Cohesive School Design & Coaching Towards Schoolwide Consistency

PRESENTER

Justine Carryer

Justine Carryer is a school designer, curriculum writer, school leader coach and instructional coach. She writes integrated core curricula with a focus on project-based learning, outdoor exploration, and place-based experience. She has written a comprehensive K-8 science and social studies integrated curriculum, K-12 Math curricula resources, and K-12 Performance Tasks for ELA, Math, Science/Social Studies, and the Arts. Her educational career started with 10 years of primary and secondary Math and Science (Physics) teaching, outdoor education, and comprehensive school design for a K-8 outdoor- based public charter school. She now runs Sunshine Studies, 501(c)3 non-profit, focused on curriculum writing, academic planning and school design with school leadership, coaching teachers, and grant reviewing for state school start-up funding. Her passion is helping schools (existing or start-ups) co-create a cohesive and inspired vision for their school that generates cohesive schoolwide structures for tiered implementation.

TRANSCRIPT

Jessica Hurdley:

I’m pleased to introduce Justine Carryer, who is a school designer, curriculum writer, school leader, coach, and instructional coach. Justine, I’ll turn the time over to you today and I will come back on at the end. Hi.

Justine Carryer:

Hi everyone. Thank you so much for the introduction. We can go ahead and jump in with that introduction, and I did paste a link to this presentation in the chat. We’re going to have some work time today and you can use this presentation for that work time. So it should be there at the, so the first step in cohesive school design and school-wide consistency is your school’s mission and vision, which today I may refer to as mission. Just combining those two words, every school kind of has their own focus with its mission or vision. And the goal with taking an inspired mission and vision is to distill this mission into actionable and consistent school-wide practices that result in a positive attitude towards learning. Today we are going to focus how you can bring inspiration and breathe life into your school’s mission for all staff. Again, we have some embedded work time, so please find that link so you can use it for your work time so that you can generate some planning and ideas towards cultivating school-wide awareness of and consistent implementation of the practices that support your school’s mission. We’ll also have a number of poll questions for you to reflect on how your school is implementing your mission and vision and ways in which to directly impact the consistency and effectiveness of this implementation. So polls are very much for you to reflect and take some ideas home with rather than for me to collect data. So we have our first

Poll question, which this is maybe the fifth

Poll question, I’m not sure if they got out of order. The first poll question should be How many staff know your school’s mission and vision? Go ahead and take a moment to respond, reflect.

Okay, so the majority category is some, which is perfect. This is exactly what we’re focusing on in this session. So today we’re going to be looking at artifacts that were created for Glen Canyon Outdoor Academy, a K through eight public outdoor based charter school serving students in page Arizona and Navajo Nation. And we’re going to use this to illustrate a cohesive school design and branding that takes an inspired mission and vision and distills it down into the photos that you can see below of engaged learning and high quality artifacts. So your second question now, if you think about the first one is all staff. How many students and families know your school’s mission and vision

Needs to be non option? Another

Justine. Awesome. Okay, so most of you say a few. Wonderful. All right, well, I’m so happy that everyone’s participating today. So here we have for GCOA, you can see in the way that children are outside, there’s project, there’s hands-on learning. These are called expedition notebooks. At GCOA, the students and families, it’s very important for them to know their school’s mission and vision. What I’d like everybody to do is go ahead and open that link and scroll through, and I’m really hoping in presenter view, I can see everybody’s comments. I would like for you to directly add comments to this slide and really think about what practices do you think this school has to take, this mission and vision and yield student engagement and the artifacts that are pictured below. So I’ll give about five minutes. Please feel free if there’s any technical errors to let me know, but let’s just take some think time to comment directly on here. You can just add a comment. What consistent practices does this school have to take the inspired mission and vision and yield what you see below? This is also a great time to post some comments.

So that question is really thinking about embodying practices for school-wide consistency of implementation around your mission and vision. GCOA has developed what we call the layers of instructional practice that help to cultivate process for consistency across the entire school. From an inspired mission comes this process of consistency, and within every classroom it ensures clear expectation and engages students in a learning environment that reflects the GCOA mission and vision. So our next poll question is, does your mission and vision play a key role in any of the following, implementation plan, professional development, coaching PLCs, curriculum priorities, lesson plans, engagement protocols? You can select more than one. And again, I didn’t put a none of the above, but

Okay, so majority in professional development, that’s great. That’s really what we’re going to look at today. And the first question of does your staff and families know about your mission and vision is the professional development is a perfect structure to really support with that. And then I see in the chat answer mission questions because our district has an old one posted, but no one in the building really knows it. That’s a great reflection and none, these are great reflections everyone. Thank you. So within that, we have another question is, do you have a developed process for consistent implementation of the mission and vision for

Every classroom?

Not really. Okay. Well, that’s what this is. This picture right here, the GCOA layers of instructional practice, this is gco a’s way of taking an inspired mission and vision and distilling it all the way down to components of a learning experience, which is GCO a’s glorified term for lesson planning. So you have a inspired mission and vision ideally, which was this previous slide that we looked at and commented on. And from that is this first layer of an instructional vision. So what does GCOA really believe in beyond that sort of overarching mission and vision theme? And how does it go all the way through each of these layers to teacher lesson plans? So teacher lesson plans should be reflective of the school’s mission and vision and their academic philosophy. So we’re going to first look at and unpack that outer layer to help your school develop a process for school-wide consistency at GCOA.

We call this the instructional vision, its core academic philosophies of which there are four. So I’m just going to show this to you and then we’re going to jump into some work time. And as much as you would like to dialogue during that work time, please feel free to use the chat for it. So again, from the mission, which is essentially active student-centered environment through outdoor learning, collaboration and community engagement, there are then these four philosophies that are essentially outdoor education collaboration among staff, collaboration with families and community. And the fourth one is that all students can learn. So what we’re going to do is take some work time to process how GCO a’s mission and vision translates into core academic philosophies. The way that we’re going to do that is twofold. So one aspect, and this I believe is slide five, but I’ll check in a minute when I get out of presenter mode, is to plan your back to school orientation to launch your school’s mission and vision on day one, ideally with all staff. So you can see here in orange at the top, this is our back to school orientation, the first two hours of the first day. And at GCOA, they do include all staff. Yes, I can put the slides back in the chat there.

Yeah.

Okay. So what we’re going to do is take some time, I’ll give you about 10 minutes, which is a lot of work time, but I really want you to have some time to process everything and really think about how you can apply this at your school. And things seem to be loading. So once you go in there, you’re going to go to the slide that was previously shared that has this agenda here. And what we did at GCOA, again with all staff is both create an activity that gives all staff time to read and reflect on the core philosophies and an activity that itself embodies the mission and vision. So we have a visual collage and then outdoor components of this lesson and the structure itself with a hook work time and jigsaw. And then a debrief is our lesson plan structure, which is that innermost ring of our instructional model for BCOA.

So for this work time, the first thing that you’re going to do is create a duplicate slide, which I hope works. I gave everybody editing access where you can actually go in and start brainstorming your own agenda, 60 to 120 minutes for sharing your mission and vision with all staff. And if you aren’t sure what your school’s is, then maybe the activity needs to be breathing new life into your mission and vision. Maybe the activity needs to be distilling a core philosophy such as what’s in slide five from your mission and vision. So if you don’t feel like your school has these core philosophies, these components that lift up your mission and vision, that can be your orientation activity. The other aspect of this work time, so you can differentiate for yourself is slide seven. You could start to think about, oh, maybe I’m in a position to define the core philosophies that hold up that mission and vision. And again, you can go back to slide five to see how GCOA broke that down, and you can start jotting down notes here. So we’ll have 10 minutes for this work time. Alright, so go ahead and finish up any notes that you’re taking, whether in the presentation or on your own. And we’re going to look at a second aspect of this instructional vision. I’ll go back into present review so it’s easier to see the screen here.

Just to recap and debrief. What we’ve looked at is one, your school or campus or district having an inspired mission and vision. Two, cultivating core philosophies or that instructional vision. Three, generating an orientation activity, ideally with all staff to breathe new life into that inspired mission. And then the next component of that is a midyear feedback and reflection. And again, we’re still looking in this outer layer of school-wide consistency in this infographic, the instructional vision. So at GCOA halfway through the year, we had a professional development activity where we took everything that had been talked about in the teacher’s lounge or inside conversations or in direct conversations or even that students were saying, and we lumped it all and organized all of it into our core academic philosophy or that outer instructional vision layer. So what we did for this professional activity was this, the orange agenda here and the product is what I’m sharing on this screen here.

We made four anchor charts, one for each of the core philosophies. We shared observations that were made by the school leader for campus trends of how they were being enacted or what the trend was overall. And then we led a reflection explicitly naming the things that we had been hearing around campus, and of course in the teacher’s lounge and had teachers write on sticky notes, what’s working and what’s not working with each of these aspects of the core philosophy. And the result of that was tremendous because one, they felt heard. Two, we got to reflect, and three, it was a two-way dialogue where leaders could share what the campus trend was, what was happening and not happening as it related to the core philosophy that’s underneath that umbrella of the mission. And then teachers got to share what they felt like was working and not working and what help they needed.

So this is our midyear reflection and feedback, which after that orientation activity is essential in again, really cultivating that school-wide consistency. So you can see the agenda for that professional development here where again, we made four anchor charts. Teachers wrote on sticky notes, what’s working and what’s not working. They organized that feedback based on which academic philosophy it fell under. Then we grouped teachers into four groups and they categorized all of that feedback to create topics of what’s working and what’s not working. So transitions may be working or not, transportation may be working or not going smoothly between the indoor and outdoor classroom may be working or not having enough time for that. So really taking that feedback and consolidating it and having staff do that is very valuable. And then from that we have a daily staff crew, which is the first 20 minutes of every day, including all staff in creating action steps, which you can see back here, these next steps and action items and who’s responsible for those action items.

So we’re just going to take a couple minutes of work time now, so we have time to look at a couple more things before the session ends. And you can just jot down some notes or again, make a duplicate slide of this, but this is midyear planning for next school year. How are you going to circle back and reflect upon and or give and receive feedback about the implementation and consistency of your school’s mission and vision and core philosophy. So I’m just going to give a couple of minutes here to really think about how you can create that structure for the mid-year reflection.

So now we’re going to dive a little bit into the next layer of school-wide consistency from having that clear, oh, quick question. Okay. Just saw that how your mission statement came to be. Did teachers generate the mission statement? That’s a great question. So before we move on, let’s reflect on those questions. So our mission statement, G’S mission statement came to be actually from the founding team, which was a group of about 15 teachers from page parents of students who wanted to transition to a school like this. And that’s a great activity to do with everybody. What are our core values? What makes our school unique? So outdoor experiential education was the first thing for Glen Canyon Outdoor Academy and cultivating that mission. Then from there as a charter school, creating core philosophies was kind of a secondary part of that core founding group, which was made of teachers and parents and creating the core academic philosophies that guided our entire charter process.

And so if you are looking at having staff recreate your mission and vision, you can do an activity that’s actually similar to the mid-year reflection and create some anchor charts that are some of the core values that your school has already established and really try to distill those and make them very clear and concise. You could do a very open-ended thing and have everybody write on a sticky note what they think their school is about, and then assign groups to categorize those sticky notes, create those core values. So the core values is really the first thing. And then creating a sentence or two sentences about those core values is fairly straightforward. So getting everybody’s voice involved is kind of the first step. And then you can really create some cohesion by having staff overlap. What is the consistency here? And maybe somebody is using a synonym, but then they can come together. And then Gabrielle sharing strategic planning process with the steering committee. Yeah, exactly. Each with parents, board members and community members. So it’s very similar thing to Glen Canyon Outdoor Academy and there’s lots of ways to do that. So if you would like to follow up and get help planning how to do that, please feel free to reach out. Any other questions on mission and that

Instructional vision? Okay, we can go

So far. So the next layer, which is the only other thing we’re going to look at before the session ends today is from there, creating an instructional model that really guides the practices in the classroom. So your final poll question is, does your school’s mission and vision drive school-wide practices and routines?

And again, this is multiple answer you can select, I didn’t put none again, sorry about that. Engagement strategies. So here you have the next layer of school-wide consistency, which is what GCOA calls their instructional model. This guides those school-wide practices and routines. And the first thing within our instructional model is having common vocabulary across all classrooms and a common way to implement those consistent practices and routines. So from this, if every teacher is able to embody the instructional model in the classroom, our goal is an impact on student learning. So here on this next slide, you can see how the consistency and instruction starting with that mission, then going to core philosophies and then having an instructional model can take student work, which on the left was from 2022 to 2023, school year beginning and end to last year, 23, 24, beginning, middle, and end of the year. And that is the ultimate goal with consistency and instruction is having a model for teachers that’s clear, that is directly related to the mission and vision that they can create practices in the classroom. And this student actually in a two year period had three different teachers. So all three teachers were cultivating that same instructional model to focus on supporting this student’s engagement in their own learning and improving their attitude towards their learning.

One key protocol that we have, and I’ll end with sharing this is called a high quality work protocol. So from that instructional model, GCOA has selected about five instructional strategies that we explicitly teach in professional development use in our coaching and use in PLCs to help teachers take that overarching vision and break it down into practices that they can use in their classroom. So this high quality work protocol starts with looking at student work, giving them clear feedback based on chain links, which are success criteria. Every school has their own vocabulary for that, and then helping a student grow their work. So we’re just going to take a few final minutes taking this protocol that again, comes funnels down from that instructional model and then looking at student work. So here we have beginning, middle, and end of year non examples and examples. So we can just use the chat for this for the next couple minutes and I’m going to guide you through a high quality work protocol.

So typically I would print these out on an anchor chart and you would have students do a gallery walk to look at different work samples. And the first thing is to just notice and wonder what do you notice about the non example or the example and what do you wonder about it? So we’ll just take one minute, you can go ahead and type notices and wonders in the chat. Alrighty, well that was a final practice from there. Colorful pictures or eye catching. Great. So what you would do from notices and wonders is then take that and co-create chain links or success criteria and have students reflect on their own work and give peer feedback based on that work. And that also sets teachers up for grading as a standards-based grading school. They can look at success criteria generated from this activity with students to give students feedback. So that’s just an example of a practice derived from our instructional model, that second layer. So we just have about a minute left, I believe, and I’d love to open it up if there are final questions. And thank everybody.

Jessica Hurdley:

I don’t see any questions coming in through the q and a. Okay. Or the chat.

Justine Carryer:

Alright, well thanks everybody.

Jessica Hurdley:

Perfect.

Justine Carryer:

That gave some good reflection.

Jessica Hurdley:

Absolutely. Thank you, Justine, for your incredible insight into creating a school-wide collaborative team. Walking us through the process of creating core philosophies from a unified mission and vision and reflection, and creating consistencies in instruction using the instruction model that you had suggested.