Fwd: Kick Off Your Week: Visits to KKP schools

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Supt. Christina Kishimoto <reply@hawaiidoe.org>
Date: Tue, Sep 5, 2017 at 10:44 AM
Subject: Kick Off Your Week: Visits to KKP schools
To: 20048903@notes.k12.hi.us

VIEW EMAIL ONLINE Visit to Na'alehu El, Kea'au High A few days ago, I visited two schools on the Big Island that made me reflect on our priorities and the important work that lies ahead of us as an education community. I have a deep commitment to deliver on a vision of access to quality education for ALL Hawai'i keiki through three driving strategies: School Design, Student Voice and Teacher Collaboration. I hope that you share this commitment because only a community working together can ensure academic success for all students. There is no work more meaningful. When I visited Na'alehu Elementary School and Kea'au High School, I was invigorated as I talked with students about their aspirations to contribute to the world, to their local communities and to their families in significant and powerful ways! There are many questions what we will need to answer together: How do we help students find the pathway to achieve their personal goals? How do we design schools that deepen their areas of passion? How do we develop in them the skills and mindset to meet critical benchmarks on the way to becoming our future engineers, teachers, electricians, and software designers, as they articulated to me that day? What are the experiences that need to be part of their instructional studies? What content areas do they need to master to reach those higher level courses that will open up those opportunities? Who are the people that they need to interact with; the materials they need to be exposed to, manipulate, create; the concepts they need to struggle with, research, question, and work through? What opportunities do they have to create and design? At Na'alehu Elementary School the 6th grade students filled a classroom and opted to meet with me instead of taking their recess. (Yes, hard to believe — but perhaps their principal had something to do with this.) They had so much to share about their love for their school, their excitement about their future and their ideas about how to improve their school. To the question, "If you were principal, what would you change about your school?" I received the thoughtful and enthusiastic response, "We want more science!" While they also wanted a trampoline, the conversation focused on their love of science and wanting more time with science instruction. This is a testament to several things: Teachers at Na'alehu are doing a great job of exciting students around science; Students are eager to learn and create; and Students are very thoughtful when asked to provide feedback about instruction and their learning. Among the staff I spoke with at Kea'au High School, I had the pleasure to talk with a science teacher who is interested in developing a robotics elective. She has been teaching computer science, coding and robotics concepts, but in conversation I learned that she has had no formal training in coding, which I have also heard from teachers at other school visits. I need to ask, how are we supporting our teachers who are teaching these cutting edge technologies utilizing design thinking approaches? How does a teacher with impactful ideas around student engagement create a collaborative with other teachers around a new instructional approach? Where do teachers go to for innovation funds or to vet an innovative teaching concept? My time at Na'alehu El and Kea'au High helped me to reflect on the conditions that make great school designs possible in Hawai'i while also raising questions around how to provide quality support structures for students, teachers and leaders to continue to advance innovative practices in professional development, student empowerment, career pathways, applied learning, design thinking, technology infusion, and collaboration models. How does our collective focus on School Design, Student Voice and Teacher Collaboration impact how you deliver and structure your work this school year? FOLLOW US: Facebook | Twitter | Vimeo | Pinterest | LinkedIn | Google+      ONLINE: HawaiiPublicSchools.org This email was sent to all Hawai'i DOE staff. unsubscribe

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