Learning Specialist – Lessons Learned

Category: Learning Specialist (page 1 of 5)

Professional Learning: Improving Your Wellness Program

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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The Wellness Coach (Counselor) – Instructional Technologist Partnership

December 21, 2022 / David Carpenter / 0 Comments

I have written a lot about what I see as the wellness coach and instructional technologist overlap of areas of services to our school community.

We describe (digital) citizenship as the purview of instructional technologists. As an instructional coach for wellness, I use the term “digital wellness” to describe the domain where I support students, staff, and parents in their lives. I need to find out where conventional guidance counselors generally stand in supporting citizenship or digital wellness. As usual, I am speaking about my experiences and ideation.

The question can arise of the difference between digital citizenship and digital wellness. One way to understand the difference between (digital) citizenship and digital wellness is that most citizenship curricula teach students to think about how their actions affect others. Digital wellness looks inward to help us think about how our use of technology affects our well-being.

Remember that a guiding principle of digital wellness is to engage the Character Strength of proactivity to help us take charge of how we use technology to support our interests, values, and wellness. 🙂

When teachers or the instructional technologist are teaching citizenship skills, instances of digital wellness also come into play. The reverse is true for teachers and wellness coaches teaching digital wellness when citizenship is a part of the learning. With all this said, it makes sense to me that the wellness coach and instructional technologist should have a strong partnership to help each other design their programs including professional learning opportunities for staff.

My focus on elementary students means building the foundational understanding that they are in charge of the tools – not the other way around. They learn how to use technology for learning and, yes, for entertainment and fun. The wellness program naturally grows student self-awareness to help them understand technology’s positive and negative influence on their lives, especially their well-being.

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Collaboration, Creativity, and Refinement with the Kidspire Team

October 21, 2022 / David Carpenter / 0 Comments

For the past several months, I have worked with a team of dedicated educators at the Kidspire non-profit in Vietnam to co-design wellness lessons. They provide educational services to children in orphanages. Their curriculum covers STEAM while growing their wellness and life skills offerings.

After meeting at their office last spring to learn about their wellness program goals, I began to work on the Wellness@Kidspire resource website. The plan was for me to design the first draft of Positive Psychology activities on the PERMAH pillars, digital wellness, and the character strengths of emotional intelligence, grit, growth mindset, proactivity, self-control (self-regulation), and social intelligence. The target audience would be high school students preparing to transition to an independent life outside the orphanages.

Ms. Ai Nguyen as the lead designer, would then draw from the resource site to develop a slide deck while getting input from the Kidspire team and the teachers in the orphanages. Ms. Ai has recently shared the slide deck with me, which is in Vietnamese, but you can get a feel for the lessons through the images. The teachers will now teach the lessons giving feedback to Ms. Ai, who will refine the lessons for the next time they are taught. She will also provide me with insights and to-do’s to take the first draft of the Wellness@Kidspire site to the next level.

My reason for sharing our efforts is to point out how an instructional coach for wellness works with teachers and administrators. The process of gathering information as to the audience and the goals starts the process. The design and draft creation come next on the part of the wellness coach. The lead designer and teachers then add their distributed expertise to craft the learning activities to best meet the needs of their students.

New iterations come about as the teachers and the design lead see what works and what doesn’t while adding their own ideas to improve the lessons. This information returns to the wellness coach to enhance the original resource materials.

One big gap in this process is that I am not in Vietnam co-teaching some of the lessons to work directly with the teachers and Ms. Ai. The reality is that I don’t speak Vietnamese, so this isn’t feasible, but it is what I would be doing as a wellness coach in an international school. I have written about the roles of the instructional technologist and wellness coach in which I attend the elementary school grade-level team curriculum meetings to co-design in person. The collaborative and creative sessions are followed up by my co-teaching to fine-tune lessons to then share with the other team members to teach independently. And note that many lessons are not standalone as they are activities integrated into the LA, social studies, math, etc. curricula and classroom practices using the PRIME integration strategies pulled from the Wellness@ES website.

I do want to highlight the role of what I call the wellness lead, which in this case is Ms. Ai. I have written a few times about the elementary teaching teams having a wellness lead who looks at the team’s actions through the lens of wellness to find ways to support its integration. As an instructional technologist, I had a tech lead on each team. Something tells me this is the norm, with team members being the literacy, math, etc., go-to person to lead out in their respective areas of expertise.

Wellness Program Development and Implementation

May 12, 2022 / David Carpenter / 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.

Learn it, Live it, Teach it, Embed it: Implementing a whole school approach to foster positive mental health
and well-being through Positive Education by Erin Hoare, David Bott, and Justin Robinson
Positive Education: The Geelong Grammar Journey by Jacolyn M. Norrish (free book download)
Geelong Grammar School (GGS) Positive Education Model

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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What if we… Celebrate Student Success Through Story Arcs

October 25, 2020 / David Carpenter / 0 Comments

We all love a good story. It is a part of being human to desire to share and hear tales of life’s ups and downs. With this in mind, what if we used story arcs to reflect upon and celebrate the growth of our students?

The Student Support Team at my school pauses from time to time to celebrate the progress of our students. We know that it is so important for us as individuals and for our team wellness to step out of our daily routines to reflect on and celebrate the progress of our students. Taking time for the Character Strength of gratitude also expands the P and A of PERMAH with Positive Emotions and Accomplishment. 😉

Many teams start their meetings with a connection activity. You can see some examples of meeting starters at my Wellness@ES Team Wellness page (scroll down to the Meeting Starters/Connections section). The activities, yes, build connections and, at times, lead to some very thoughtful discussions. I think that if we try this story arc activity, it might sometimes be a bit cathartic. To describe the struggles, we sometimes experience with our students to see them reach the triumphant denouement of their story could be a very well-being-supportive experience! Sharing student story arcs might be a beneficial connection to think about trying with your team.

I am already thinking about how some student stories intersect with others, whether with other students, teachers, and/or patterns in working with parents. Our brains love connections and patterns, so something tells me that sharing student growth story arcs can be very fruitful for one’s team, whether it be a grade level, learning support, and/or department. Call me crazy, but I think this storytelling engagement with one’s Character Strength of creativity can also add to the fun of the constructive tales we might tell. And with our sharing, a few chuckles can go a long way these days. 🙂

I also see the possibility of using this story arc idea with students to help them reflect on to celebrate their pathway to personal growth. I would be bringing in lots of language around PERMAH and the Character Strengths as students literally draw their arc and write in their descriptions and wellness connections as they set the exposition, list the significant events, describe difficulties, and note their efforts to move through the difficulties to reach their goals. The connection aspect for students is so personal that the 4MAT approach (i.e., quadrant 1 connection making) to lesson design comes into play. I know I am again showing my age as an educator, as 4MAT was and is not just another passing fad in teaching and learning. It works!

The Write Stories website offers a beneficial description of the six shapes of stories to give you some examples of possible story arcs.

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Collaboration to Improve PRIME Wellness Integration Strategies

September 7, 2020 / David Carpenter / 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 – Coming Out the Other Side

April 13, 2020 / David Carpenter / 0 Comments

A Hybrid Approach

What will our world be like coming out the other side of the COVID-19 crisis? At every level from the planet as a whole to individual nations to communities to individuals, this is the question we are starting to ponder. At the moment we cannot really start to see the picture until we get some more data on the processes that nations might follow in trying to take the initial steps out of lockdown life. It looks like China will be our first model to learn from.

Looking specifically at education, what are the pathways forward first in reopening and then moving into sustainable delivery of services at the start of the next school year? An obvious adaptation is that schools must be prepared for a future of providing virtual schooling. This is something we bought into fully at HKIS when we reopened after SARS. Each year we would run a week of practice virtual school in which teachers moved their instructions and learning materials fully online.

Yet there is more to the picture than being either fully opened or virtual. There is an in-between hybrid approach that schools could be providing. Looking specifically at international schools in August, there is the possibility that some parents simply are not going to want the health of their children to be at risk by sending them to regular school if schools do in fact open normally. There is also the case of families and staff who cannot return due to visa and/or lockdown restrictions.

So what does this mean? It could be that some international schools adapt to this stakeholder group by offering ongoing virtual school. Without going too in-depth on this, we need to look at the possibility for elementary schools, for example, to have at least one teacher at each grade level who would be the virtual school teacher. In discussing this with a colleague we concluded that it is just too much to expect teachers to manage their regular classes all day to then facilitate the learning of virtual students.

The specialist teachers from PE to the arts to the librarian also would be providing instruction. But there are not enough of them in my school for example to designate some of them as full-time virtual teachers. This challenge will need some thought. Perhaps some international schools might share virtual specialists?

Another hybrid possibility is with the students who are flourishing during virtual school who really benefit from having more control over the place, pace, and path which many identify with personalized learning. These self-reliant and independent students are also sometimes the more quiet students who find a voice in blended and virtual learning environments. Perhaps schools might offer a pathway for these students that involves virtual learning of core subjects with their coming to campus for the arts and PE classes, life skills, and afterschool co-curricular learning opportunities.

Another angle on this hybrid model is that it allows schools to offer more flexibility and a broader offering of services, especially in the competitive world of international education. We are hearing stories of lower-tiered international schools that have been cutting wages of staff leading to low morale and/or dealing with parent groups unhappy with their virtual school offerings. Those schools in a capitalist market should see fewer applications for the coming school year. The stronger schools that provide quality virtual school learning should find more demand for enrollment with the understanding that across the board the lower economy might decrease the overall size of the applicant pool. It will become a reality that some of the local parents will need to move their students to public schools. And there is also the case to be made that some of the lesser schools with lower tuition still might pick up some transfer students from the more established and higher-cost competitors with cost being the primary driver for some parents.

Another possibility is that the schools that offer a dual-track approach offer parents a choice when the potential threat of COVID-19 cases growing occurs. The parents with students in school could move their children into the virtual school track as the school remains open if they are not forced to close by the government.

Lots to think about and there are probably many other permutations as international school leaders look at how they will adapt and compete for students in the coming school year.

The Humanity of Schools

I was talking to a teacher who is moving on to a new international school next year. It is a school that also interested me in reading about their approach to teaching and learning. They call their teachers “designers” which is the term that I have used over the years in describing teachers as architects designing and facilitating learning.

I explained that I will be interested to learn how her school which opens in August will prepare for virtual school. Will they focus on the tools? Will they see pedagogy coming first to be supported by the right tools for the task? But mainly, will they see virtual school preparation being about designing ways to support and connect the humanity that is at the center of our school learning communities? I am intrigued to learn how a community of designers forming a new and vibrant school will respond to the possibility of school closure just as they are opening up for the first time.

We will see.

Not a Normal Start

Getting back to the question of what will things look like for international schools coming out the other side of the pandemic, I am thinking a great many of the stakeholders in schools will not be where they usually are energy-wise at the start of the new school year. The social and emotional toll of going through the loss of normalcy in teachers’ personal and professional lives cannot be ignored. The students and their parents will have gone through the process of changing roles and the fatigue of home isolation and seemingly never-ending virtual school. The emotional piggy banks for so many are low at this point with big questions of what summer travel will look like if it takes place at all.

A parallel storage area of sorts is our capacity to pump out adrenaline that so many have needed to call on, again and again, to work through the challenges of the moment during virtual school. I think of the medical practitioners who drained their energy banks and survived on the adrenaline and last vestiges of their hope and care for others. As we head into the fall and a new school year, our teachers and support staff will, I think, struggle to push through the weariness and fog of mental and emotional fatigue, if lockdowns continue and virtual school is in session.

With the possibility that summer travel could be curtailed due to travel bans, many might not be able to return to their home countries to be with their loved ones. They will also miss out on their normal summer recharging rituals (e.g. going to the beach cottage, attending baseball games, special summertime meals, etc.). The effect of so much loss will be deep.

This makes me feel that international school leaders need to take a very realistic look at their expectations for the start of the new school year. What comes to mind is the need for a huge focus on the normal class community building that occurs with the start of the school year. Emphasis needs to be placed on doing activities that are fun and energizing that help build bonds of connection between students and teachers. I can see the need for taking on fewer academic learning outcomes building in more time for students to work on tasks with depth that helps build their confidence and connection with others.

The reality is that the coronavirus might return in full strength in the fall. With this in mind, we need to be very intentional about recharging everyone’s batteries which will probably be lower than normal coming in. A focus on wellness will need to be front and center going forward which can be supported by having a wellness focus group come together to design both short and long term small initiatives to help design a “wellness toolkit” for individuals, teams and the community. A main tool of the wellness toolbox can be creating and implementing personal wellness plans. The plans can be based on engaging the character strengths within the PERMAH pillars. Staff members could find partners to coach each other in following their wellness plans. A full menu of self-care strategies should be put together with some designated for the individual to provide for him/herself and others provided by the school (e.g., gym memberships, on-campus yoga, and fitness providers, flexible virtual teaching from home or school, ongoing personal wellness PD, etc). And of course, there should be a focus on team wellness with support strategies in place.

An additional support effort can be offered by counselors in partnership with whoever manages the professional learning at one’s school. I can go on and on about “personalizing PD” away from the old sit and git one size fits all but I won’t as we covered it a few times in my old podcasts. The bottom line is wearing my instructional technology cap would be to design a user needs assessment mechanism as in surveys for the team meeting check-ins by admin and counselors to having wellness partners taking each other’s “well-being temperatures” especially around mental health. From this data and that of individuals’ knowledge of Positive Psychology, a menu of learning and self-care opportunities could be developed for face-to-face and online truly personalized for individuals’ needs.

This preparation and ongoing efforts hopefully can delay and offset to some degree the eventual fatigue that we have seen arise these past few months of virtual school. I can see the normal week of PD for returning and new staff focusing less on curriculum and logistics and more on making time to get people together to have fun and nurture our social connections. I also can definitely see a daily afternoon sporting event for interested players with cheering onlookers. Fun and light games like cornhole, bocce ball, and croquet along with beverages and food should become a mainstay way to end each day.

The need for frequent and transparent communication with parents and staff is more important than ever, especially with low batteries and potentially declining morale. Parent communication is a given these days with schools activating their crisis management plans. Our leadership has one voice and has very clearly communicated messages to parents. Just the simple numbering of the emails is a value-added protocol.

Staff will need to know where things stand with enrollment, travel restrictions, and other factors that can affect their contracts. My experience in Israel during the first Gulf War, in Saudi Arabia with a terrorist attack, and again in Hong Kong during SARS was that the administrative team worked diligently to create and communicate contingency plans so that staff knew where things stood with their contracts and options.

Admin and staff obviously need to be on the same page with a feeling of trust and a realistic understanding of expectations balanced by the individual needs of staff and their families. Flexibility and putting the humanity of the community first need to be the guiding mantra. The last thing a school community needs is a vacuum of information and rigidity which opens the door to rumors and an “us vs them” attitude. 🙁

Learning Support

I continue to be so impressed by the professionalism and dedication of the staff at my school. From the business office to the support staff to the teachers to the administration, I find myself constantly pausing and being thankful that I get to work at such a wonderful school.

The same goes for our students who accepted the challenge of virtual school. They have grown their character strengths around being independent, problem solvers, and hard working. Between the teachers and the students, a lot of wonderful teaching and learning has taken place. Our parents also have been incredible taking on new roles in their homes.

Yet we must face that our students are not learning as well as they would in face-to-face school. With many international schools having large EAL populations where English is not spoken at home, we must face the reality that at the start of the new school year many of the students will have lost ground not only in their language acquisition but probably in some of their subject areas as well as in their social development.

Coming out the other end of the pandemic, what will the start of the new school year look like regarding remediation to bring students up to where they would have been pre-pandemic? And how to balance these academic needs when I just wrote about the importance of SEL and community building? Thankfully I am not an administrator possibly trying to juggle these two outcomes… 🙂

A second factor to think about with international schools is that there will probably be a good amount of turnover of students changing schools. At least in my location, there have been schools that have excelled in providing virtual school while others have brought on the ire of their parents for supposedly not delivering the goods. Something tells me there will be some families trying to move up the hierarchy of schools especially knowing that virtual school could happen again in the coming year.

So how will stronger international schools keep their enrollment up and handle the possible influx of students coming from schools with lesser programs? In speaking to a colleague, one approach would be to possibly have summer school that offers language and other subject learning remediation for new students. This is predicated on the hope that summer school can be taught face to face. If not, we know that virtual schooling cannot match the learning in regular school so a virtual summer bridge program would be limited in its viability.

An additional approach would be to offer EAL standalone homerooms in the elementary division. Our current approach is to mainstream all students with one EAL teacher at each grade level for push-in and some pullout support. But if some schools are bringing in students at lower English levels than they might normally accept, they might need to adapt their program to provide intensive English learning provided by an EAL-trained homeroom teacher at each grade level possibly with the additional support of a dedicated EAL specialist.

As I know very little about the field of language learning, I am doing my usual throwing out a bunch of ideas to think about. 🙂 I would be very interested to hear from administrators and EAL staff as to how they would develop a hybrid program that continues their regular push in EAL support while also offering a pathway for students needing a more full-on English learning program.

Tying things together here, who knows what the new school year will bring. I know that the administrators at my school continue to be proactive as they are looking at multiple contingencies. I am not connected in any way to the managing of our virtual school or involved in planning for the future so please understand that these ideas are my own as I continue to look at challenges as opportunities for innovative and adaptive thinking.

Photo Credits:

Tunnel- Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Hands Up- Photo by Jaime Lopes on Unsplash

Car Charging- Photo by Andrew Roberts on Unsplash

Students- Photo by Rachel on Unsplash

VS- Virtual PD

April 6, 2020 / David Carpenter / 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

Virtual School Design Team

February 16, 2020 / David Carpenter / 0 Comments

I mentioned in my Virtual School during SARS post that we formed a leadership team for our virtual school at HKIS that included green hat thinkers. I also wrote about the grade-level teams dividing up the work by the various strengths and talents that the team members presented. While our VS Leadership Team at HKIS did all the organizational, logistics, and curriculum design work, I am now thinking of a new approach to separate leadership and curriculum design into two teams.

Elementary schools have leadership teams made up of administrators, grade-level team leaders, a leader for the specials, possibly a representative for other groups, and of course the instructional coaches. This can add up to a lot of people. While performing their normal duties this works just fine and it can work for running the virtual school with all stakeholders having a voice while receiving information back from the leadership team.

What might be unwieldy is the curriculum collaboration design work that needs a special skill set from its members. This is where a portion of the overall VS Leadership Team could provide the nucleus for a VS Design Team. The VS Design Team not only provides ongoing curriculum development but also works as a skunkworks for longer-term research and program design especially if the virtual school continues over the long term. Additional members would be the teachers who have the strengths of creativity, curiosity, and zest along with a good understanding of using technology effectively. They would need to be especially creative regarding pedagogy. The tech background doesn’t have to be a prerequisite as the instructional technologist can lead out on how to make the instructional strategies viable for virtual delivery. This is where school leaders who really know the talents of their staff can review their profiles to construct the VS Design Team.

The instructional coaches would be the main communicators working with the grade levels and specials teachers. They would be the busy bees gathering the learning outcomes from the teams and bringing that information to the VS Design Team to then do their design work. This would especially be the case for the transdisciplinary units of study. The team’s work would go into a lesson database (curriculum mapping tool or Google Docs for example) with the coaches returning to the teams to unpack the strategies and fine-tune them for delivery.

The value of this approach is that the VS Design Team would not only come up with delivery approaches that could be used across grade levels but also would cross-pollinate by curating and iterating the ideas that come in from the teams. It is important to note that there must be trust and buy-in from all the teams to hand off some of their design work. One cannot have the VS Design Team come up with instructional strategies that are then ignored by some teams.

An additional design approach is to nurture the real innovators on staff to let them do mini-pilots playing a bit in their virtual sandboxes. This approach is supported by the School Retool “hacking mindset” approach to redesigning school cultures to be more nimble and innovative.

Source

It is important to remember that the first couple of stages of virtual school mainly deals with setting up systems (i.e., delivery, communication, etc.). The next phase has the teachers in a more comfortable place where creativity and innovation really can come into play as they deliver their math and literacy curricula. The longer virtual school lasts, the more important it is to find ways to strive for helping students move up Bloom’s Taxonomy aiming for concept learning while building in collaboration for learning and for social-emotional support. And the longer virtual school lasts, the more the grade level teaching teams need to teach the units of study. So if your units of study involve inquiry, project, and problem-based learning, look to your VS Design Team to find age-appropriate ways to support these pedagogical approaches.

To balance the big ideas and efforts to try small pilots look to bring in your learning support teachers to fine-tune your design efforts. They specialize in individualization breaking learning down into concrete step-by-step processes. Just as we naturally differentiate for content, process, and product in face-to-face learning, we need to do the same with our virtual instruction. Some students will only need a little explanation while others will need lots of scaffolding, especially when working in teams on project work. Count on your learning support teachers to help with this process.

There is one more member of your VS Design Team- the counselor or as I say, the Wellness Coach. The longer students are away from the normal social-emotional support of being in school with their classmates and teachers, the more they need very intentional sharing of information and strategies to support their well-being. I would add wellness as a subject area for teaching teams to incorporate into their lessons. The Wellness Coach is the person to find out what teams are already doing regarding wellness to then share their activities across grade levels. The Wellness Coach can curate those activities and add new ones to have a central database of lessons to help students learn about their wellness while also providing activities for each of the PERMAH pillars guiding students to engage their character strengths.

One final thought is that we don’t need virtual school to bring innovators together to create, craft, and share powerful instructional and assessment strategies. If our schools are truly innovative learning communities, we of course find ways to nurture and cross-pollinate our ideas also during regular school. 🙂

First Image Source

Photo by Victor Garcia on Unsplash

Virtual Elementary School – Looking Back To SARS in Hong Kong

February 1, 2020 / David Carpenter / 0 Comments

With the outbreak of the coronavirus in China and its spreading to other locations outside China, we are seeing both public and international schools closing in Asia. The response to the SARS epidemic in 2003 was similar. At that time I was the instructional technologist for the Upper Primary of the Hong Kong International School (HKIS). I vividly remember the sense of despair and anxiety in our staff trying to make the decision whether to stay in Hong Kong or travel to their home countries. Our parents were desperate for information, especially about how to provide stability and emotional support for their children.

Moving to the present day, I did some reflection this past week about the needs of the students, parents, and staff if our international school might need to close to then go virtual. I am also seeing other folks thinking about virtual school and posting some helpful guidance on tools and platforms that schools can leverage when going virtual. Our menu of tools at HKIS in 2003 was very limited but our focus was not on the technology. Here is a bit of our story.

Our head of school sent out the announcement that the HKIS would close. Those staff members who had not already left Hong Kong leading up to closure were figuring out their next move. We realized that closing the physical doors to our school was not our only option. We could open virtual school doors to our community. We realized that with the majority of our students being local that many would be holed up and isolated in their apartments and houses for who knew how long. It was also clear that their days would probably be unstructured which would only increase their anxiety and that of their parents.

The idea of going virtual was not much of a sell to our principal Bruce Kelsh. His response was to tell me to form a team and to get started immediately to create our Upper Primary Virtual School. The Middle and High schools jumped on board and we began to make our plans. To learn more about those experiences, here is an article describing the effort and some of the lessons we learned.

Now firmly in the present day thinking about what might happen next with the coronavirus, I am putting together a list of ideas for my elementary school. Here is what I have so far.

Virtual School (VS) Lessons Learned from HKIS During SARS

Virtual School Leadership Team. Create a leadership team to design the overall plan to then work with and guide the grade-level teams and specialists into implementation. One might not just go with current leadership structures. It depends on what the main responsibilities of the team will be. In our case at HKIS, we needed green hat thinkers who also had experience in using technology. We were a school that used de Bono’s Six Hats thinking approach which could be a helpful framework for our VS leadership and grade-level teams. We also had folks who brought their skills in logistics, communication, facilitation, etc. to the leadership team. Make sure to have a counselor/psychologist on the team to bring the lens of wellness to the discussions and actions.
Virtual School Plan. The first task of the VS leadership team at HKIS was to construct our VS plan of operations. We began the process by recording lots of questions and “what if’s?” This is where we are fortunate at the ES to have so many facilitators and program developers. Note that the VS plan documentation is an ongoing process. You can get your initial goals, roles, and systems in place. However, your learning, reflecting, and adapting are ongoing as you get feedback from teachers, students, and parents. So be ready to keep your plan up to date with built-in markers to pause, reflect and make changes. All the documentation will obviously pay big dividends down the road if and when you are forced to reopen the virtual school.
Pedagogy came first– not technology. Our guiding design process at HKIS centered on what we called the Three C’s: Communication, Community, and Content (Interactive). We reviewed the everyday literacy, math, etc. lessons and unit projects (similar to our super units) through the SAMR and TPACK filters looking to create lessons that would have our students easily communicating (and collaborating) with each other and their teachers, building SEL connections (community) while engaging with the interactive content to then move into creating with or without technology. If we are to take a similar approach I would drop the SAMR as it can be confusing for some. A cleaner and simpler approach is Replace, Augment and Transform (RAT). I add “amplify” to augment as we help students share their learning with a greater audience.
The Instructional Technologist (Instructional Coach for Technology): This is obviously a key role today just as it was back in 2003. I have written a lot about this role with real emphasis that your instructional technologist must be allowed to apply his/her training as an instructional designer and facilitator of the curriculum development process, especially in the case of virtual school. What I have seen happen in the past few years with the growth of more and more educational platforms is that the instructional technologist is in some cases returning to the pre-2000 role of technology coordinator. Back in the day, the tech coordinators were definitely the “tech guys” who were mainly technicians making the computers and printers work. Today I am seeing the instructional technologist not only managing educational platforms and accounts but also being the caretaker of hardware as in iPads, robotics labs, etc. So let your instructional technologist dive into the TPACKing process of guiding teams to work as designers bringing their content, pedagogy, and technology knowledge together to create the lessons and unit projects. If possible, as part of applying individual skill sets in various roles, get your Dreambox, SeeSaw, etc. teacher experts to provide that type of support while their grade-level partners carry more of the curriculum development work. And of course, this designing and creation process is going to be fluid with some getting-started needs that will diminish as teachers feel more comfortable using various technologies.
Collaboratively develop uniform lessons by grade level teams as opposed to having each teacher go it alone. At HIKS this led to more buy-in from staff feeling the work to be less daunting while benefiting from the more efficient use of time, distributed expertise of teammates, and creativity of teamwork. The leadership team designed protocols and frameworks to help provide a uniform presentation of curriculum and experiences for students. An additional principle was that we tried to break lessons into simpler portions as we obviously did not have the benefit of face-to-face explanations with our students. This leads to thinking about how we do build a system for students to ask questions of each other and their teachers.
Communication Conduits. Connecting to uniformity for ease of understanding by our stakeholders, we also had protocols for handling information requests, needs for extra social-emotional support, setting good boundaries with parents, etc. The admin team at HKIS had very clear structures on who spoke for the school and when information would go out. This is a larger issue that our admin already has in place but we will need guidelines for parents emailing grade-level teaching teams for information and requests.
Distributed expertise led to teachers taking on various roles engaging their skill sets as handling the web work, parent communication, liaison with the Virtual School Leadership Team, etc. This approach benefits from having very upfront discussions with team members about their strengths and weaknesses as to where they can best apply their skill sets.
An added wellness PERMAH benefit at HKIS was that virtual school also connected our teachers who had left with those of us who stayed in Hong Kong. Teachers had more positive emotions due to the relationship building of the grade level teams engaging in creative work leading to flow as well as feelings of achievement and satisfaction of contributing to the well-being of our students and their parents. It was also very evident that giving teachers opportunities to engage their strengths and skills also added to their well-being by connecting to the E and M of PERMAH. Admin provided ongoing emotional and informational update support for staff as well. Moving to the present day, I would introduce the term wellness to our communications while providing a curriculum to help our students and parents better understand how to handle their feelings of fear, anxiety, isolation, etc. that arise in crisis situations. The nature of Positive Psychology is to focus on how to equip ourselves to engage our character strengths within each of the PERMAH pillars to enhance our well-being and thrive. It is important to note that the same efforts must be provided to support staff with their wellness needs as they deal with the isolation that comes from a virtual school. I would recommend that a wellness/self-care curriculum be developed for staff that is offered face-to-face and/or virtually depending on the status of being on campus or not. It is obvious to point that teachers and students get so much energy from being with each other. The loss of energy and potential of experiencing more negative emotions becomes more and more evident with the loss of daily classroom routines and face-to-face contact during the longer virtual school runs. As for the present moment, we already have our PERMAH and Character Strengths lesson idea resources on the web and ready to roll. We can take small steps limiting the language of Positive Psychology and PERMAH by simply using the terms our students know as the value of relationships, the positive feelings that go with accomplishment, and the strengths of being creative and self-understanding for example. One structure to support this process would be to designate a wellness or SEL lead on each of the grade-level teams. This person would work with me to design SEL activities that would be a part of the regular curriculum just like the regular subject areas.
Self-Management and Study Skills. It goes without saying that students take a leap in their development around self-management skills and the character strength of self-control. Our younger students of course need a great deal of parental supervision while our upper primary students are more self-reliant to some extent. The virtual school puts our students into an entirely different learning environment with limited interaction with their teachers. One support mechanism is to provide lesson(s) to help students construct their daily learning plan (i.e., goals, task listing with time expectations, use of a timer, etc.) that includes breaks from technology with designated wellness breaks. The wellness coach (counselor) could support the effort by creating a website of wellness activities for students, teachers, and parents to draw from. A guiding principle would be to get everyone, including teachers, to take nature breaks several times a day.
Interdisciplinary Learning. Our specials teachers at HKIS were a big part of the design effort to offer integration and standalone learning opportunities for their content areas. They came up with lots of creative and FUN activities for students to do. The librarian played a key role in providing online resources of databases, reading resources, etc.
Our Coaching Model. The instructional technologist, the science coordinator, and the librarian led the VS leadership team at HKIS. We are fortunate at the ES to have three coaches, learning support teachers, two counselors, and EAL instructors to help lead and share their areas of expertise collaborating with the VS leadership and the grade-level teams in their design and implementation work.
Web Resources for Independent Learning. We did build a section of our web presence to house links to online resources for students to explore on their own. We need to remember that our regular curriculum will only take up a portion of our students’ days. The supplemental enrichment resources at HKIS offered self-directed learning opportunities that included inquiry and research. I am reminded that we also had a section for parents for their FAQs which cut down on the need to respond with full explanations to parent emails. Our leadership team would need to decide whether to have one central listing of sites broken down into categories and age-appropriate sections or to have each grade level have its own resources page. Connecting to having roles on the grade level teams, one role can be the curator of web resources. Here is one listing of web resources divided into four themes. There are many other curated lists that we can draw from.
Social and Emotional Support. Our biggest lesson learned was that through the structures, systems, and connections of VS that we helped our students and their parents feel a part of a community. I cannot stress enough how important this was. One needs to recognize how isolating it was for some of our families who chose not to go out for walks and visits with others. Other parents chose to not be so isolated. As noted in the article, some students who lived close together would congregate at someone’s home for their face-to-face version of school interacting with our VS curriculum. Some parents organized the day into blocks for LA, math, social studies, etc. Note in a couple places in this post that our staff also benefited socially and emotionally with their running of the virtual school which offered routines and ways to engage with the pillars of PERMAH. Do understand that the longer virtual school runs, the more social and emotional support takes precedence over other goals and academic needs. So we should look at every opportunity to have our students interact with each other. The interaction can take place in virtual synchronous morning meetings, sharing photos, recorded audio and video messages, working in teams on projects, and so on. Simply find ways for shared face time! I also would definitely broach the idea going forward to work with staff, students, and families to create some sort of wellness plan using PERMAH and the Character Strengths. Goal-setting within the PERMAH pillars with supportive action steps could be a part of the wellness plan template.
Social and Emotional Support for Staff. Just as in regular school, the administration needs to be out and about nurturing connections, taking “moral temperatures” and cross-pollinating ideas. The art of active listening through acknowledging, validating, and celebrating more than ever must be taking place as achieving and “stretching” teachers need support with their well-being by school leaders. As mentioned, I would also look to form a wellness support team to come up with self-care and morale-building activities if we are able to work from school. We could definitely put together a menu of “afterschool activities” for staff if we get to work from school. We also need to draw on the expertise of the counselors/psychologist and outside-of-the-school mental health providers to provide information about mental health and how and where to get support, if needed.
Parent Buy-In to VS and Their Role as Teachers. This happened naturally but I would make it more intentional in our effort. We could possibly put a parenting/teaching set of guidelines together. We would also need to do the same for nannies if the parents are going to work. And note that some families will choose not to participate and/or be sporadic with their engagement.
Delivery Tools and Platforms. The intent of this write-up is to not list the delivery tools we used at HKIS. There are so many good ones to choose from now. What I would think about is how to package research assignments and super unit projects. One approach would be to use some adaptation of WebQuests especially when inquiry is involved. To the point of keeping the directions simple and clear, it makes sense to think of formatting the learning in some sort of learning module for “one-stop learning”. While WebQuests have been around for over 20 years, they check a lot of boxes for clear task and rubric identification, collaboration through roles, inquiry, higher-level thinking skills, and learning project creation. They also make the research process simpler by providing a listing of resource sites within the learning module. And regarding tools and platforms, it is helpful to have either a central or by-grade-level virtual school toolbox for students and parents to access tutorials for all the technologies. Also, make sure to have one central posting place for assignments whether on a weekly or bimonthly timeline. In using a variety of tools for different purposes such as creation, curation, collaboration, and/or communication (i.e., Information and Communication Skills- ICL), it can become confusing for students and parents to know exactly what is expected and when it is due. So make sure to have the central assignment place for easy reference whether it is in your LMS. Google Docs or a website.
Cross-Pollination. Just as in regular school, we had pockets of innovation taking place within grade-level teams. It was my good fortune to watch creative teachers find ways to design learning activities that supported our “Three C’s” approach while I also was able to share their ideas with the other teams. As mentioned, at the ES we have a great many coaches and specialists who can bring their skills to each team while picking up innovative approaches to carry and diffuse out into our learning community. It made sense for us at HKIS to start slowly helping to guide our students into learning virtually. But as our students got the hang of things so did we which led to richer and deeper learning experiences.
Opportunity. Our experience during SARS at HKIS was difficult at times. Thankfully there were no cases of illness within our community. Instead of allowing hysteria and troubling emotions to rule our thoughts, our community like many when facing challenges, worked together to make the most of the moment to shine and to excel. Disruption and challenge definitely can provide opportunities to reflect and engage our growth mindsets to then charge forward. This was the case for some of our teachers who tended towards a bit of a static mindset. I can still see several of their faces beaming at what they accomplished especially when previously being reticent in using technology. Many of our students made leaps in their development becoming more self-driven and independent. Our early adopters who sometimes did not get recognition for their creativity and innovation really shined when given the opportunity to showcase their ideas.
Reentry and Reflection. Build opportunities for students and staff to reflect on their experiences during virtual school. There is of course the social-emotional processing that needs to take place. The very positive personal growth also deserves time and attention. Back to the theme of disruption, we learned that with positive attitudes and growth mindsets students and staff found ways to engage their character strengths and skill sets to experience real personal growth.
Transferability. We learned a lot about differentiation through innovative pedagogy delivered via technology when not able to provide face-to-face instruction. Many of our quiet students found their voice thus growing their confidence by fully engaging in virtual learning. Some of our teachers found ways to continue aspects of their online content and activity work thus moving into more blended instruction during regular school.
Co-Curricular Learning. After-school activities were a major part of the learning taking place at HKIS. From orchestra to sports to crafts, you name it, we had teachers and contractors providing engaging learning opportunities after school for our students. I cannot remember if we offered some of the activities virtually during SARS but I can say I would definitely try to find a way to include them in some fashion in the present circumstances. Disruption leads to opportunity so I can see after-school providers finding ways to virtually connect with students to run their activities and keep their businesses afloat. As noted, the SEL needs of students to be connected with one another and to participate in energy-providing activities that lead them to engage their Character Strengths (i.e., creativity, curiosity, social intelligence, etc.) means that we really should think about how we can deliver the benefits that co-curricular learning offers.

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After virtual school at HKIS, we started running an annual practice week of virtual school in which all members of our community practiced virtual learning. Here are some questions that came up in one of our initial planning meetings. There is some overlap with what is covered earlier in this write-up but some of the questions offer new insights.

What will your online assignments/lessons look like?
How will they support what you normally would be covering in class?
How will they involve cooperative learning?
How will they be project or problem or inquiry-based?
How will you avoid fluff work?
How can multimedia teacher-created lessons engage students more than static worksheet ones?
How will some assignments involve doing research that the student can access online?
How do we continue our normal curriculum?
How will you build community?
How will you support one another?
What would our enduring understandings be if we should close down?
How would we reach those understandings through the curriculum?
Who would be responsible for what areas?
Then what technology will support what we want to do?
And how can the TAs help us?

Image Source: Learning & Leading with Technology. Volume 32. Number 8.

Lessons Learned

Instructional Technology - International Education - Wellness

Category: Learning Specialist (page 1 of 5)

Professional Learning: Improving Your Wellness Program

The Wellness Coach (Counselor) – Instructional Technologist Partnership

Collaboration, Creativity, and Refinement with the Kidspire Team

Wellness Program Development and Implementation

What if we… Celebrate Student Success Through Story Arcs

Collaboration to Improve PRIME Wellness Integration Strategies

VS – Coming Out the Other Side

VS- Virtual PD

Virtual School Design Team

Virtual Elementary School – Looking Back To SARS in Hong Kong

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