Teaching and Learning: February 2018

Monday, February 26, 2018

Fwd: Kick Off Your Week: Education access for our homeless youth

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Supt. Christina Kishimoto <reply@hawaiidoe.org>
Date: Mon, Feb 26, 2018 at 10:53 AM
Subject: Kick Off Your Week: Education access for our homeless youth
To: 20048903@notes.k12.hi.us

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Education access for Hawai'i's homeless youth

One of the things that I enjoy doing during the weekends is getting around Honolulu on a Biki to the Farmer's Market in Kaka'ako, Chinatown to shop, Ala Moana Beach Park to swim, various museums and outdoor events, or just for a ride to take in the people, sights, and sounds of this great city. When I do, it is inevitable that I will come across a homeless person or family. The sight of someone living on the street makes me pause and I can't help but wonder about the stories behind each person's life. It was during one of these Biki rides a few weeks ago when I attended an 'ukulele music festival in Kaka'ako Waterfront Park that I came across a homeless woman among a group of people living in tents that was tending to her toddler. I thought about the students who attend our public schools, and the impact of fragile living situations on their access to quality education. Whether they're impeded by access to health care, permanent housing, dental care, vision care, haircuts, showers or a place to study, our homeless students need our support in ensuring that when they are in school, they are supported, welcomed, cared for, and highly prepared to be able to successful in their life.

There are about 3,000 homeless students in our HIDOE school system, with 74 percent of them on O'ahu (see chart for breakdown). Of those, 10 percent are unsheltered, 30 percent are sheltered, and 60 percent are "doubled up," which means they are living from home to home with relatives or friends for short periods of time. Their challenges are many: being unprepared due to missed school days, fear of getting their family in trouble if they disclose their living situation, or just a feeling of shame for having a living situation that is different from their peers.

homeless student population by county/charter As a community of public educators, we are committed to ensuring that students who do not have stable residency continue to have full access to public education, and as much as possible can remain in their home school. You may wonder how families register their children without proof of residence. Proof of residence is not required, but rather an address or location is accepted so that the school may stay in touch with family and extend services to support our students.

There is a federal law that is important to this work — the McKinney-Vento Act ensures educational stability for children and youth in homeless situations from PK to 12th grade. The law requires that we remove barriers to identification and enrollment while ensuring full participation in school. Our goal is to mitigate challenges that children and families face, including providing free meals, transportation if appropriate, communicating with and engaging families, and connecting them with social service agencies. At the HIDOE we have a dedicated state coordinator and a resource teacher for service planning. Last year, we received funding for 17 part-time Homeless Concern Liaisons distributed across the 15 complex areas to connect families to schools, assess needs and further develop support resources. I am greatly appreciative of legislative support for these positions. In addition, all schools across our state have a homeless support designee. Our school counselors and social workers are an important resource to engage families, and often visit shelters where families have temporary housing. Family engagement is critically important in a child's success.

To accomplish our work in providing quality access and support, we have many community and agency partners who work with us to provide transportation, tutoring, family support, homework help, school supplies, hygiene supplies, and housing outreach connections.

The Department of Human Services convenes the Hawai'i Interagency Council on Homelessness with a bold mission to prevent and end homelessness in Hawai'i. The Council seeks to accomplish its mission by coordinating government, private entities, community and homeless service providers, and persons experiencing homelessness. There is also an Interagency Council at the national level in which Hawai'i participates.

To think about

As we finalize the process of hiring all of our Homeless Concern Liaisons, we will continue to think about our next level of work to ensure that all of our students are supported within our learning system, experience empowerment through education, and have a voice to contribute to school design. Some of our next work will include thinking about how to:

Create viable alternatives during non-traditional school time for credit accrual for students in homeless situations who have had their instructional time disrupted; we are committed to having all of our students graduate
Ensure a safe environment for students to self identify as unaccompanied youth without fear, so that they can receive services and supports
Expand access to preschool offerings within the public school system — early engagement is key!
Differentiate responses to truancy and behavior offenses for students in homeless situations to support continued access to school
Share best practice models for schools to replicate and learn from; include sessions in the annual Educational Leadership Institute for HIDOE educational officers
Expand upon meaningful parent involvement and community involvement opportunities

The tri-level team that includes staff from the Office of Curriculum, Instruction and Support Services, in partnership with Complex-level staff and school-level liaisons, are committed to continue to engage with and expand upon powerful community partnerships to ensure that all students have equitable access to quality education. Differentiation of supports and of school designs is important in addressing equity and access.

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Tuesday, February 13, 2018

Fwd: Kick Off Your Week: Looking at School Design

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Supt. Christina Kishimoto <reply@hawaiidoe.org>
Date: Mon, Feb 12, 2018 at 3:01 PM
Subject: Kick Off Your Week: Looking at School Design
To: 20048903@notes.k12.hi.us

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Looking at School Design

In a variety of forums throughout this school year, I have made reference to a process for looking at your school model and I have asked you to think about how you would articulate your school design. If you are an academy designed high school, an IB school, a STEM school, or a Summit Learning Academy, among other models, you may have already developed language to frame your school design. Many schools throughout Hawai'i, though, have a more consistent approach to their model based on practices that have been in place historically at the school or that have been rolled out centrally by grade. What I am asking school teams to do is to reflect upon why your school's structure, theme, pedagogical approaches, resources, partners, and school day are designed in the way that they are. Essentially, is every aspect of your school designed for students?

I encourage you to look at your school design through four lenses as represented by the visual below. In doing so, would you agree that your school is purposefully designed to ensure that every student is highly engaged in a rigorous, creative and innovative academic curriculum, supported by a purposefully designed learning environment with powerful applied learning practices that are aligned to college and careers?

four quadrants of school design

Core Values and Mindset

An evaluation of your school model requires a consideration of both internal school culture and external community context. These would include clarity of leadership vision, clarity of school purpose, core beliefs and assumptions that drive decision-making, community values and traditions, community resources and availability of local partnerships, and community engagement approaches. It is also important when examining core values and mindset at a school to look deeply at the perceptions students have about themselves, about their peers, and what they believe is the perception of adults about the capabilities of the students. Think about how your school's core values and mindset shows up in what occurs during the normal course of a school day, what languages are spoken on campus, what cultural observations are embedded in how you do your work, and how families are celebrated. I like to think of core values as the sights, sounds, and feelings I experience on a school campus.

Curriculum and Learning Design

Once you have taken an honest look at core values and assumptions that drive the school design, take a look at your instructional structure next. This includes the priority given to the core work of teaching and learning, the definition of pathways that link courses to college and careers, the quality of the curriculum so that it can stand up to today's industry standards and 21st century workplace expectations, and the access and support structures that allow all students to engage in learning through the core curriculum design. Also take a look at how you allocate time for teachers to collaborate on both designing curriculum and identification of quality curriculum materials. Another aspect to the instructional structure is the learning design, i.e. student choice in curriculum, student collaboration, learning and exploration time, interdisciplinary learning activities, real world application of learning — and threaded throughout, rigor, rigor, rigor.

Infrastructure

It is easy to emphasize curriculum and learning as the most important aspects of a school design, but once that assessment is done, take a look at your assumptions of practice. The infrastructure that you put in place brings your instructional design alive. Think about what that calls for: how you use time and technology, select materials and resources, group students, define instructional spaces, design classrooms, team up teachers, and design professional development for your staff. Infrastructure is also about decision-making processes, governance and community, and parental engagement.

Student Learning Products and Voice

There is no better assessment of the quality of a school's design than to examine the learning products created by students and to hear what students have to say about how they are engaged in learning. At the end of the day, the curriculum is only as good as the engagement of students in rigorous, meaningful learning where they can apply their learning, test their ideas, think critically and design creatively and collaboratively. We know so much about effective pedagogy today, but it takes a school's collective commitment to embrace these practices so that every classroom and every child is engaged in applied learning, project-based designs, inquiry, essential questions, design thinking, community projects, and interdisciplinary research. School designs should also embed safe learning environments for academic showcases and academic competitions based on student created projects. Students continuously ask us for more voice in curriculum matters, including course development and self-directed learning opportunities. Take a look at your school and consider the ways in which student voice and choice are embedded assumptions of your school model.

A Word of Caution

One of the important aspects of school design is the consideration of local choice, voice and empowerment. Therefore, as you learn from other schools that have effective school models, I caution you not to outright replicate what another school is doing without taking a look at its application to your community. There are so many diverse and wonderful ways to deliver on a great school model. Think about the important non-negotiables, but then design for your local community.

Another word of caution is the field's battle cry to scale up, scale up! It's like that bad story we've all heard over and over again. "If a laptop cart shared by two classrooms is successful, imagine what we could do if we scale up to a one-to-one environment?!" In some circumstances it works because the instructional approach calls for this, in others we have too many unused devices. Instead of heeding to the cry to "scale up," focus instead on the design and purpose of each aspect of your school model so that learning is rigorous, engaging, life-changing and, yes, fun!

Wednesday, February 7, 2018

Fwd: Kick Off Your Week: Leading from the middle

Teri Ann Lin

6th Grade LA/SS Teacher
Wheeler Middle School

(202) 810-3025

teampueo.weebly.com

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Supt. Christina Kishimoto <reply@hawaiidoe.org>
Date: Tue, Feb 6, 2018 at 9:50 AM
Subject: Kick Off Your Week: Leading from the middle
To: 20048903@notes.k12.hi.us

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Kick Off Your Week header

Leading from the middle

If you are one of the just over 1,000 educators from Hawai'i who attended last week's two-day national AMLE Middle Grades Summit at the Hawai'i Convention Center, then you have certainly by now shared stories about the humorous keynote speaker, the numerous best practice sharing sessions, and your new learning that has invigorated your classroom plans.

When we talk about education planning, we often focus on early learning education and college and career pathways, yet the adolescent years of our students must receive equal attention. These are important formative years as our young people move from childhood into their teenage years, maneuvering through an increased sense of independence, questioning assumptions about their world, and realizing that they must develop a self that is independent from parents. It's a time for exploration, curiosity, questioning, and growing. The beauty of this time period in terms of the learning process is that students are ready to learn both independently and in groups. They are open to and excited by all types of exciting pedagogy from inquiry (they love open ended arguable questions!), to creativity (art, music, movement, design), to project-based learning (designing with friends!). The challenge and opportunity for teachers is how to keep changing up their teaching approach because adolescents transition from needing well defined structure and systems in grades 4 and 5 to needing more creative space in grades 6 through 8.

Adolescents are also highly susceptible to influencers. This is where character education, setting norms of respect and peer support, and creating a collaborative, positive culture built on concepts of equity and voice can create a dynamic, engaging learning environment in which students take ownership and contribute.

During the conference there was certainly agreement that to teach in the middle grades you have to bring a certain amount of your own quirkiness, high energy and love for the adolescent years. You also have to be highly flexible and love a change environment in order to embrace the explorers in our youth. Whether it is integrating social media, technology applications, cooperative learning, personalized learning, flexible grouping, student decision-making, peer grading, or movement, the point made over and over again is that middle/intermediate schools have to use time, curriculum, space, and student work in a way that is designed around the adolescent.

Of the many great sessions presented by teachers from throughout the U.S., I want to highlight one by our very own Washington Middle School teachers Jyoti Castillo, Rebecca Arlander and Lucy Alexander, focused on Cultivating Collaborative Civic Spaces for Adolescent Learners. (You can view it on the DOE Intranet here.) This team shared their best practice using the inquiry process to engage student voice and choice through student designed essential questions, critical thinking exercises and argumentative position papers, all within a dynamic group. The power of their practice is in the student engagement approach, the rigor of the lesson, the opportunity for students to explore their thoughts and positions, and the use of multiple and varied source documents. I left this session wanting to enroll in their classes!

As our middle/intermediate schools continue to work on designing schools uniquely for the adolescent, I look forward to hearing about your innovative practices that are providing rigorous, engaging learning environments for our middle schoolers.

Looking for summary reviews of recent research articles on the adolescence? http://www.amle.org/Publications/ResearchSummaries/TabId/621/PgrID/2110/PageID/1/Default.aspx.