Teacher Professional Development Week Notes...

Here are some quick notes as KPEA is starting to wrap up our 3 weeks of teacher professional development and get ready to welcome our new kindergarten students on Thursday:

• Inspirational family story - One of our families that includes three students at KPEA, was planning on moving to New York this summer. This is a family who has been through many ups and downs in their two years with us and as a result many teachers on staff have a close relationship with the students and parents. Based on challenges this family has had in the past, when they told us that they would be moving this summer we both worked to give them advice and connections with schools in New York, while also wondering if they would end up moving back to Philadelphia quickly since this is where the rest of their extended family lives. Teachers tried a couple of times during the summer to get a hold of the mother to see how things were going and all her numbers were disconnected - not an uncommon fact for this family. So we waited to hear something before we had to officially drop them from our rolls and take new students off our waitlist this week. And then on the same day we were going to contact new students, one of our teachers gets a call from the mother. In her words, her children kept asking when they were going to get to go back to KIPP because in his 7-year old words "KIPP is home". As a result, she decided to move back to Philadelphia so her children could continue at KPEA. In fitting timing, we got this news just as teachers were in a training on how we build powerful, lasting relationships with families and when teachers heard the news there were tears of happiness. Like I wrote here, keeping our kids is core to what we believe at KIPP and KPEA and that happens when great teachers build deep relationships with kids and families.  

• Our teachers and staff have been doing a lot of work with ideas from the book Lost at School and I couldn't recommend it highly enough for teachers and leaders thinking deeply about how to work successfully with challenging students. The book is full of both deep ideas and practical strategies with the most foundational being the switch in thinking from "Kids do well if they want to" to "Kids do well if they can". It might seem like a little change but the impact on how we see our roles supporting challenging students is profound, because the role of teachers and support staff changes from "making kids want to behave/punishing them into not wanting to get into trouble" to "giving kids the skills and support to be able to do well". We're working hard to combine these big ideas with our already strong focus on clear expectations, social skills education, and strong use of teacher moves from Teach Like a Champion. I'll blog more about how this goes throughout the year, but I'm really excited to continue the work of shifting our student culture to one that is always about purposefully thinking about what is best for our students' character in the long term and never about just compliance.  

• We've been using this TED Talk by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on "The Single Story" to talk about how our kids, families, and each other are made up of many stories, characteristics, and identities. In her talk, Adichie says, "the problem with stereotypes is not that they are wrong, but that they are incomplete." The term "single story" has been a really good phrase to help us balance the realities that we know broad truths about everyone we do this work with but we must dig deeper to know each person as an individual. Totally worth the 18 minutes to listen to her talk.

• One of our areas of focus this year at KPEA is represented by the phrase "We work and teach in such a way that students achieving is the constant; how we get them there is the only variable." This does not mean that achievement is a fixed, inflexible target - notice that the phrasing is "students achieving" not "student achievement" - because we are a school that values student progress and are just as excited for our students who make a ton of growth but are not on grade level yet as we are for our highest readers. But what is not ok is us being ok with kids not learning - for any reason. A teacher was out on maternity leave for a while? Shuffle staffing around to make sure great teachers are covering in that room. There is a new 2nd grader who comes in reading on a kinder level? Make sure she gets double or triples doses of reading each day. A student's behavior is spiraling because mom is working the overnight shift and can't come in for a problem solving meeting at school? Go to her house for a home visit. Our language around this comes from a blog post by Dan Meyer about a speech by Uri Treisman on the concept of "fault tolerance". The powerful idea is used to describe systems where we know problems will happen and engineers must design systems that are robust enough to withstand these challenges. Planes get hit by lightening and keep flying. Google servers crash but email keeps sending. Not all kids in school come in on grade level with perfect behavior and our schools, especially in under-resourced settings must be ready to ensure that kids learn no matter what.