Schools of the Future annual conference

We stayed until the end.

Leslie Witten, the library media specialist at Island Pacific Academy, and I attended the final session after an energizing day of professional development.  We were rewarded with gold at the end of the rainbow: Rob Mancabelli’s session on Personal Learning Networks.

Exhausted and happy

He explained that all classrooms are now blended; students don’t ever leave their online networks, regardless of school appropriate use policies for mobile devices. Modeling for students how to utilize these devices as tools to learn what they want to know is as valuable a skill as teaching them how to analyze a text.

It is not only a small radical group of educators who believe this but the very traditionally minded National Council of Teachers of English is also on board. According to their position statement: 
Twenty-first century readers and writers need to:

• Develop proficiency with the tools of technology

• Build relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively and cross-culturally

• Design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes

• Manage, analyze and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information

• Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multi-media texts

• Attend to the ethical responsibilities required by these complex environments

It was a great session and I’m glad we lingered long enough to catch it.

Community of Learners

Our independent school is very honored to receive the Schools of the Future grant (currently in year 4 of the 5-year cycle) which is dedicated to promoting 21st century skills in Hawaii's independent schools. As part of the grant the 13 receiving schools meet three times a year as a Community of Learners (CoL) to discuss what is working and how to improve. This time, Dale from DP art and Darci from elementary joined me in a day of discussion about backwards designing for more meaningful assessment.

Dale and I were asked to select a discipline and backwards plan a unit based on the mission and values of our school. This picture is what we came up with in terms of formative and summative assessments for a unit he his planning in art.

Honolulu Museum of Art

Our literary magazine class went to the Honolulu Museum of Art Spalding House (previously known as the Contemporary Museum) for "Words off the wall: an evening of art, literature, and entertainment." It was an art opening for their new show which has everything to do with words and the educational programing director partnered with Mixed Innovative Arts to ensure there were plenty of hands on activities for students.

It was such a joy to go to a museum with students and have people come up to them and ask them to write on things. The Friday night field trip gave students lots of ideas to promote the literary magazine; a word wall with push pins went up in our school hallway the next week!

Our class magazine went digital

Open publication - Free publishing - More art

Click on the image to see what our literary magazine class put together last year. "Banana Phone" on page 9 is one of my favorites.

HAIS Learning Walk

On Friday last week I visited Le Jardin Academy (LJA) in Kailua as part of the HAIS learning walk designed to encourage communication between independent schools. Visiting other schools is such a healthy way to get new ideas for the classroom--I loved it.  In each room a student “classroom ambassador” came up to us and explained the unit question, the area of interaction, and a brief summary of the work at the moment--the teacher just kept teaching.

LJA is doing so many things well it was nice to just walk around and observe them in action.  Things going well:

 1. An environment of collaboration
Several teachers had breaks between classes and shared lesson plans, book lists, summative assessments, and rubrics with our group. 

 2. Classrooms you can decorate
Many of the rooms we visited seemed to be inhabited by only one teacher and they put up student work, rules, and decorations that made the space unique and fun. At the brain conference speakers argued that what is on the classroom walls does affect students’ aptitude for learning.

 3. Printing access for students in every classroom
 We watched students write an in-class essay on their computers and print it in the same room. Very efficient.

4. Maximum 16 students to a classroom
 The classrooms themselves were small, but they fit the manageable number of bodies there.

 5. An administration firmly in favor of 21st century skills
 I don’t know if any school ever has all faculty members, parents, and administration personal moving together towards just one objective, but it appeared that this was very high on the school's list of priorities, and it showed in the student's focus on the material.

More from Christine Carter

Continued from last week, this was the last of Christine Carter’s suggestions for how to increase happiness in schools.

#3) Foster a culture of kindness

Apparently the research shows that you get a little squirt of dopamine in your brain every time to do things for other people. It boosts your immune functioning like an anti-depressant. Also, people who have received from others are more likely to give to others. This is all a very cursory overview, but similar to the way stress has harmful effects on the body and mind, positive emotions do too. The more students get out of the “fight or flight” mentality the more space they have to absorb the lesson of the day. Carter’s specific suggestions to use with students were:

 A) Show students how kindness can spread by modeling it. It can be small, like smiling at people a lot, giving up your seat on the bus, or tipping outrageously.

B) Help students broaden their giving vocabulary. Talk about different ways they can give (being forgiving, celebrating someone’s birthday etc.). Ask students: what kind thing did you do for someone else today? What is one kind thing that someone did for you?

Carter chose to present on the conceptual level rather than the research level and I’m glad because I was able to follow everything she said. I hope to read her book soon!

Raising Happiness in Schools

I feel so energized by my trip to San Francisco and the Learning & the Brain conference that I’m dusting off my blog to document the highlights. The focus this year was "Educating the Whole Child/ Student: Using Brain Science for Smarter, Happier and Healthier Learners." I have dreamed of attending this event since I first heard about it four years ago and it met my expectations as an inspiring opportunity for professional development (all except for the fact that the Fairmont Hotel doesn’t provide internet for a conference of this magnitude which was perplexing and frustrating).

Christine L. Carter, PhD gave a talk entitled “Raising Happiness in Schools.” Her primary thesis is that while we once assumed that getting students into good colleges would be followed by good jobs and lead to happiness, the research shows that happiness is more of a precursor to success than a resultant. According to Dr. Carter there are 3 ways to increase happiness in schools.

#1) Motivate students using the concept of a growth mindset as opposed to a set mindset. Students who operate under the assumption that it is their hard work that produces results as opposed to their innate talent tend to outperform students who think they are just “smart.”
Specific strategies:
A) Praise their specific process. “Nice job! You must have tried really hard” as opposed to “you are so smart!”
B) Create an environment where it is ok to make mistakes or fail as long as you get up and try again.



C) Help students identify their own fixed-mindset and beliefs about themselves. Many students believe they “suck at math” or “can’t sing” but really they just haven’t put in the hours of effort it takes to develop a skill.

#2) Consciously teach and practice gratitude
The idea here is that we foster what we see. If we only see hassles in life, we will find them. If we are looking for joys, they are all around. Some ways to practice gratitude are:
A) Positive affirmations

B) A gratitude box in the classroom where students can put in things they are thankful for
C) Gratitude posters in the classroom to be written on at any time.
D) A time at dinner when family members talk about three good things that happened to them in a day.
E) When people ask you how you are instead of telling them how busy you are, tell them something you are grateful for.

365grateful.com from hailey bartholomew on Vimeo.