Teaching Life Skills at School

By Steve Atwater | Published: October 29, 2011

Last Thursday I was in Homer to lead a parent training.  Toward the middle of the presentation I asked the group to identify the skills that our students will need to be successful after they graduate from high school. A lot of good conversation ensued, but what was most interesting, was a sharp disagreement between two parents over whether a school or a family is responsible for teaching life skills.  Both parents clearly agreed that our students need more in this area but had different views on the role that school should play with educating the whole child.  

This dilemma is of course not new and schools, as you know, have been asked to do more and more in this area.  While it is easy to dismiss the teaching of life skills, for example character, as not within a school’s domain, it’s my experience that students lacking in these skills usually do less well than do their peers who have them.  My sense is that the parent who was arguing in favor of our schools teaching these skills recognized that many of our students are not learning these skills at home and hence, need to acquire them at school.  One of the advantages of our district is that by and large, our students have a personal experience at school that includes employees knowing their names and layers of support to prevent them from slipping through the cracks.   I support the teaching of life skills at school and know that our smaller size allows this to be a more seamless effort with our core than it would be in a larger setting.

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Keep it simple does not mean school is dull

By Steve Atwater | Published: October 23, 2011

A couple of weeks ago I used this space to state that schools need to be wary of trying to do too much, that it is imperative that folks not lose sight of what matters most at school.  Since then, I’ve heard from a few that took what I wrote a bit too literally by asking whether I was suggesting that school be reduced to teaching the basics.  While I appreciate this interpretation, this is not at all what I meant. 

Schools have a captive audience of students and as such, are attractive locations for providing the students support in a myriad of skills and awareness type activities.  It would not be hard for a principal to find something or someone that is an add-on to the district’s curriculum for each day of the week.  My point in keeping it simple is that we must be selective in taking on new programs or activities.  Is Character Counts a good thing for a school?  Absolutely.  I  know that our principals who use this program feel it is well worth the effort.  Is an assembly to celebrate national gerbil week a good use of school time, absolutely not.  And while I write this tongue in cheek, it is not too distant from some of the tugs that our schools receive.

Our schools are tasked with the enormous responsibility of educating our children.  Let’s ensure that we don’t dilute the school day to the point that this responsibility becomes impossible to meet.

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The Big Shift

By Steve Atwater | Published: October 16, 2011

As the global economy struggles to find firm footing, it is clear that what lies ahead will not resemble what we knew in the past.  I read this week (Thomas Friedman, NY Times) that some are calling this stage of the global transition the “Big Shift.”  Friedman writes that during this time there is “growing stress because we are trying to operate with old practices that are increasingly dysfunctional.”  To a lesser degree, this big shift is an apt way to describe today’s schools.   Educators are trying to figure out how to embrace the digital world and changing learning styles of students while working within a school system that (because of its structure) is not accommodating to change. 

For the past several years our teachers have worked hard to utilize the power of the digital world in their classrooms and are doing so with varying degrees of success.  On the one hand, I can point to successes such as what I heard in Seward on Thursday night where a student marveled at how a teacher is using a SmartBoard as a part of instruction.  Also at this meeting, one of the teachers shared that the staff at school was aggressively utilizing digital tools to improve their craft.  Another good example is from here in the central peninsula.  Next week three of our high schools will share instruction through a video feed.  The public can participate in this as well.  But on the other hand, I am encountering several teachers who are frustrated at a lack of training in how to use digital tools and are generally unsure of how to best utilize the digital world where most of our students live.

As we continue to move forward with the inclusion of digital learning, we need to remove the archaic pieces of school structure that prevent us from getting to where we need to be.  Does it make sense to separate students by age?  Does it make sense to teach content to secondary students without any tie to the other courses? Should content be delivered digitally with the face-to-face time presereved for guided practice and discussion? Just a few of the structure related questions that educators are grappling with and in some cases answering.

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Keep It Simple

By Steve Atwater | Published: October 10, 2011

Last week, soon after Steve Jobs died, a friend forwarded me an email that was a long list of Jobs’ most notable quotes.  It included the following that struck me as pertinent to our improvement efforts at KPBSD.  “That’s been one of my mantras — focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”– BusinessWeek interview, May 1998

As we strive to improve our students’ learning experience, it is very easy to be distracted by all the tugs that come from the myriad of stakeholders who want to have a say in what goes on in our schools.  While we must be receptive to our schools being more than places to learn academics, it is critical that we do not let the external forces compromise this primary purpose.  As Jobs said, we need to keep it simple so that the students can truly master what is most important.   This can be done by protecting the time that our teachers give to instruction.  We all expect our teachers to be creative and innovative.  Let’s ensure that we do not let that which depresses these two skills get in the way.

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Positive Behavior Intervention and Supports

By Steve Atwater | Published: October 1, 2011

One of the on-going challenges that our some of our schools face is how to work with students who consistently struggle to behave in an appropriate way while in school.  The amount of attention that these mostly younger students can command is daunting and can leave a principal and staff at their wits end.  While our resources to work with challenging students are good, it is often difficult to find a way to help those children with the most severe behavior find success in the classroom.  Several of our schools however, are implementing Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports (PBIS) as a way to help our youngsters cope with impulsively poor behavior.

PBIS is similar to our Response to Intervention model in that it has tiers or levels of data driven activity.  At the first level is a school-wide effort that sets appropriate behaviors within the school.  The second level is a series of interventions for students who do not respond to the primary behavior instruction.  The third level provides individual support for students who do not respond to the two lower levels.  The reasons why children struggle to keep their behavior in line with accepted norms while at school are complicated and varied.  The PBIS program however, is a great way for a school to provide a framework from which to offer the needed behavior support to all its students.

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Insistent but patient with collaboration

By Steve Atwater | Published: September 24, 2011

One of my expectations for our principals is that they foster a collaborative leaning community among their school’s staff.  According to research, there is lots of evidence to show that collaboration, when done well, will positively impact student achievement. What I am finding is that it is easy to mistakenly assume that the congenial work environment that results from collaboration will have this intended impact.  So what then, is effective collaboration? Rick DuFour’s definition: collaboration is “a systematic process in which teachers work together to analyze and impact professional practice in order to improve our individual and collective results”[1] nicely summarizes what it is about and hinges on the word systematic.   I know that maintaining the discipline to systematically follow collaboration’s processes is difficult.

For the past two years the district’s leadership team has skirted the edges of working as a collaborative group.  We are now going back to the drawing board, so to speak, and are committed to getting it right.  Included with this new focus is our recognition that we need to collectively embrace learning as a part of our weekly meeting.  Our meetings then, need to be more than sharing information and making decisions. 

I read this week that baby boomers enjoy being self-sufficient and tend to have a difficult time embracing collaboration.  With many of our staff in this age bracket (me included), we need to be insistent but patient in taking the steps to help our schools become collaborative learning communities.

[1] DuFour, R (2003). ‘Collaboration lite’ puts student achievement on a starvation diet.  Leading Edge, 24, (4), 63-64

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Six Hours in April

By Steve Atwater | Published: September 18, 2011

Last week I wrote about Finland’s successful approach to educating its country’s children.  I failed to mention however, that the Finns do not use standardized tests.  It is ironic then, that our country’s obsession with testing is not leading to a higher level of student learning.  In the U.S., standardized tests results are the primary source for determining how well a school is performing. I regularly cite test scores as comparative evidence that our students are doing well.  Looking ahead, it is now probable that these test scores will be used to determine if a teacher is doing well.  While on the surface, this correlation of teaching and student test scores seems logical (it is after all, fair to expect good results) I am not so sure that this move to tie teachers to standardized test scores will lead to a higher level of learning.  This will be particularly true if the tests continue to consist of multiple choice or short answers.

The biggest complaint concerning testing is that it narrows the curriculum.  Teachers feel the pressure of the test and focus on those concepts and items that will be tested.  If teacher evaluation is to include student performance on tests, then it is fair to expect the curriclum to get even tighter. I am okay with the move to tie student performance to a teacher’s evaluation, but it must include multiple sources of student information and not the result of a multiple choice test.  Six hours in April is not a tell-all event to determine teacher effectiveness.

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Whatever It Takes

By Steve Atwater | Published: September 10, 2011

The September edition of Smithsonian Magazine includes an article (A+ for Finland) that profiles the Finnish education system.  Because Finland’s students regularly outscore their peers from around the world on the Program for International Student Assessment, the country’s school system is looked to as one of the best.  The article points out several differences between the Finnish and US education systems.  For me, the most notable of these is how the country selects and prepares its teachers.  But what I found most interesting, was the description of the Finn’s whatever it takes attitude that they employ with their struggling learners. Their all hands on deck approach is working. 

Although we are a long way from being mentioned in the same conversation as Finland, I feel that KPBSD is doing a good job of doing what it takes for our younger, struggling learners.  We can show that our Response-to-Intervention process that we employ with our primary students is leading to positive results.  The number of special education referrals that we have for students who are emotionally disturbed, or with learning disabilities is falling.  It is fair to say that our intervention efforts are paying off.   I know that all of us at KPBSD are trying to improve our school district.  It is good to see that some of what we are doing may in fact belong in this conversation of what is best in education.

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Balancing the Art with the Science of Teaching

By Steve Atwater | Published: September 3, 2011

A few years ago Senator Begich invited me to attend a small meeting to share ideas on how best to reauthorize No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Much of the attendees’ comments focused on the negative impact of NCLB and predictably bemoaned the Act’s narrowing of the curriculum and the shaming of schools to do better.  While I agree with the negative effect of NCLB, I offered that in many ways, the act was positive for schools.  I am convinced that it forced administrators and teachers to be more scientific about schooling and hence, far more analytical about how and where to expend improvement energy.  In many ways, the discussion mirrors the recurring conversation that we have at the building level on how to balance the art with the science of teaching.

At KPBSD we are working to obtain this balance by insisting that the science of teaching is a driving force in the preparation of instruction while encouraging  the art of teaching to be the driving force behind instructional delivery.  I don’t feel that our teachers can have success with our students without this balance.  When thinking about our favorite teachers I suspect that we inevitably think about the art of their approach toward teaching.  What we may not see or been aware of however, is that these good teachers constantly use science to refine their art.

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CTE, What is Next?

By Steve Atwater | Published: August 28, 2011

On Tuesday our Career and Technical Advisory Committee will meet to discuss how best to use new state money for Career and Technical Education (CTE).  The meeting will offer the group a chance to look ahead and, if appropriate, begin to set a new direction for the district’s CTE.

For the past several years CTE has been recognized as an underutilized part of our students’ secondary school experience.   But due to relatively tight budgets and a comfort with what we know and have, our approach toward CTE has been fairly traditional.  That is, the industrial arts classes that we often call shop make up much of our CTE offerings.  There is an increased interest however, in having CTE more seamlessly integrated into the regular curriculum.  Rather than have CTE be a thing that you do at the end of the building in shops or home ec rooms, it can be a career pathway of selected courses which explore and prepare a student for a career in for example, the health field.  This pathway would necessarily be application based, but it could also be used to meet graduation requirements in math and science.

The small size of our secondary schools limits what we can offer our students.  It is critical then, that what we decide on for what is next is both pressing and realistic.

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