Carrie Symons, PhD

This week at Summers-Knoll, we had our first early release/half-day, professional learning session for teachers on Wednesday, October 9th. (Thank you to the aftercare staff who made it possible for homeroom teachers and specialists to engage in this learning together.) We used this time to take a deeper dive into our schoolwide, Climate Science initiative with the founder of Summers-Knoll school, Ruth Knoll.

Over the past two years, Ruth has been taking her own deep dive into the science of soil. As a dedicated student of the Soil Food Web School, founded by Dr. Elaine Ingham, Ruth has been studying the science of thermal (aka hot) composting.

About

From examining microbial life and fungi under a microscope to giving us a tour of various types of composts (e.g., Johnson-Su, Bokashi, Vermicompost) in various stages of development, we learned about the critical importance of compost in the broader scope of climate science as well as how to create thermal composts using a standardized formula of 10% high nitrogen, 30 % nitrogen, 60% carbon.

Prior to our field trip to Ruth’s house on Wednesday, we met virtually with a Soil Food Web consultant, Loida Vasquez, who works in the agricultural industry with farmers across the U.S., Mexico, Costa Rica, and Colombia.

Loida taught us about the different types of microbial life in a healthy, nutrient-rich compost, their functions, and their critical role in plant life and the life of our planet.

When teachers’ build their domain knowledge, they, in turn, can create more meaningful opportunities for student learning. Through translating domain knowledge into curriculum and instruction for students, teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge deepens. For example, if you wanted to better understand the dust bowl history of the U.S., one of the best ways to do so would be to teach someone else about it because to teach someone else about something, you need to have both the domain (aka content) knowledge as well as practical knowledge of how to create meaningful and engaging experiences through which students learn. As one of my yoga teachers, Baba Hari Dass said, “Teach to learn.”

Thank you, Loida and Ruth, for partnering with us on this journey. At Summers-Knoll, we take project-based learning seriously. We recognize the importance of continually deepening our knowledge as educators in ways that align with how we want students to learn as well: surface, deep, and transfer. If a pedagogical approach, such as PBL, is going to foster transformative learning for students, teachers need to also have transformative learning opportunities.

Diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice (DEIJ) are not new ideas, but within the past decade – across public and private sectors – organizations, institutions, and companies have increasingly made it an explicit part of their mission and/or vision. Despite the importance of each of these constructs, their meanings are often assumed. Like many acronyms, DEIJ has become ubiquitous, and ubiquity often reinforces assumptions. But for an organization to genuinely embody and reflect these ideals, they need to be kept alive, iteratively interrogated and (re)centered in our conversations about who we are and why we do what we do.

Recently, there has been movement away from the word “inclusion” to “belonging.” Born in Detroit, john a. powell is the Director of The Othering & Belonging Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a renowned social justice activist, educator, and author. As Professor powell helps us understand in his book, Racing Toward Justice, inclusion suggests some sort of gatekeeping – that we somehow need to be given permission (by someone else) to be a part of a community. In contrast, “belonging” reflects the fact that we are all human. By the very nature of our humanity and each person’s inherent dignity, we all belong. Now the question is:

How do we create spaces that reflect this truth?

Each school year with each new class of students, teachers and students create classroom agreements. At Summers-Knoll, in 2023-24, those classroom agreements were collected, analyzed and synthesized into three schoolwide norms: Be kind. Be safe. Be respectful. At today’s Dragon Time (our whole school, Friday morning meeting), teachers shared their processes of establishing agreements in their classrooms and students shared examples of how their actions and words reflect our schoolwide norms.

Parents, caregivers and families are a critical part of a school’s culture and they, too, must experience a feeling of belonging.

The fall 2024 issue of the Independent School magazine focused on the vital role of parents, and schools’ relationships with parents, in independent schools. In her article, Debra P. Wilson, the president of the National Association of Independent Schools, wrote:

“Is it objectively harder to parent today than it was in, say, 1981? In a recent Pew Research report, 62% of parents say it is somewhat harder than they thought it would be. Another 26% says it’s a lot harder. 

While I should, and do, cut my own parents some slack for some of the more laissez-faire parenting styles of the ’70s and ’80s, I’d say it at least feels harder to be a ‘good parent’ today.   

Parenting is no longer just about raising well-fed and well-mannered kids who work hard in school and ultimately find a way to support themselves. The flood of information available to us today means we know all the risks ‘out there’ in the world, including in the virtual world. The world also feels that much more competitive, and we’re more aware of the importance of our children’s inner lives, their emotional and relational well-being. All this good and important information raises the stakes for our parenting choices. The metaphorical bumps and scrapes feel much more consequential. 

In this context of increased parental anxiety and societal polarization, independent schools have an important role to play. We can use the uniquely close environments we have built at our schools to better understand parents and partner with them to help our kids through challenging moments. We can build trust with parents so that they better understand the school’s role in looking out for individual students. Ultimately, we can create places of belonging for not just the students in our care but for their parents as well.”

Let’s tell a new story about belonging, one that permeates the walls of the school and reshapes who we are, our communities, and how we help one another remember the importance of honoring each person’s inherent worth and dignity across sectors, spaces, and time.

This week, on Thursday September 26th, we had our 2024-25 Curriculum Night at Summer-Knoll School. It was the first in-person Curriculum Night since 2019. While remote Curriculum Nights on Zoom enable parents to join the event from the comfort of their own homes, an in-person Curriculum Night offers unique advantages, which we witnessed last night: parents gathering together in the spaces that the children inhabit during the school day, hearing directly from teachers in real-time and visiting their classrooms, experiencing the positive collective energy that’s created through coming together as a community with intention, purpose, and commitment to our children’s education.

As Margaret Wheatley said, “Never underestimate the power of a small group of committed people to change the world. In fact, it is the only thing that ever has.”

Curriculum design is a long-term, ongoing, iterative, dynamic process. As I shared in my welcoming remarks at Curriculum Night last night, teachers’ curriculum design begins well before the start of a school year. In the middle of one school year, teachers are already thinking about and planning for the next. As teachers are constantly working toward their curricular and instructional goals – for their current class and each individual student – they are reflecting upon their teaching practice and integrating what they are learning about their students through their formative assessment(s) to inform their instruction (e.g., what’s working, what needs tweaking, how to pivot and for whom and when, what they may do differently next time they teach a particular concept, skill, or strategy).

But what, exactly, informs curriculum design? The above graphic illustrates a response to this question. At SK, teachers’ ongoing assessment of students and content area standards – the Common Core State Standards, Next Generation Science Standards, the 3C Social Studies Standards, and Singapore Math – inform teachers’ instruction; teachers skillfully address the standards through place- and project-based learning.

At its foundation, SK’s model of project-based learning is based upon the PBL Works Gold Standard frameworks for project-based learning design elements and teaching practices.

From this shared understanding of project-based learning – its components and the purposes of each component – SK teachers have amplified the rigor of their curriculum design and instruction through our shared study of The Project Habit: Making Rigorous PBL Doable.

Teachers creatively weave and integrate multiple content areas (e.g., science, literacy, social studies, math, music, art, languages) into four main projects over the course of a school year to provide students with rich learning opportunities. When planning, they begin by identify learning intentions at surface, deep, and transfer levels to ensure students are developing the knowledge they need to ask meaningful questions, draw connections between ideas, and transfer/apply their learning in authentic ways.

Students develop concepts, processes, skills, and strategies through project-based learning. The curriculum is the “what” and the instruction/learning is the “how.” And while teachers develop a curricular blue-print for each project or lesson, their instruction is responsive to the students with whom they work. In this way, teaching and learning are co-constructed in the moment by people (teachers and learners) who are situated within a sociocultural context and who engage with one another and an array of resources and materials to mediate teaching and learning.

Project-based learning is a truly human endeavor – it’s an active, co-construction of meaning through inquiry, relationship-building, encountering and overcoming obstacles, and applying knowledge in new and novel contexts. When students engage learning in this way, it’s meaningful and memorable.

Prior to the school year, Summers-Knoll faculty and staff gather for our annual, two-week, August professional learning institute. During this time, we do a lot things: reconnect with one another, welcome our new faculty and staff, review our safety policies and procedures, set-up classrooms, and dive deeply into curriculum planning for the year. We take time to explore and discuss our school’s initiatives for the year, and with these initiatives in the foreground, teachers workshop their project ideas with one another to design and develop their year-long curricula.

As mentioned at our State of the School meeting last spring, in this 2024-25 school year, we’re working with the overarching themes of Global Competence and Climate Science.

Global competence is “the capacity and disposition to understand and act on issues of global significance” (Boix Mansilla & Jackson 2011). Globally competent students learn how to investigate the world beyond their immediate environment, recognize their own and others’ perspectives, communicate across differences, and take responsible action. As such, global competence begins with – and must be sustained by – an awareness and exploration of one’s own identity and who we are as individuals, but this sense of self is not cultivated in isolation or for the purpose of promoting individualism. On the contrary, an exploration of one’s own identity is meaningful only to the extent that it helps us better understand who we are in relation to other people and the role(s) we can play in the communities and world around us.

Studies and projects related to climate science provide a context in which globally competent students can take action on environmental and ecological issues. While the scope of a project can be highly local, such as making nutrient-rich compost for our own garden, the knowledge and skills students develop in such a project can transfer to – and impact – the health of the planet more broadly because soil is everywhere; it is literally the ground upon which we walk. Part of our work as educators is to help reframe conversations about climate science. It’s helpful to know Why Humans Are So Bad at Thinking About Climate Change so that, as educators and parents, we can help children recognize that our seemingly small efforts can have a cumulative effect.

There is power in numbers. As individuals acting collectively, we can make a positive difference in the short and long-term health of our planet. As Bodhi reminds us (photo above), simply put, we are a huge family.

In my previous post, I reflected upon the transition that we find ourselves in at the end of a school year. Now here we are at the start of a new one.

The start of a new school year evokes memories from childhood: the crisp, unused new school supplies; a new lunchbox; new shoes. Moving on to the next grade or into a new class brings with it a sense of having “grown up” a bit, being “bigger.” We move from thinking that the world is us to recognizing that we are a part of a much larger world.

At Summers-Knoll school, at the start of the year and throughout, we focus on building community within and across classrooms. We are engaged in the endeavor of cultivating a school-wide culture of care, which includes learning how to play together, share, listen, and understand and respect diverse perspectives both within our classrooms and out in the world. We regard diversity – in all of its forms – as essential for growth, a socially and emotionally healthy community, for a truly abundant learning environment and ultimately, a rewarding life.

Learning how to function as a community of teachers and learners takes time. It’s a year-long project that begins with our professional development institute for teachers in August and goes all the way until our final days of professional development after the school year has concluded in June. It’s the bedrock of everything we do, and parents as our partners play a critical role in this project.

Here’s to another school year filled with the joy of learning and the realization of hidden potential!

It’s the final week of the school year, which is always bittersweet. While there’s so much to celebrate, endings and farewells signal change, and we, as humans, tend to find comfort in our daily rituals and routines. But change is inevitable.

When I was in college, one of my dear mentors and dance professors, Dr. Nancy Spanier, had a quote on her door: Change is inevitable. Growth is optional. When I was an elementary classroom teacher, I turned this quote into a large wall graphic using colorful paper, spray adhesive, and cardboard. It was a fixture in my classroom. It even survived a move from Colorado to California between my 6th and 7th year of teaching. Clearly, this quote stuck with me, and as I reflect upon why, I believe it is because it epitomizes a key aspect of teaching and learning. As teachers and learners, we’re all about growth and development.

Change and growth are not synonymous. While change is something that occurs naturally in all living things, growth requires intention and social interaction. As educational psychologist, Lev Vygotsky, says:

“[…] human learning presupposes a specific social nature and a process by which children grow into the intellectual life of those around them (Mind in Society, 1978, p. 88).”

In the midst of growth, there’s often a sense of struggle. Growth, for most of us, is not a comfortable process. Growth requires we move through our zone of proximal development, which is “the distance between the actual development level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers (Vygotsky, 1978, p.86).” In other words, we grow into our potential via some form of social mediation (e.g., modeling, conversation, feedback).

So with the end of the school year upon us, as we all move through the change of seasons and from the end of one school year to the beginning of summer and the eve of the next school year, may we recognize this change as an opportunity for growth. Through reflecting upon where we were a year ago and where we are now – and how we got here – we can identify they ways in which we’ve grown, the skills we’ve developed, the knowledge we’ve built, the new perspectives and ways of being we’ve cultivated. Such reflection yields insights into what we’re capable of, if we’re willing to move through productive struggle, and the importance of the people around us – peers, teachers, parents, family members – who mediate our growth and help make learning possible.

I’m filled with gratitude for another school year, which has brought about both change and growth, and I look forward to the journey ahead for there is always more growth on the horizon.

In the second to last week of the school year, there’s a lot happening in County Farm Park, on the playgrounds, and in the garden beds around Summers-Knoll School. The Preschoolers have observed ladybugs and caterpillars through their changing life stages until releasing them into the wild on their playground. The Young 5/Kindergarteners also observed the butterfly life cycle and released them this week. The 1st/2nd graders just planted three different types of native Oak Trees (two Swamp Oaks, a Bur Oak, and a Pin Oak), which will increase the biodiversity of our big playground. The 3rd/4th graders have created and planted a Monarch [Butterfly] Waystation just outside their classroom door. And the 5th – 8th graders have been preparing for their performance of A Mid-Summers Knoll Night’s Dream, a modified version of Shakespeare’s A Mid-Summer Night’s Dream, which is being staged on the big playground. In addition, Tim Cernak (2nd grade Christa’s dad) and his team made a huge dent in the removal of invasive species – and planting of native plants – on our big playground this Friday morning.

Oak trees play a vital role in our ecosystem, and Michigan is in need of more oak trees. As Michigan Audubon Society experts explain: “Oaks are essential not only to birds and butterflies but also to many other wildlife species. The acorns produced by oaks — considered ‘hard mast’ — are an important food source for Wild Turkey, Blue Jay, Wood Duck, white-tailed deer, squirrels, mice, and other critters.”

Plants for Monarch Butterflies are also crucial to our ecosystem’s health. “Monarch Waystations are places that provide resources necessary for monarchs to produce successive generations and sustain their migration. Without milkweeds throughout their spring and summer breeding areas in North America, monarchs would not be able to produce the successive generations that culminate in the migration each fall. Similarly, without nectar from flowers these fall migratory monarch butterflies would be unable to make their long journey to overwintering grounds in Mexico. The need for host plants for larvae and energy sources for adults applies to all monarch and butterfly populations around the world.” Now with close to 100 native plants in SK’s newly planted Monarch Waystation, including milkweeds and nectar sources, the garden bed just outside the 3rd/4th grade classroom will serve as an important stopping point for Monarch Butterflies in their long migration from the northern U.S. and Canada to Mexico in the fall and their return from Mexico to the northern U.S. and Canada in spring.

In place-based education, students identify a local problem and then find a way to address it. With the addition of important plants and removal of invasive ones, SK’s grounds are contributing to the increase and sustainability of biodiversity in our local ecosystem. As humans, we are part of these ecosystems we are trying to protect; it’s a mutually beneficial endeavor – the plants that grow here support other living things, including the people who care for this land. Thank you, everyone, who has contributed to the restoration and preservation of this land.

As we head into the homestretch of the school year, we reach markers and milestones that let us know we’re approaching the final days. In addition to the baby robins finding their wings and leaving their nest, this week, students in Kindergarten through 8th grade took the final NWEA MAP growth assessment of the year. At SK, teachers are formally and informally assessing students all the time, and they use their ongoing assessment of students to inform their instruction. So why administer the NWEA MAP Growth Assessment?

The data provided by your child’s MAP assessment provides just one more window into their knowledge and skills in the areas of reading and math (and in science for students in 2nd. – 8th). The format of the MAP Growth assessment is a digital, computer-based, multiple choice test. It’s an international, norm-referenced assessment, meaning that students are compared to an international peer group versus a criterion-referenced test (e.g., the M-STEP), which measure students’ performance against predefined standards.

The score generated on the NWEA MAP Growth assessment is presented in a few different ways: a RIT score, and a percentile rank. According to NWEA:

“These RIT scales are stable, equal interval scales that use individual item difficulty values to measure student achievement independent of grade level (that is, across grades). ‘Equal interval’ means that the difference between scores is the same regardless of whether a student is at the top, bottom, or middle of the RIT scale. ‘Stable’ means that the scores on the same scale from different students, or from the same students at different times, can be directly compared, even though different sets of test items are administered. A RIT score also has the same meaning regardless of the grade or age of the student.”

“A percentile rank indicates how well a student performed in comparison to the students in the specific norm group, for example, in the same grade and subject. A student’s percentile rank indicates that the student scored as well as, or better than, the percent of students in the norm group. For example, a student scoring at the 35th percentile scored as well as, or better than, 35 percent of students in the norm group. It also means that 65 percent of the students in the norm group exceeded this score.”

So as the school year concludes, and we look at students’ MAP scores across several points in time, it’s important to remember:

All tests have limitations. Test scores need to be viewed as one data point generated in a particular moment in time and a particular context.

Knowledge is fluid and dynamic. To assess how well I know something or a proficiency level in a skill, I need opportunities to apply that knowledge or those skills in many different ways and across different contexts over time.

Students are always learning and growing. Growth and development are dynamic, not fixed; as we learn, our performance and displays of knowledge ebb and flow. Typically, over time, an upward trajectory becomes apparent. If there’s a dip or plateau, may it be a source of curiosity rather than criticism.

Integration takes time. Often when we’re learning new things, other skills are put in a holding pattern until we are ready to integrate the new with the old. For example, when students are learning to monitor their reading comprehension and pause when they come to a word they don’t know, their fluency may take a back seat. It doesn’t mean they’ve lost the ability to be fluent. It just means that their working memory is focused on honing a new skill: vocabulary acquisition. Until that skill becomes a strategy or a habit, it will require more energy and attention.

Zoom in. Zoom out. After zooming in to view the NWEA MAP data for what they are – one data point in time – we can zoom out and ask ourselves: How do these data help us identify areas in which students may need more instruction? We have to look at other data points to see if there’s a pattern. A holistic view is assembled through many individual points.

Through connecting the dots, we can better understand a learners’ strengths and areas for growth. From that place, we can design instruction and provide learning opportunities, along with meaningful feedback, to help each student as they progress along their personal learning journey.

As I mentioned in last week’s post, right now at SK, in the spring quarter of the school year, many classes’ projects involve explorations of the natural world: habitats, ecosystems, species, plants, soil, and trees. With a project-based approach, these explorations are inquiry-driven, cross-disciplinary, and multidimensional. Rather than teaching concepts in isolation, teachers and students co-construct meaningful contexts through in-class and outdoor experiences, excursions, and master classes; students deepen their learning by making connections, recognizing and analyzing relationships, and applying their knowledge to new situations.

Relatedly, in her book, Lessons from Plants (2021), Dr. Beronda L. Montgomery provides an accessible, scientific explanation of how plants “know” what and who they are, which drives their biology (or, one could argue, their biology drives their ways of knowing). But this text is not just a book about plants.

Montgomery dispels myths about plants’ intelligence – they are not merely organisms that adapt to the conditions in which they find themselves. “[…] plants don’t just function within their environment: they actively participate in and transform it (p. 91).” She draws parallels between how plants function as integral parts of (and participants in) larger systems and how we can, as human beings, not only function more optimally within the systems where we find ourselves but also transform those systems into healthier environments.

We have the capacity to both adapt to and change our environments.

In particular, the roots of a plant have a specific and important purpose in sustaining a plant and transforming its environment.

“Roots play an important role in succession because of their influence on plant establishment and their transformative properties. Underground, just below our feet, roots are exerting control on soil properties and thus, on entire ecosystems. A plant’s health is determined in large part by the activity and function of its roots. We can gauge a plant’s health by its ability to form blossoms and fruit, but it is the roots that provide the necessary nutrients for reproduction (p. 84).”

The soil and the roots – some of the most essential parts of a plant’s health and environment – are underground, often hidden from sight. Although we don’t often see (or even think about) what’s below the surface, it matters.

SK students are learning about the importance of the entire system in which we, as humans, live and in which all living beings live. Our care for one another, for all living things, must extend well beyond what we can see easily with the naked eye. As stewards of our environments – physical, social, and emotional – we must always consider what lies beneath the surface as essential to who we are as well as who we must become to take part in the world we are creating.

With the emergence of spring, now in full swing, I am witnessing teachers’ and students’ exploration of the natural world in and outside of the classroom. From deconstructing flowers and observing caterpillars in the early stages of forming their chrysalids in preschool to habitat exploration in young 5/kindergarten, gardening and soil testing in 1st/2nd grade, and finding salamanders under logs at Black Pond in 3rd/4th grade, the richness of life in all its forms – microorganisms, plants, insects, and animals – surrounds us.

At the main entrance of Summers-Knoll, atop the light fixture on the beam to the left of the door (as you enter), a mother Robin made her nest, laid her eggs, and her baby chicks have hatched. Just this morning, she was feeding her babies, their little hungry open beaks popping up, visible just over the edge of the nest. Nature is so close, all the time. Entire cycles of life are beginning and ending around us in the nooks and crannies of our everyday comings and goings, literally just outside our front door…