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Instructional Technology - International Education - Wellness

Category: Professional Development (page 1 of 5)

Professional Learning: Improving Your Wellness Program

July 6, 2023 / / 0 Comments

How well is your elementary wellness program succeeding in helping your students construct their wellness toolkits to exercise their character strengths within the PERMAH pillars? In addition, where are your students regarding personal growth and thriving? Designing a wellness program is a vast task, with implementation being a vital component. Another critical aspect of program building and implementation that schools sometimes fail with is the follow-through to measure the effects upon the stakeholders.

Accountability, thus, is central to the success of the program. One way to pull in the lessons learned from the program rollout is to periodically have staff reflect, share and create together to improve your wellness curriculum.

The following is one approach for an elementary staff workshop to start the improvement process for your wellness program that you can possibly adapt for your staff as they strive to integrate the character strengths and PERMAH pillars into the culture of their classrooms. Measuring how effective your wellness program is for your students is another aspect of accountability. A future blog post will cover this most important topic.

Wellness Integration Reflection and Improvement Workshop

If your number of staff members is not too large, set up six tables where you usually do your professional learning workshops. If your staff is large, you need to set up two or more sets of six tables.

Let’s go with a smaller staff for this workshop description – one with a set of six tables and your staff divided into six groups. It is up to you to decide the parameters of the group makeup. Do you go with current grade level teams accompanied by specialists teachers, or do you mix things up by assigning group members from each grade level? An additional criterion could be to try and get a diverse mix of skills and character strengths within each group.

The first stage is to review the current PRIME integration strategies (the ones that work for most character strengths). The goal is to improve your instruction bringing the strengths into the culture of your classrooms. The teams also review the character strengths integration strategies specific to particular strengths (e.g., creativity). Each table has posters listing each PRIME and specific character strengths integration strategies. The teams at each table first rate each strategy for effectiveness, giving them a green for working well, a yellow for working so-so, and a red for not working.

The next step is to improve each strategy focusing on those receiving the yellow and red designations. The group works to improve each strategy writing their improved approaches to the strategy listings on the poster papers. Teams delist red strategies that cannot be improved.

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The second stage is the round-robin aspect of the workshop. Each table will be home to one PERMAH pillar listed on poster paper. You will need to assess how long stage one will take to decide whether to try and tackle this second stage after your work on the first stage or save this activity until another day. The goal is to review how individual character strengths can be applied within each PERMAH pillar. With your staff already having implemented your wellness program by first teaching the character strengths followed by teaching the PERMAH pillars and how character strengths can be exercised with each pillar, your staff should have enough experience to now reflect and improve upon their efforts.

Each team spends a designated amount of time at each PERMAH table, focusing on each specific pillar. The facilitator can predetermine how much time is spent at each table or assess how much time each team needs per table once the process begins. An example is one group working at the Relationships table. The first step is to share and record on the poster paper which strengths and how each group member is teaching them to their students to engage within the pillar. The next step is to collectively comment upon and refine the instructional techniques that are being shared. The final step is to discuss character strengths not listed by anyone that their students could exercise to enhance their engagement within their assigned PERMAH pillar. Strategies to teach these new strengths into the pillar also would be written on the poster paper. Once this work is completed, each group moves to another PERMAH pillar table to follow the same multi-stage procedure.

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The final stage is to regroup by grade level and assign specialists to grade-level teams in which they teach many of their students. You will need to assess how long stages one and two take to decide whether to try and tackle this third stage or save this activity until another day. The goal of this stage is to have each team spend time to devise new character strength integration strategies to use in their classrooms. The strategies can be PRIME in that they will work for most, if not all, of the character strengths, or they can be specific to individual character strengths. Team members present their new strategies to be refined by the team to be written on the provided “New Strength Integration Strategies” poster paper if the majority feel the strategy is doable and on par or better than current integration activities.

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The wellness coach and wellness team meet later to review the workshop(s) outcomes. Further refinements are made, if needed, to the information on the poster papers. The final listing of improved and new strategies is then added to your web portal. I am guessing you have some website or online resource that lists the PRIME integration and those specific to the individual strengths, like my Wellness@ES website.

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Instructional Coach for Wellness – Standards and Job Description

September 5, 2022 / / 0 Comments

I am revisiting my blog post on Instructional Coach for Wellness with this offering.

I was updating the standards section of my portfolio the other day when I remembered something interesting about the ISTE coaching standards. The standards are for K-12 instructional technology coaches. They have been updated over the years to the point that they really are pretty flexible, applicable, and accurate to the role, in my opinion. I am no longer a tech coach, but my takeaway is that the ISTE standards fit nicely in my role as a wellness coach in K-12 schools.

A Captain Obvious moment, yes, as the standards are all about coaching, but as I don’t know of any organization coming up with school wellness coaching standards, it seems like a good starting place for wellness coaches working with admin to design their job descriptions. I searched for wellness coaching standards to find companies that provide courses to gain certification, but their focus is mainly on life coaching/counseling for clients. I did not find any organization with information on wellness coaching in schools.

I can say from speaking with an international school recruiter that schools are, in fact, hiring wellness coaches.

I’ve written a great deal about this in this blog and through my Wellness@ES site. As I unpack what being an instructional coach for wellness might entail, I see a significant portion of it being connected to my vision of the school wellness program being integrated into the regular curriculum and school culture. I see the primary focus for wellness coaches to be similar to that of tech coaches, with the job being to coach the teachers to bring wellness principles into their regular classroom instruction. This can involve co-teaching, but the primary instruction is from the classroom or advisory teacher. The role also consists in designing professional learning opportunities for teachers.

A portion of this coaching involves lesson design and finding opportunities to highlight learning opportunities pulled from the wellness program. I previously shared the integration similarity between TPACK and my WPACK (Wellness-Pedagogy-Content Knowledge) approach that I bring to the collaboration table. For me, the WPACK descriptor helps paint the picture a bit more of how the character strengths and the PERMAH pillars of Positive Psychology can naturally fit into one’s teaching.

My bias and vision might not fit with what schools are doing as I suspect many are buying a SEL – wellness curriculum that the wellness coaches teach in each division. This, in my mind, looks like the old-style elementary guidance counselor rolling into classrooms periodically to conduct the prescribed lessons from the purchased curriculum. In middle and high schools, the wellness curriculum might be delivered through advisory by the advisory teachers, or possibly it is taught by the health/PE teachers during their classes. I don’t know the standard approach, especially in international schools.

My bottom line is that I am curious to learn how school leaders are finding ways to enhance their students’ wellness and, hopefully, their staff members. With international schools, I see this effort being extended to the greater community, including parents. If international schools are hiring wellness coaches, what do their job descriptions look like, and what standards are in place to guide them in fulfilling their job description? And, of course, how do they measure how successful their efforts are?

As I didn’t follow up in my original post to list the ISTE coaching standards and how they can fit a wellness coach, I will do so here.

4.1 Change Agent – The ISTE focus on improving instruction definitely means bringing about change in teaching and the classroom culture. I see the wellness coach also being a change agent, but to a lesser degree if one’s school follows the old model of the guidance counselor being “in charge” of wellness/SEL by providing the instruction and possibly not collaborating with elementary teachers and MS/HS advisory teachers. The WPACK model I mentioned previously has the wellness coach co-designing aspects of unit plans to integrate the character strengths and PERMAH via PRIME Integration Strategies into the units of study and culture of the classrooms. This approach leads to change, with classroom teachers leaders in wellness implementation efforts.

4.2 Connected Learner – ISTE tech coaches network through PLCs and PLNs to stay on top of innovations in pedagogy and technology. I see wellness coaches doing the same though the world of wellness coaching is relatively new compared to efforts to bring technology innovations into our schools. I wonder what networks of K-12 schools sharing information on Positive Psychology are out there. I am reaching out to Character Lab now to see if someone will speak to me about their network of schools if they have one.

4.3 Collaborator – This is the biggie! Like tech coaches, I see wellness coaches sitting at the collaboration table to find ways to naturally embed wellness learning opportunities into the regular LA, social studies, math, etc., curriculum. There are many possibilities for integration, as in how about some strength spotting characters in book studies? What was the “shadow side” of some strengths presented by some historical figures? When talking about scientific relationships and connections, how about connecting to the R in PERMAH to hook the interest of your students? 🙂

4.4 Learning Designer – Take what I just wrote for collaboration and add personalized to the ISTE call for student agency. Active learning to have your wellness coaches help co-design student-centered and constructivist lessons. The biggest draw for students to learn about wellness is that the main topic is themselves! What a connection and interest builder. 😉 Wellness from a PosPsych perspective is about learning, engaging, and practicing character strengths within the life domains of PERMAH. So once your program moves past the first stage of teaching the character strengths and domains,  you get to move into full-on experiential learning as students consistently practice and apply their knowledge in their lives. I am currently working with a Vietnam-based non-profit that provides educational services to students living in orphanages. We collaborate to design and teach a curriculum that hits this ISTE standard with students immersed in discovery learning activities. Note that the curriculum website is messy, with some translations and few graphics. It really is a workspace and “sandbox” for my Vietnamese partners to work with.

4.5 Professional Learning Facilitator – This standard is a differentiator between what conventional school counselors do and what a big part of an instructional coach for wellness does. This is not to say that guidance counselors do not provide professional learning opportunities. But I wonder how many counseling graduate school programs offer complete courses in instructional design and adult learning to teach counselors how to collaborate with classroom teachers to integrate the ASCA standards into the regular curriculum. This is where counseling and instructional technology intersect so well for the role of the wellness coach. I have mentioned in previous posts about the Geelong Grammar School’s approach to wellness program development in which the school goes through learning, living, teaching, and embedding the principles of PosPsych into the school’s culture. The first three stages involve adult learning first to learn and practice the principles to design ways to bring them into one’s teaching. This means lots of planning for personal and professional learning. As mentioned in previous posts, my approach would be to personalize and differentiate adult learning as much as possible. This involves the creation of a wellness resource website for adults to choose when, where and what they want to learn.

4.6 Data-Driven Decision-Maker –  Yes, of course, use data to drive your initial wellness program design efforts to guide your plan’s adaption throughout the implementation process. Where the technology coach is helping with academic achievement in which we have many assessment tools, we do not have many significant group ways to measure the well-being of the students and adults in our communities. There are some instruments out there, but this is an area where I have limited experience. And I can say that in listening to a couple leaders from Geelong Grammar School and the Institute of Positive Education a couple years ago, they didn’t have much information on assessment and general measurement either. Their Positive Education Enhanced Curriculum (PEEC) for early and primary students did not have any assessments, if my memory is correct, from reading through it a year and a half ago. But perhaps they have a measurement component now. My point isn’t to point fingers but to say that they are natural leaders in wellness education, and they were very upfront about how difficult it is to measure well-being in children. I get excited at the possibility of working with MS/HS students and adults to design a personal wellness inventory based on the idea of everyone having a wellness plan. This inventory could look similar to the program with the PERMAH construct and how one rate the use of specific character strength applications within each pillar. Working to do the same with elementary students could be challenging. Still, the more effective we are in teaching the character strengths and the pillars, the more the students will use wellness vocabulary in their language to the point of being able to self-evaluate their well-being to some degree. The struggle with all age groups is trying to construct a pre-assessment of one’s well-being when the students don’t have a language yet to describe their well-being. The folks at Character Lab offer a Student Thriving Index, and Dr. Duckworth has a grit scale.

4.7 Digital Citizen Advocate – I show my age and time in the tech field when I say we need to stop saying “digital” citizenship. It is just “citizenship,” as our students live in the analog and digital world with the fluency of movement, so they are one world. Moving on… the wellness coach’s prime directive is to help students with their personal development to build out their wellness toolkits to thrive in their lives. So yes, this also means helping them become good citizens. My take on digital citizenship efforts is that much of the focus is on assisting students in seeing how their actions affect others. Many character strengths and PERMAH pillars come into play to help students make healthy decisions when interacting with others. I also see the need for an internal focus to help students and adults learn about how they can engage their strengths within the PERMAH pillars to positively affect their digital wellness.

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Wellness Program Development and Implementation

May 12, 2022 / / 0 Comments

After writing and podcasting about wellness and sharing lots of crazy ideas over the past several years, I think it is time to take a stab at organizing some of my strategies into one post to possibly help schools when planning to design and implement a wellness program. I do this with little experience in wellness program design while knowing that multiple books, dissertations, and articles have been written about implementing new programs. And yes, there are consultants in the business and education worlds who specialize in program development and implementation, with some providing guidance specifically for wellness. What I am offering is not a set plan. It is a menu of ideas to choose from that can go into a project to be implemented as a wellness program. 🙂

Looking at starting a Positive Psychology/Education-oriented wellness program takes me to the work of the educators at Geelong Grammar School (GGS) and their Institute of Positive Education. I searched and found the following resources about their wellness program development efforts. Look to definitely read what these PosEdu pros have to say! They use the term Positive Education as the application of Positive Psychology into the field of education.

I also looked to the work of Dr. David Perkins and Dr. Jim Reese in their article entitled “When Change Has Legs,” and my interview with Dr. Reese on the EdTech Co-Op podcast to help guide my thinking on implementation strategies. Another helpful implementation article from the Harvard Business School is “5 Critical Steps in the Change Management Process“.

My approach always is to find what is practical and actionable to bring timely results for students and adults.

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-Decide on whether you will include the parents and/or staff in growing their wellness.

–Form a wellness committee with representatives of all stakeholders to design a community-wide wellness plan. Form a more focused “wellness team” within the committee of interested staff to be the drivers of the process. I have not been on a school and community-wide committee for some years that included students, but I have heard of schools bringing them on to some committees. With no such experience, I am guessing that selected high school students could be full-on members of a wellness committee. Perhaps one could put forth the case for mature and confident Middle Schoolers. Hence, I wonder if there is a way to have a side student advisory committee that also includes older elementary students where input is received on ideas from the larger wellness committee. Again, I don’t have any experience with student representatives. Still, I think students need to be a part of the process, especially to get their ideas on how a wellness program would be received and how to tailor it to the students’ lives. Along the same lines, I would think about forming a separate parent advisory group with which the parents of the wellness committee and administrators connect for their ideas and to use as a sounding board.

-Have your instructional technologists represented on your wellness committee. There is a lot of common ground between their student curriculum on (digital) citizenship and their providing of workshops for parents with what your instructional coaches for wellness cover especially with digital wellness for students, staff, and parents.

-Get your leadership organized, as in who will be the political and the practical leaders of the implementation process. Dr. Perkins and Dr. Reese list the responsibilities of each, so do look to read their article. As a practitioner, I always focus on finding current leaders and others with the potential to apply their Character Strengths of leadership and teamwork to further craft implementation strategies while building accountability for the change process.

–Define what wellness means for your community connecting to the principles of Positive Psychology (my shorthand is “PosPsych”). I think that sometimes committees tend to think too big and broad in the scope of what they want to cover. This is understandable. I know of a wellness consortium that brings financial, environmental and spiritual into the usual Physical – Intellectual – Emotional – Social (PIES) approach to how we categorize parts of the whole student. I would advise against doing this for many reasons, with one big one being that PosPsych is research-supported to describe the domains of life that, if lived well, will lead to wellness when engaging one’s Character Strengths. Schools can have a separate umbrella of life skills with some overlap that can cover financial, environmental, and other essential life literacies that school leaders wish to grow within their students.

-Bring in the components of social and emotional learning as provided by the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL). They overlap with the Character Lab versions of the Character Strengths of emotional intelligence, social intelligence, and self-control.

-Speaking of Character Lab, besides defining the term wellness, consider whether you will use the Character Lab names for the Character Strengths (they currently list 15 of the 24 strengths) or the VIA Institute on Character version. And will you use the term Positive Psychology or Positive Education in describing your program? I find the Character Lab names more student-friendly. I also like to use Positive Psychology as the term used in research and the acronym PERMA, which many add “H” for health. I find that using PERMAH is sticky with folks, while the Positive Education version with “positive” before each pillar title offers no acronym. And yes, I know capitalizing Character Strengths is incorrect, but I like the emphasis the capitals provide. 🙂 The bottom line is to build a shared learning language for your wellness program.

-There are many techniques to running meetings effectively, including protocols provided through mechanisms like Critical Friends Groups. It is essential to start the change process with solid foundational strategies that stakeholders are already using. A starting place is to do a plus-minus brainstorming listing of what the school has in place that already supports wellness and the negatives as barriers that will need to be overcome.

-A connected strategy is to conduct a wellness survey of community members, including students, parents, and staff, to gather data to have a baseline to refer back to once the program is in place. One aspect of the survey can be on PosPsych content knowledge regarding what the term wellness means to community members. A second survey question can, of course, anonymously gather information about their well-being status.

-Nail down what is at the core of your wellness program in a paragraph or two. Like the school’s mission statement, this core statement must be promoted and shared frequently. Here is a rough example of what my core wellness statement looks like>

I see the science of Positive Psychology guiding my work, looking past deficiencies to see and focus on the strengths of those I work with. I help others to answer the questions:  

  • What does wellness look like from a Positive Psychology perspective?
  • What is character?
  • What are Character Strengths?
  • What are the pillars of life (i.e., PERMAH) that we can engage our Character Strengths in to help us to thrive? In a figurative sense, which “tools”(i.e., PERMAH and the Character Strengths) in our “wellness toolkit” do we routinely use to live life well on a daily basis. Which tools do we apply when we face obstacles and long-term struggles?  
  • What are values?

-I would add the topic of digital wellness under the ample tent coverage of your wellness program.

-I can also see putting together a list of all the components/structures of the school where the principles of PosPsych could be embedded. From the business office to transportation to campus green space management to hiring to after-school programming, I could see a wellness filter being added to decision-making around the question of “how can wellness be supported?” when leadership makes decisions in the running of the school.

-Do a parallel implementation process by also following the School Retool model of jumping right in to introduce wellness education to your chosen stakeholders provided by your early adopters and others with enough content knowledge to get some pilots going that will provide feedback to support the wellness committee in designing the wellness plan. This goes against the Geelong Grammar School (GGS) model that is presented as being both linear in progression and, in time, a cycle. More on this topic later in the post.

-If the school currently has profiles of a graduate for ES, MS, and HS, if they don’t already have a section on well-being, add it with attributes of what a “well” student looks like at each level, including how one can observe students using their personal wellness toolkit to flourish and when needed, to overcome obstacles.

-Start scaffolding for learning and living wellness principles by having community members set wellness goals for personal wellness and school team/department and family wellness (the breadth depends on which populations are a part of your program). Wellness plan templates can be used to design the action steps for everyone to work towards their goals. 

-Decide what your curriculum will be and how it will be delivered. Will you purchase a curriculum? Will you develop your own? Will your approach be integrated into the regular curriculum (i.e., LA, SS, Sci, etc.), or will it be delivered during a set time in the weekly timetable? Who will teach the curriculum? Might you have a hybrid approach combining the integrated and purchased standalone curriculum?

-Connecting to the previous strategies, look to have a wellness web portal and wellness app, use portfolios with a wellness documentation component, and other tools to teach and embed wellness into the lives of your chosen stakeholders.

-One aspect of using communication tools to get the wellness word out there is to ponder who and how you will communicate the latest news and updates to support ongoing learning about wellness. What “just in time” conduits will you have in case of a school crisis and/or ongoing community protocols such as with Covid information sharing? Schools already leverage social networking tools from Twitter to blogs, so how might you brand/title your wellness information and news?

-If you go the route of staff learning and experiencing PosPsych in their lives, have divisional and departmental (i.e., principals, HR, business, etc.) administrators work with individuals on their annual professional growth plan to include the setting of wellness goals. The teaching staff would also set goals for teaching the wellness curriculum. A series of calendar events would be scheduled to support progress toward reaching the plans during the year. The wellness coach at each division level can offer to coach to support staff with their personal wellness goal(s).

-The divisional wellness coach partners with the teaching teams to set their wellness teaching goal(s) to design the activities to work on the team wellness goal, including setting calendar events to meet and reflect on their efforts during the year.

-Redesign your curriculum planning unit template to include a way to document either the integration of and/or the teaching of the purchased wellness curriculum into the units of study. A starting place is to have a section of the unit plan entitled something like “Wellness Teaching & Integration.”

–Ongoing professional learning/development to help individuals and teams meet their wellness goals. The wellness coach and administrator who oversees the division wellness program meet with individuals and teams to help them design aspects of the school’s Professional Learning Community (PLC) and the wider Professional Learning Network (PLN) to help individuals personalize their learning.

-Give your early adopters and passionate about wellness staff members resources and time to engage their Character Strengths of creativity and teamwork to come up with ways to support and teach wellness within your community. One starting place is to set aside time for Teachers Teaching Teachers (TTT) workshops for learning and ideation. Go-getters can also design online mini-courses for staff to take on their own time schedules. This could tie into the badging strategy listed below.

-Further support staff learning by forming learning groups based on the COETAIL efforts that include PLCs around technology integration, which in this case would be for wellness integration. One possibility is to run several groups focusing on the school-wide or divisional goals of the year so that wellness might just be one topic choice among several.

-The creation of a badging (micro-credential) certificate system containing all the PosPsych content knowledge and integration strategies that staff can work on, whether towards their personal and/or professional goals. Teaching staff members can add their badges to the wellness section of their professional portfolios and possibly use them for credit hours in renewing their teaching licenses. 

-New students and parents need to be onboarded annually into the wellness program. The same goes for new staff before their arrival in August for the normal orientation and onboarding program. Providing online tutorials, FAQs, webinars, and other resources through the wellness web portal can help with the process. Design wellness workshops as part of your orientation program for new students before the first day of school. Provide a series of workshops for parents for face to face meetings and for online attendees.

-Design wellness learning opportunities for your parents working with the Parent-Teacher Association (PTA). The PTA can help with the onboarding process for new parents for wellness and other aspects of the school and community culture. If you have a community center on campus, support your PTA in offering book clubs, workshops, small group discussions, etc., on wellness, parenting, and other topics of interest.

-I can say again from experience that the onboarding needs to be scheduled and promoted at the start of the year to continue on a monthly offering new staff and parents opportunities to grow their knowledge of PosPsych with built-in activities to support their living and embedding of wellness principles into their lives.

-The same, of course, needs to happen for students. Schools often offer a start-of-the-year orientation program for new students. Possibly have more than one day of orientation in which you introduce your wellness program. Find ways for your ES homerooms and MS and HS advisory to have start-of-the-year wellness foundational learning opportunities to build foundational knowledge of PosPsych so that the new students can feel comfortable as teachers integrate the Character Strengths and PERMAH in their regular curricula . And just as with the parents, look to have some follow-up orientation get-togethers with your new students to discuss wellness and other topics to help them transition to your school.

-Will you follow the Geelong Grammar School (GGS) Positive Psychology/Education implementation model of “learn, live, teach and embed” or draw from another framework? A lesson learned is that it can take a lot of time and effort to have your staff and parents go through the learn and live it phases before moving on to the teaching phase. It makes sense that teachers need to understand the principles of PosPsych before teaching them, just as they do with the content of their regular curriculum. My lesson learned is to power up on preparation and follow through to take the adults through the first two phases. Don’t get bogged down in these two phases knowing that adult education is complex and changing behaviors is even more challenging. Your students deserve to learn and live wellness ASAP! Get into teaching mode!

-The GGS program is described both in a linear fashion and as “four interconnecting cyclical processes” (Learn it. Live it. Teach it. Embed it.), which is supported by the graphic representation of their GGS model. The article’s authors clearly state that each school must design a program that meets its needs. Hence, it seems that one can start going through the phases in a linear fashion that then becomes a cycle that leads to ongoing reviewing and refinement of the steps as a form of continual renewal. Well, I think that is how it works. 😉 As Dr. Perkins and Dr. Reese note, look to design your framework to be flexible and adaptable to the needs of your community as a whole and to individual stakeholders as much as possible.

I am reminded that Geelong Grammar had Dr. Martin Seligman, one of the founders of Positive Psychology, present on campus for six months, so they could get rolling with the Learn and Live stages. They really had their staff’s attention and made their wellness implementation their number one priority. It should also be noted that their team “complete a four–day residential training course to discover and explore elements of personal well-being, to learn the foundations of positive psychology, and to develop an understanding of and gain personal experience in the six domains of the GGS Model. Training courses are also offered to parents of students, to be introduced to Pos Ed that is intended to directly enhance their own well-being, and indirectly enhance the well-being of their children, family, and friends.” (Learn it. Live it. Teach it. Embed it.)

So yes, it is a big step to have the aspiration that teachers live the tenets of PosPysch before they can teach it. And yes, there is the question of whether the school can reach into the private lives of staff regarding their wellness. My experience tells me that schools can get waylaid in the first two phases before the teaching begins. And again, GGS put enormous resources towards supporting the adults in their community with the “Learn and Live It” stages.

So boy, howdy, the folks at GGS really were and are committed to their wellness program! This brings up the point of not trying to manage multiple initiatives simultaneously. Implementing a wellness program that so gets at changing behaviors and lives is a huge undertaking. So really refrain from bringing about “initiative fatigue” by trying to do other new programs while implementing your wellness plan.

The article’s authors do go on to acknowledge that schools might not be able to offer such a dedicated learning opportunity for their community members. The authors go on to twice note that “staff is encouraged…” to live by the principles of PosPsych. So in my thinking, they could say to staff that they were encouraged but not expected to apply what they were learning to their personal and private lives. I think it is a big undertaking for school leaders to desire, let alone require staff to make changes in their lives guided by PosPsych.

I, of course, would love to be a member of a school where all the staff makes such a commitment to personal wellness, but I cannot see it being made a professional obligation. I can see strategies and systems being constructed that offer a pathway to engage with PosPsych in one’s life, both professionally and personally. Once teachers learn the wellness content knowledge and have the tools to integrate wellness into their classrooms, don’t let the Live It phase prevent the students from experiencing the principles of PosPsych in their lives. And also, don’t let the time-consuming work of designing a strategic wellness plan get in the way of being actionable, as advocated by the School Retool approach to program implementation.

We know that modeling is a powerful instructional tool, so it makes sense for teachers to understand the content of PosPsych and share well-being practices with their students. Character Lab makes modeling a central strategy in all of their playbooks. But in the end, we can model by asking questions about how to apply Character Strengths and how to engage them within the PERMAH framework to teach PosPsych to our students. We don’t need to share our personal lives unless we choose to. So again, don’t get bogged down in how well or how many of one’s staff truly live what they teach about wellness.

I will finish this list of strategies by offering a final point that Dr. Perkins and Dr. Reese list as the fourth leg of their process to support innovation and change. They use the term institutionalization, which compliments the GGS phase of embedding the wellness program into all aspects of the school community. I think school leaders need to construct systems that keep the program growing with mechanisms for accountability that don’t depend on specific leaders and passionate individuals who, especially in international schools, often move on to new schools. From experience, I saw a few programs quickly disappear when the individual(s) who started and ran them left the school, and/or systems were not in place to keep the program(s) going.

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I hope to learn about schools that designed and implemented wellness programs where students, staff, and parents speak and act upon the language of wellness. If you have been reading my blog, you know that these ideas were shared previously in more detail. I wish I could say the strategies come from my experiences in schools that successfully implemented school-wide wellness programs, but they do not.

By this, I mean that if I ask a third, eighth, or twelfth grader to paint a picture of what wellness looks like in their lives, they would be able to speak in terms of the Character Strengths that they exercise daily to live well along with the ones they engage in handling potential tough spots in their day. If asked which PERMAH pillars are really helping them thrive, they should be able to name them while stating which strengths assist in that effort.

I would apply the same questions to staff and parents who are open to sharing their experiences with the tenets of Positive Psychology and its application in their lives. And finally, I would be able to ask any teacher to either share specific wellness lessons and/or integration strategies that bring PERMAH and the Character Strengths into the culture of his/her class.

So if you made it to this point in the post, please use the comment tool to share about schools that are doing wellness well. 🙂

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Shifting from PD to Personalized Learning

January 13, 2022 / / 0 Comments

This past week I listened to Dan Taylor and John Mikton’s  The International Schools Podcast, in which John interviewed my old podcasting partner Jeff Utecht and his current podcasting partner Tricia Friedman. Listen to the episode as they cover various interesting issues, including professional development (PD). Jeff and Tricia are consultants and PD providers, so they shared many helpful insights on this topic.

What caught my attention was when Jeff noted that we need to move away from the term “professional” development and toward “personal learning.” His statement reminded me of our Ed Tech Co-Op podcast’s episode entitled “Personalizing PD” in 2015. Jeff and I discussed multiple pathways to support educators’ professional learning. Our big takeaway was, yes, build in a system for individualized and personalized learning not just around professional learning but also around personal non-job focused learning. It really was a good and helpful episode, if you ask me, so take a listen. What we said in 2015 is even more relevant today when the pandemic’s conventional practice of bringing in consultants for face-to-face learning is limited.

I wrote Jeff after listening to the podcast, saying that I have no idea where the field of professional development is today. Still, I had a couple brain-pops that might help educators think about their learning. First, we know the term “personalized learning” has been a buzzword for some years regarding student learning. I have covered this topic in my blog on a few occasions. I also developed a section on the Web Resources for Learning website dedicated to helping students design what I call their personal learning system. On that resource page, I mention that educators also develop their own personal learning systems. I think educators would see the connection when one says the term professional learning network or PLN.

Network means being connected to resources and others, while system means how to make the connections and on what topics. So as students might have subject area, information gathering, curation, etc., categories of their Personal Learning System, educators also do the same with their PLNs. An elementary teacher’s “system” might cover subject areas, instructional methods, assessment techniques, etc., along with the tools to reach out to resources and thought leaders while also sending the teacher’s ideas to others in the network. Many tools are social networking but can also include web resource sites, podcasts, blogs, and other information sources that can be curated.

Helping teachers see their learning as networked and part of a system might help them visualize whether they have a PLN or not; they might want to shift from thinking that their school is the leading provider of their professional learning. And as Jeff and I spoke about on the podcast, we need to move away from siloing our learning into professional versus personal. Many folks have their social networking and information resource providers mixing in professional and individual learning. I find that I get a lot of ideas around education by reading and listening to thought leaders who are not educators.

Another idea is to think about how you learn. We discuss how students learn, including which modalities might help support differentiation. We also talk a lot about student agency, including helping students better understand how they learn. So as is often the case, we can apply what we are doing with students to ourselves. 🙂 Look to enhance your agency by thinking about the variety of ways you learn as you look to develop or recalibrate your PLN. I am reminded of a blog post I wrote entitled “How Do Adults Learn?“. It might provide some insights as it was based on current research.

So if you have a PLN, you might have reached out to your instructional coaches, librarian, and possibly some other teachers, significantly those fluent with social networking tools, to help you build your network. If you don’t have a PLN and want to further personalize your learning, you might want to reach out to these folks for content and connection tools to get you started.

Speaking of Jeff, Tricia, John, and Dan, you really should look to follow them on Twitter and/or other networking tools where they are present to add them to your PLN.

Photo by Clint Adair on Unsplash

 

Virtual School Pedagogy – Oldies but Goodies

February 12, 2021 / / 0 Comments

Note: My international school is just starting virtual school for the current school year, so we are now just experiencing what many schools have been doing for most of the year. I posted the following to our Wellness blog.

I hung up my instructional technology hat a ways back, so I can’t offer the latest tools, tips, or techniques that many of our staff use in their virtual learning delivery. I can offer pedagogical strategies that have worked in the past and can definitely be supported through technology to enhance learning in virtual schools.

Concept/Mind Maps

Concept/Mind maps help students make their thinking visible, primarily when representing connections between ideas, events, topics, etc. Concept maps also can be used as collaboration tools.

An excellent way to use concept maps for virtual learning is to use an online provider like Mindmeister. Students can share their Mindmeister concept maps with you to access their thinking, especially for formative assessment of their understanding as the unit of study progresses. Virtual collaboration is supported if you partner with students or place them in groups to work together to use mind maps for multiple purposes. Here is a mind map template for essential questions one teacher provided his students. Look at a blog post describing how students used concept maps to answer the essential questions for their units of study at a couple schools.

Learning Activity Types via TPACK

Several American professors came together in 2010-11 to organize learning activity types (LAT) into nine subject areas supported by technology. They published articles about their efforts. Here is one. They provide research-supported pedagogies in their Learning Activity Types website hosted at the College of William & Mary School of Education. They apply the TPACK construct for planning purposes. Look to their website by going to the left side menu to select from the nine learning activity-type disciplines. The supporting technologies are from 2011, so adapt ones that still exist today and/or find the latest iteration or replacement tool that best supports each pedagogy. Image Source

Multimedia Essays (Media Mashups)

Writing essays is one of the most precious skills that we teach our students. But sometimes, our students can benefit from an alternative learning experience and assessment that engages the full range of their ICL skills. We can differentiate and add complexity to the standard writing process by having students create multimedia essays where they “mash up” various sources of media to communicate their thinking. At the time, a William and Mary doctoral student describes her work with multimedia essays in this podcast. Image Source

Personalized Learning System (PLS)

Students (and teachers) use technology to access information, to make meaning, to create and communicate their learning via a personalized set of resources for learning… a “go-to” 24/7 technology and information access toolkit – a Personal Learning System (PLS).

We guide our students to work as architects designing and maximizing their “learning flow” (think of the term workflow) while also engaging in time management techniques to increase efficiency and purposeful productivity. Self-directed and growth-minded students use devices, apps, Web tools, and information sources, putting themselves in charge of their learning. Here is a web resource describing what a Personal Learning System can look like and a planning document for students to work with. Image Source

Sketchnoting (Visual Note-Taking)

Our students live in a media-rich world. They think in images, video, and sound while constantly making neural connections. The creation apps on phones, tablets, and computers offer students pathways to draw, audio record, insert images/video, and embed hyperlinks to information sources, all personalized. This is where visual note-taking comes in. We can expand note-taking choices beyond text recording into multiple modalities by guiding students to use mind maps, colors, shapes, images, and digital grouping by dragging and dropping objects and connecting lines to record their thinking. Image Source

The Six Thinking Hats

Edward de Bono created this approach to decision-making and problem-solving that guides users to think in terms of types of thinking and perspective. We can apply them for individuals and groups of students to use as they process information. Here is a helpful overview and a teacher’s application in her classroom. Image Source

Thinking Routines

In the book Making Thinking Visible, Ron Ritchhart, Mark Church, and Karin Morisson help readers understand the power of thinking routines to help students process big ideas and make their thinking visible. Teachers routinely use the thinking routines in their regular face-to-face classes. One can also choose from a variety of technologies to also use in virtual school. Here is a dated web resource on the supportive tools one can use. However, the application of the routines is sound. If you are new to the routines, you can review an article by Ron Ritchhart and David Perkins entitled Making Thinking Visible. Also, look to go through the Harvard Project Zero Thinking Routine Toolbox. Image Source

WebQuests

WebQuests are a natural pedagogy for virtual schools because they’re already web-based. They connect inquiry and research skills to students working in teams using their communication skills to present their findings. WebQuests are online research expeditions built by teachers that put the students into roles to find information from selected sites and other resources as they attempt to solve a real problem and/or answer a question. The students in teams analyze, curate, and then use the information to create a learning product to demonstrate their understanding. WebQuests are NOT internet scavenger hunts with students just going through a list of links. True WebQuests have the students performing in the authentic roles of historians, economists, mathematicians, etc. The culminating project is usually a performance task in which the students present their findings while playing their roles or applying the learning to produce a product. Image Source

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A significant wellness connection for these pedagogies is that they engage students in PERMAH while exercising their Character Strengths. Collaboration amplifies Relationships with students using their strengths of kindness, leadership, and teamwork, to name just a few character strength applications. The process of creating definitely has students applying their strength of creativity within the pillars of Engagement and Accomplishment.

So how do we take these oldies but goody strategies and other current innovative and effective practices to spread them throughout our virtual school? One approach would be to form a virtual school design team in each division who become busy bees finding out what’s happening in virtual classrooms elaborating on ideas, and making connections to new approaches. They then cross-pollinate throughout the division and potentially between divisions. 😁

Album Cover Image Source

Dual (Hybrid) Approach to Implementing a Wellness Program

November 11, 2020 / / 0 Comments

My focus for designing a wellness program and implementing it is to take an integrative approach. This approach has grade level ES and MS teams grade level teams and HS departments creating and collaborating with the counselor (wellness coach) to adapt the current curriculum delivered in units of study (i.e., LA, SS, math, etc.) to find natural integration opportunities for PERMAH and the Character Strengths. The same collaboration and design work go into choosing strategies that can embed wellness practices into the culture of the classrooms and advisories. My Wellness@ES resource site is filled with PRIME and SECONDARY strategies to support this integrative approach.

I also put forth a few ideas on collaborating to review the purchased SEL curriculum to teach the provided standalone lessons.

In my mind, this dual (hybrid) approach gives the teacher a vast toolkit for teaching wellness. In both the integrative and standalone purchased curriculum approaches, the teacher can proactively plan according to the developed scope and sequence of standards while being nimble and ready for just-in-time teaching when specific wellness needs are presented by the students.

So how might a school move forward using this dual (hybrid) approach? I sat in a PD session yesterday that offered the first steps of a model that one might use. The topic was health which our teachers are teaching within our units of study and through some standalone lessons. The grade-level teams worked with a spreadsheet (see below) that listed the standards with some criteria for the teachers to respond to. This audit will provide data to further develop the scope and sequence of the standards.

As you can see, the grade level teams were asked to designate if the standards are being assessed (planned for next year) and what they are teaching by quarter. If they are not teaching the standard, they check whether it is feasible to add the standard for the future. The teams went through this process for both integrations through super units (i.e., units of study) and standalone lessons using the provided spreadsheet for their respective grade levels.

Whether it be wellness or another subject area, it makes sense for teaching teams to have this opportunity to map out where they are and where they are going. I can see us using this protocol when we move forward with a wellness program at my elementary school.

 

Photo by Possessed Photography on Unsplash

Chart by Dan Keller

Collaboration to Improve PRIME Wellness Integration Strategies

September 7, 2020 / / 0 Comments

Suppose you have visited my Wellness@ES resource site to review the integration strategies for each character strength. In that case, you will see that I list the main ones as PRIME integration strategies and secondary integration strategies for each strength. The Prime strategies should work to integrate all the strengths and have a decent chance of deepening student understanding of the Character Strengths. Here is the Kindness Strength page as an example in which you can scroll down to see the Secondary Strategies.

It looks like we will move forward in the teaching phase of the wellness program at my school. Our teachers naturally put in a lot of time to help their students with their social and emotional growth. I think the next step is getting further teacher buy-in and input on the strategies. While there is 100% buy-in for teaching wellness, it will be essential to give our “wellness chefs” the opportunity to work from their own recipes as they craft their wellness integration lessons.

I plan to start our wellness integration program using the following template if permission is given to try it.

Step 1 – I prepare handouts for each PRIME integration strategy using the template pictured above, listing the strategy in the center of the document.

Step 2 – I work with the grade level teams, including the specialists, to set aside time in one of their planning meetings to collaborate to improve the strategies.

Step 3 – I prepare and print out a poster-size version of the above-listed template with one strategy per document. I wrangle up some Post-It notes.

Step 4 – An administrator and I meet with each teaching team to review the template worksheet. Team members first work individually to write responses to the questions using individual Post-Its to stick to the large-size PRIME strategy worksheets.

Step 5 – We then review each other’s work on a couple of the character strength worksheets. We look to synthesize what comes to mind from our discussion as we go through the Post-It notes. We finalize our responses to each template as I take notes.

Step 7 – I work with the team leaders to set follow-up meetings to review the remaining character strength worksheets.

Step 8 – I compile the final responses to edit and improve the PRIME strategies listed on the Wellness@ES site.

My next post will be about moving all this creativity and ideation into action.

 

Photo by Charles Deluvio on Unsplash

VS – Parent Workshop on School Tools

April 12, 2020 / / 0 Comments

I ran across an old document where I listed possible parent workshops for one of my previous schools. Here is one topic that could not be more needed around the world…

Understanding Your School’s Tech Tools: Your children during and after school interact with learning portals, adaptive web-based skill development tools, research databases, and all sorts of apps and websites. How can you support your children in using these learning tools? How can you better interact with your school’s learning system and website to receive information? This workshop partners you with your child to learn together.

Photo by John Schnobrich on Unsplash

VS- Virtual PD

April 6, 2020 / / 0 Comments

Our instructional coach for STEM along with our other coaches organized a round of Teachers Teaching Teachers (TTT) to be delivered via our videoconferencing platform. They are getting input on what folks want to learn about and what they feel comfortable teaching.

I want to share the email that went out to staff because it reinforces the importance of community while acknowledging, validating, and celebrating what our teachers are doing as designers and creators.

Hi all,

You all amaze me. You are reinventing school over and over again as we continue with social distancing and the change in our community structure.  I see you all changing your consciousness: Not just about how you go about teaching effectively in the virtual world, but also about what you value about community and your work. You are learning about your own flexibility and craftsmanship while developing different forms of interdependence with others.  And many of you are becoming experts at technology in ways you might never have predicted.

Lots of people ask me “what are other teams doing?” and “how can I get better/more efficient at ….” Many of you are further along in building your virtual school repertoire and have ideas to offer that people could really use right now. Some of you are only beginning and would love a little mentorship or a place to just to collect ideas.

In this TTT, you will have the chance to present for a few minutes, something that you are doing that is going well and that people could use a little help with. You may just want to listen and ask questions. We also welcome anyone who might want to moderate discussions.

Our TTT is scheduled for this Wednesday, to next Tuesday, April 14, from 2-3 pm.

Please sign up for up to 4 sessions you are most interested in by Thursday at 3 pm.

This will be moderated in part by the coaching team via Zoom. A link will be sent out next Tuesday.

I cannot say this enough. I am proud that I get to be a part of such an excellent faculty. Your dedication to our community, even at this taxing time, is really wonderful.

STEM Coach Name

Photo by Nicolas Tissot on Unsplash

How Might An Educational Services Company (ESC) Support International Schools?

September 3, 2019 / / 0 Comments

What advice would you give an educational services company (ESC) that wants to break into the international school market? When I lived in the U.S., I consulted with a few providers who offered after-school activity programs, so my experience was minimal. But I can put on my instructional technology hat to think as a designer looking at challenges and opportunities to develop some plans moving forward.

I am reminded that the first step to supporting clients in determining their needs. My son Sam adds to this point that the ESC should not look at the client’s needs only within the scope of the services that they can provide. They should be ready to say, “we don’t have the know-how to help you with difficulty, but we can help find someone who does.”

With international schools, it is essential to focus on their mission and values at the center of one’s services. We need to recognize that schools, in general, are conventional places, so starting to make things run better comes first, followed then by helping school leaders feel comfortable with new ideas.

Even progressive-minded parents who want their children to develop their thinking skills want the same experience they had as students. I remember a talk that Daniel Pink gave our staff at one of my schools. He said to be very careful in using words such as “innovative or cutting edge” in describing new programs.

The elephant in the room for some international schools is that their students are so managed and over-scheduled outside of school. Some students miss out on the typical developmental learning opportunities of unstructured play and making independent choices. Having free time and opportunities to become more independent is a problem that some schools are taking on through parent education outreach. I am guessing that the ESC could combine Outward Bound style activities with unstructured times giving students more “real life” experiences. It is a subject that an ESC should seek to learn more about.

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My approach here is to list needs and support strategies for the stakeholder populations of international schools. As stated previously, the first step is determining the stakeholders’ needs to design the programs to meet the needs. The needs will vary depending on factors such as what programs are already offered, locality and school culture (i.e., school mission), and school leadership mindset (i.e., static “That Is The Way We Have Always Done It” vs. a growth and openness to possibilities mindset). The themes of personalization, coaching, and accessibility, as well as self-discovery and personal growth, run through the strategies and constructs.

The following are ideas that I have written or podcasted about that could be developed by an ESC to offer services to their clients. The following strategies and program offerings cut across, in several cases, the student, staff, and parent stakeholder populations.

Resource Websites/Portals: Challenge> Students, teachers, and parents need access to valid information to support their roles as learners, teachers, and parents. Students- Libraries often provide a good listing of databases for general research but too often, students turn to search engines for their schoolwork. Teachers- Many teachers prepare learning modules posted in their school Learning Management System (LMS), so they often look for new resources. Parents- Some international schools have some form or other of a parenting resources web page, but they might still need a consultation to improve them. Another needed resource list for parents is orientation support for the school, community, and country.

ESC Services>

Students- Work with interested staff to build out the current LMS information resources portal for skill and subject-specific content or develop a particular resource website, if needed. An ESC can draw from many web resource sites to connect to the teaching and learning needs of their client schools. My Web Resources for Learning is an example site I did not create for one specific school, so it is a bit general, and some of the links need updating.

Teachers- My Web Resources site has a teacher section that can be used as an example. Connecting to personalization, teachers need specific books, videos, instructional strategies, web resources, etc., to improve their day-to-day teaching and units of study. The ESC either has resource finders on staff or hires independent contractors (think Etsy model). I wrote about this in my Information Brokers blog post.

Parents- Parents don’t always have access to parenting books in their native language, so they need valid information on parenting and other topics such as orientation to a new school and country, school calendars, events, parent workshops, etc. Parents also can be supported by helping them connect.

In the early 2000s, Justin Hardman designed and built a multi-faceted community sharing and learning portal for Hong Kong International School (HKIS). It was called myDragonNet. You can read the article we wrote about to give you an idea of what Justin created. Justin was way ahead of his time with the myDragonNet Learning Management System (LMS) because it provided space in the portal for parents and the greater community to connect. It had a social networking feel, as groups could set up mini-portal within the system. I would like to know whether or not current commercial LMS providers offer modules for community members. So I can see an ESC working with the current LMS to adapt functionality or build a separate portal for parents and community groups. Helping schools design and construct a parent portal would be high on my list of services offered. An added component would be to offer face-to-face and online courses for parents to help them construct their parenting toolkit.

Personal Learning Plan: Challenge> We want our students to be engaged and to take ownership of their learning. However, as students progress through the school divisions, they sometimes become passive and reactive to the high stakes programs like A.P. and I.B. They learn to play the game of school. Thus, how can we give students more agency, engagement, and control over their learning?

In the U.S., students who have documented special needs by law must have an Individualized Education Program (IEP). I have heard of some schools with leaders who realized that all students could benefit from personalized learning plans, creating them for all students.

Teachers- See Personal Teaching System response below, as teachers can benefit from having a professional learning plan to improve their Teaching System. Too often, schools bring in consultant P.D. providers who offer a one-size, sit-and-get delivery experience. Just like their students, teachers deserve a differentiated approach that hopefully involves some individualization.

Parents- The often-used line is that parents don’t receive a how-to parenting manual with the birth of their children. Fortunately, we have many authors and websites that can help us create our parenting toolkit.

ESC Services>

Students- I need help seeing the ESC coming in to help design learning plans for all students for several reasons. But I can see them consulting and coaching, providing a template and menus with learning strategies to draw from. The students should be at the center of the learning plan design process, working with their teachers and parents as coaches to design and follow through on their plans. Each student should have a learning plan as part of their portfolio.

Here are a couple of related blog posts.

Parents- One of the first steps parents can take in designing how they will raise their children is to construct a family mission statement. I can see the ESC providing face-to-face and virtual workshops to give parents the blueprint to work with their children to create their family mission statement. Over time we bring our children into the mission statement development process to redesign our statements with the byproduct of helping orient them to understanding one’s values and how to act with them in mind.

Personal Teaching System: Challenge> Many international schools provide their teachers with ongoing professional learning opportunities. This doesn’t sound like a problem. The difficulty can be with teachers who feel overwhelmed with instructional strategies, assessment techniques, etc. In reality, good teachers develop their personal “teaching toolkit” to design and deliver learning experiences for their students. Teachers choose from approaches such as Project-based, Problem-based, and Inquiry while creating activities that help differentiate the content, process, and products for flexible grouping of students. Fortunate young teachers have mentors and Personal Learning Communities (PLC) in their schools and Professional Learning Networks (PLN) that also help grow their teaching system.

ESC Services>

Teachers- I wrote about this topic in a blog post where I noted a place for consultancy companies to be like an information broker but for finding thought leaders and practitioners for teachers to follow via Twitter, blogs, podcasts, and other conduits to improve their teaching. An ESC could provide mentoring and coaching in person and virtually, starting a network of retired teachers interested in coaching teachers new to the profession. As mentioned earlier, I don’t think bringing in consultants to deliver a one size fits all P.D. experience is as effective as guiding teachers to personalize their P.D. by giving them a menu of podcasters, bloggers, authors, and other experts to include in their Personal and Professional Learning Network (PLN). When you add in the process of being coached to develop a learning plan with goals and activities, our teachers take ownership of their P.D. which then has more follow-through in the classroom. Here is our Edtech Co-Op podcast show on the topic of personalizing P.D.

Personal Life Plan: Challenge> Children and adults face an information-overloaded world with ever-increasing expectations for performance in school and at work. This leads to growing anxiety levels and declining well-being in our populations. Students and Teachers- The overlapping with Personal Learning Plan and having a Life Plan seems obvious. We don’t just plan for and learn at school. We learn for life, so a pathway forward is helpful.

ESC Services>

Students- As with the Personal Learning Plan, the ESC would work as consults and coaches to help schools design and implement this program. The Personal Life Plan would encompass the whole child with sections dedicated to life skills, character development, wellness to include physical and mental well-being, etc. In other words, please look at the Positive Education model’s six pillars and supporting character strengths in designing the plan template for your students. A possible helpful connection would be to design a process for students to create their mission statements with the learning plan providing actionable strategies to living the mission statement values.

This is where the coaching services come into play. I can see an ESC, especially in M.S. and H.S., providing one-to-one life coaching services for students. In the Elementary School, the ESC consultants could partner with the school counselor (life coach) and the teachers to develop a robust wellness program. Looking at the student’s physical, intellectual, emotional, and social needs, the students could use several learning systems (e.g., portfolio, personal planner) along with goal-setting to map out their plan to be well and to thrive. Here are a few blog posts on wellness and the counselor as a life coach.

Teachers- I can see the ESC providing life coaches to help teachers design and implement individual wellness plans, including writing individual and family mission statements.

Personal Learning System: Challenge> Back to the stressful and information-overloaded world we live in, students, teachers, and parents can benefit from a framework that harnesses technology and learning hacks to support their learning.

ESC Services>

Students, Teachers, and Parents- With technology being so intrusive into our lives and, at times, managing us, I think an ESC could work with instructional coaches and teachers to help students manage the technology to support and enrich their learning. I write a lot about this on the Personal Learning System page of  Web Resources for Learning. I can see the ESC offering workshops for teachers and parents and coaching services to help them find the apps, websites, and other resources to be more efficient and productive and hopefully more “digitally” well in their lives. The ESC could offer online courses at the parent portal not just for developing a learning system but also for other needs as requested by the parents.

There is an overlap with technology in life planning, life coaching, and the personal learning system. The focus is using technology to enhance lives which means developing a technology/media use plan that supports balanced living and well-being.

The themes of personalization, coaching, and providing web-based resources run through these programs in some form or another. Schools have been working on “personalized learning” for some time, primarily as it supports individualization and differentiation while also connecting to inquiry and student agency. Teachers and instructional coaches work as designers who coach students to own and guide much of their learning. It is similar in the adult world with life coaches.

While living outside Washington, DC, I spoke to many driven, on-top-of-their-game people. I noticed that several of them had a personal chef, a financial coach, a fitness coach, a life coach, etc. My experience with international communities is similar in that I meet many very driven people. Sometimes people who are busy and have the funds want to be as efficient and productive in covering their needs as possible while working towards actualization with their personal growth. Coaching brings expertise into their lives. It is an excellent opportunity for educational services companies. Thus, international schools should see how they might adapt to provide the coaching model in how they support their stakeholders. 

Offer Afterschool Activities (ASA)- 

While this post aims at what an ESC can offer international schools, it is also the case that schools can go in-house, hire co-coordinators and build their programs as in after-school programs. This is what schools do. Hopefully, these ideas, especially on ASAs, make sense for school leaders as I believe that ASAs offer a massive opportunity for international schools further to meet the learning needs of their students and parents while supporting the school’s mission.

My first advice to an ESC with after-school activities is to see what some of the big dogs of Asian international schools are offering. This doesn’t mean you are going to find groundbreaking approaches. I see a massive opportunity to bring fresh eyes and some unconventional thinking to view how international schools do after-school activities. A couple of starting points in rethinking after-school programs would be looking at the student’s needs and interests and the school’s mission. We then work backward as designers to develop an overall plan while simultaneously piloting some classes to gather data in developing our blueprint. Here is what I found for Hong Kong International School.

Thinking beyond elementary school, an ESC can also look to Middle and High schools to offer skill-based after-school enrichment and mentoring for student-led clubs. Here is a listing at the Shanghai American School offering 100+ clubs for their students. While many of those clubs are student-initiated and student-managed, as they should be, I see lower-level international schools needing consultation and coaching to offer clubs connected to the school’s mission and student interest. They also, at times, will need outside expertise for mentoring clubs, especially ones looking for community outreach and real-life experiences. And something tells me that some schools need athletic coaches as well.

I could see when developmentally applicable to offer “junior versions” of M.S. clubs, as David Perkins says of activities that work for older students and can be redesigned for younger students.

One challenge for elementary schools is asking teachers, after long days of teaching to offer after-school classes. I am still determining where the big schools are in making teachers teach after-school classes, but I do remember seeing lots of outside contractors coming into the Upper Primary at the end of each day when I was at HKIS. I have a few ideas listed below that can take after-school teaching classes off our teachers’ plates.

When I consulted a couple of years ago with an ESC specializing in after-school classes, we spoke about developing and documenting their curriculum so that new teachers could walk in and access the web-hosted lessons. Of course, this only applied to some classes like instrumental music or upper-level painting, but it could work for most lighter content offerings. This also meant that the Educational Services Company was independent of their teachers’ individual interests and talents.

With the curriculum ready for new teachers, I can see international schools supporting their teaching assistants to teach the after-school classes to earn extra pay. Here is an example of a web-hosted class that I started that could be taught by someone other than myself.

One category of offerings could be to offer classes to prepare teams for international enrichment competitions such as Future Problem Solvers, Odyssey of the Mind, etc. One can offer standalone classes built around themes such as peace and reconciliation (i.e., The World Peace Game, speaking and presentation skills (i.e., perhaps a student version of Toastmasters that includes ICL presentation literacies, etc.), and of course, all the possibilities that come with STEAM. There are also a lot of individual competitions that mentoring could support students to compete in.

A second idea that the owner of the ECS and I spoke about was to offer a series of classes in a discipline in that students would earn badges toward certification. Here is an example of what I called The Digital Scholars Program, which covers study skills, (digital) citizenship, and some digital literacy skills. Another example could be certification in wellness following the PERMAH model, including the “H” for health and the Positive Education approach to strengths education.

The third idea is that once the classes are created and taught face to face, then think about offering them in a blended fashion and possibly later in virtual form for students outside one’s international school. This takes me back to a meeting a long time ago at HKIS when the instructional technologists were meeting and talking about possibilities. We had come off the successful running of virtual school during SARS. We noted that the HKIS brand was solid and worth expanding. This led us to think about how the school might start offering online courses for students outside of HKIS.

The fourth idea is to work with one’s PTA and counseling staff to design and teach classes for parents. Helping busy parents expand their parenting toolkit already happens in many international schools, with counselors teaching parent workshops and PTAs bringing in guest speakers. The next step is a needs assessment to design a curriculum for the workshops. Whether they are offered during regular school hours or after school is okay, but marketing them as adult ASAs is another way to connect with parents. And just as for the students, it would be a bonus to offer them in blended and virtual fashion for parents who cannot attend face-to-face classes. And who knows, the ESC offers more leisure-oriented classes such as cooking, fitness, etc. This connects to the life coaching and wellness theme mentioned earlier. Check out my blog post on creating a parent portal for more information on this topic.

And then there are “academies.” Academies are where some overworked and over-managed international students go at the end of the school day to study languages, math, test prep, etc. Students start attending academies early in elementary school and continue through high school. I wonder if this situation occurs in international schools worldwide, but it is prevalent in Asia.

I won’t get into the politics and parenting of sending students to academies. Still, I would like to know what they would look like if offered on the international school campus. The optics might be wrong, especially with schools that try to get families to let their children go home after school to play and rest before they do their homework. I wonder if school-based academies offer school leaders opportunities to improve the content and delivery while working with families to think about decreasing the time their children spend in classes. Academies could be a place for supporting all the personalized support strategies listed in this post, including tutoring. Coaches at the academy could facilitate skill-building in their students across several life categories, including character strengths, wellness, and communication skills, to name a few possibilities.

This is an area where the ESC could advise and run the academies for the school, making sure to connect to the school’s mission and values.

One of the providers I worked with in the U.S. ran summer camps at schools and parks all around the Washington, DC, area. I can see an ESC doing the same for their international client schools, not just in the summer but also during the long winter break for families that are not traveling.

Offer Blended to Virtual Delivery Support–

Blended learning is becoming more and more the norm in schools with the growth of Learning Management Systems with less time spent in class providing direct instruction. Many international schools have the personnel and systems to support blended learning. But something tells me that some schools have the tech infrastructure, but they need guidance to leverage it to deliver the opportunities that blended learning can provide. Educational services companies could provide the needed expertise in this area.

One big lesson that we learned at HKIS was that providing blended learning is the first step towards being equipped to handle a school crisis that leads to school closure. I see an ESC providing schools the know-how to fully develop their crisis plan and prepare the school to go virtual in case of closure.

Offer Administration Support–

I am listing this stakeholder group because they have so much to do in their jobs, especially around planning, accreditation, local regulations, budgets, etc. With so much to do operationally, some schools might need the expertise and outsourcing that educational services companies can provide to support new initiatives and program management. Here are a few examples of standard programs and processes that some schools might need support to manage.

  • professional learning opportunities for staff
  • curriculum development and mapping
  • school crisis management plan development and implementation
  • policy and procedure documentation
  • change management

School leaders already naturally turn to the world of consultants. Educational services companies are consultants, yes, but there are not many who offer a wide array of expertise. I would like to know if enterprising ESCs offer a broker service giving their school clients menus of specialized consultant options with their backgrounds, costs, etc., to help decide who to hire.

In Conclusion-

I enjoy reading business articles and books. I especially enjoy listening to podcasts with interviews of thought leaders. Something tells me that educational service companies led by business and education minds offer their client schools attractive opportunities to support all their stakeholder populations.

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