area educators – Steve Bileca from Brandeis Hillel, Jon Kohler from Redwood Day School (another Fellowship cohort member), and Damon Allswang from Beacon Day School – for a Mediterranean dinner at Lola’s Restaurant. Finally, I met up with three members of my Aspiring Heads cohort – Andrea Kelly from Packard (NY), Rehki Puri from the School at Columbia University (NY), and Michele Williams from Stevenson (CA) – for drinks and reflective sharing about our learning from the day.