Our Greatest Asset: Our People!

"In the long run, your human capital is your main base of competition.  Your leading indicator of where you're going to be 20 years from now is how well you're doing in your education system."  —Bill Gates

Over the past few weeks, the District 107 administrator blogs have focused on our Future Planning process, highlighting exciting plans in the areas of Building Learning Capacity and Building Learning Environments.  Our third goal area of Building Human Capital is another critical piece of our plan.  The Future Planning Committee determined our goal in this area is to "Ensure PSD 107 is recruiting, hiring and retaining high-level professionals that engage in collaborative professional development and are committed to learning and implementing innovative strategies focused on improved student learning."

In the Bill Gates quote above, he begins to articulate why building human capital is so crucial.  Continuous learning is pivotal to capacity building.  In Michael Fullan's book The Principal: Three Keys to Maximizing Impact (2014) he states that, "humans are fundamentally motivated by two factors: doing things that are intrinsically meaningful to themselves and working with others—peers for example—in accomplishing worthwhile goals never before reached" (p. 7).  District 107 is committed to building the capacity of our staff members by providing rich opportunities for professional development based on teachers' needs and interests.  Likewise, it is important for us to build collaborative time into professional development for staff members so they are able to do this meaningful work with others who our common mission, "to create a community of inspired learners."

PMS math teachers collaborate

 Research shows that when teachers are provided with well-designed, sustained professional development, which includes time for collaborative conversations and on-going support, student learning improves.  Currently, our staff members have been receiving on-going professional development related to NWEA MAP testing and how it can inform instructional practices, as well as Schoology the Learning Management System (LMS) we adopted this year.  Math teachers have been engaging in professional development as a part of the Metro Chicago Math Initiative, and science teachers have been working diligently with a consultant to revamp science units in light of the new Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS).

As we look to the future of Pleasantdale professional development, the district is committed to creating a robust professional development plan aligned with best practices given teacher feedback on their passions and needs.  It is exciting to think of the growth ahead for our staff!

PES teachers collaborate

Building Our Learning Environment

If you have not seen me in person recently, you may not be aware that my husband and I are expecting our first child, due to arrive at the end of April!  It has been so exciting to see ultrasound photos, hear the baby's heart beat, and share our joy with our family and friends as we anticipate this life-changing event.  As a part of our preparations, we are also spending time decorating a nursery for the baby.  We have a 10 ft x 12 ft room to work with, plenty of space for an infant, but we have still had numerous conversations about how we can be prepare the space for our new baby.  What colors will be calming and aesthetically pleasing?  What kind of furniture will be functional yet comfortable?  And will the furniture allow for enough flexibility to move the room into different configurations as the child grows and his/her needs change?

In my last few blog posts, I explained how our District 107 Future Planning Committee has honed in on three goal areas on which to focus over the course of the next five years: Building Learning Capacity, Building Learning Environments, and Building Human Capital.  While designing our 120 square foot nursery is nowhere near as challenging or as critical of a task as designing the learning environments in our schools, many of the questions my husband and I have asked ourselves about the nursery are helpful starting points for our conversations about building the learning environments in Pleasantdale schools.  What kind of furniture will be functional yet comfortable for learners (staff, students, community members)?  And will the furniture allow for enough flexibility to move the room into different configurations as the learners grow and their needs change over time?

The Future Planning Committee decided our District's goal is to "provide flexible learning environments that promote purposeful collaboration and a balanced educational approach to create inspired 21st century learners."  This means we will dig into research related to collaborative spaces and furniture for teachers and students and develop responsible plans for replacing and renewing technology for these spaces so staff and students alike are able to extend their learning beyond the walls of the classroom.  Articles like this one from EdTech Magazine explain how some schools have begun to transform their learning spaces while also creating easy opportunities for learners to connect and collaborate with others around the world.  As stated in the article, "What we're moving toward is flexible learning environments...It's not just the physical space -- it's the mindset, the skills intended to be taught and the physical environment, all combined."

There is a lot of truth in this statement.  Our goal of Building Learning Environments goes beyond simply building the physical learning environment; it also extends to the culture of learning created within our schools.  In one of my January blog posts, I wrote about the sound of future-ready learning spaces.  The points I make begin to speak to the type of culture we hope to create in our learning environments, which also ties into our portrait of a Pleasantdale Graduate.  Everything we will be doing with our learning spaces will be done with the aim to create students who are strong communicators and problem-solvers, who are confident individuals and global citizens.  It is our goal to create flexible learning spaces that will enable us to cultivate these characteristics in our Pleasantdale community of learners.

"Sticky" Learning: Building Learning Capacity

As I mentioned in my blog post last week, the District 107 Future Planning Committee spent a significant amount of time and effort shaping our district's new mission statement and portrait of a graduate.  These serve as the driving forces behind the action plan guiding our district over the course of the next five years.  With the mission and portrait of a graduate in mind, the Future Planning Committee was able to craft goals in three distinct areas: Building Learning Capacity, Building Learning Environments, and Building Human Capital.  This week, I want to delve more deeply into the first goal area of Building Learning Capacity.

I remember seeing a powerful quote on a Lululemon Athletica bag a few years ago which said, "The world is changing at such a rapid rate that waiting to implement changes will leave you two steps behind.  Do it now, do it now, do it now!"  This quote has really stuck with me, and I think it perfectly encompasses the way the Future Planning Committee looked at the goal area of Building Learning Capacity.  

Fifth graders Skype with
scientists in Antarctica.

Learning capacity refers to the way a person is able to process, consume, and internalize new information.  To the Future Planning Committee, this meant we had to look at how meaningful, "sticky" learning occurs in this day and age.  In the book my colleague Jamie Diamond and I (2014) wrote Literacy Lessons for a Digital World, we acknowledge that "teachers are entrusted to prepare students for jobs that do not exist yet, so we must constantly consider the future of our students as we plan our lessons and learning activities" (p. 8).  This means the way teachers look at shaping their students' learning experiences must transform since the future for which we are preparing our children is unknown.  However, given our new district mission "to create a community of inspired learners," we are not just talking about reshaping learning for students but also for staff and community members.  Will Richardson (2015) insists in his book From Master Teacher to Master Learner that "teachers must be learners first in the classroom, able to model clearly what it means to work perpetually on a learning curve" (p. 10).  Therefore, we had to consider how both the adults and children in the District 107 community can maximize their learning potential.

Students in the 3M club used
MakeyMakey to create a
vegetable piano!

The committee ultimately came up with the goal that "Pleasantdale leaders and learners will cultivate advancement of global competency and cultural awareness through innovative learning experiences."  The committee's rationale in creating this goal was that it will allow our students to be open to new opportunities and will promote adaptive, innovative, empathetic, articulate, and respectful citizenship.
 This means we will be looking to explore pilot opportunities related to new learning experiences, which may include STEAM, Maker Spaces, interdisciplinary units, and implementing Genius Hour.  We want to continue to foster, promote, and instill a growth mindset within our staff, students, and community members, and we will investigate a variety of strategies and resources related to differentiating learning, assessing student learning, and the effective integration of educational technology.

The creation of this plan is just the beginning as we think about building the learning capacity of our Pleasantdale community, and we are excited about what lies ahead for us!

Planning for the Future

Goal setting is an important component of success, regardless of what field you work in or how old you are.  As Earl Nightengale said, "People with goals succeed because they know where they are going."  This recent article from Forbes, "5 Reasons Why Goal Setting Will Improve Your Focus" gives a brief overview of why goal setting can be so powerful.  According to the article, goals trigger behavior, guide your focus, sustain momentum, align your focus, and promote self-efficacy.  For many of these same reasons, teachers regularly talk to their students about setting goals for themselves related to academics, behaviors, and peer relationships.

As a district, Pleasantdale strives to continuously improve as we work together to provide our students with an optimal educational experience.  Because of this, District 107 engages in goal setting as well.  Our Future Planning process was the best way to involve as many stakeholders as possible in our goal setting.  Parents, community members, teachers, students, and administrators came together to collaboratively create a plan for our schools that will sustain us over the next five years.  The three focus areas of the goals created by the committee relate to Building Human Capital, Building Learning Capacity, and Building Learning Spaces.  However before we could dig into the specifics of what our goals were going to be, it was important to have a claer mission for our District to guide us.  

After studying a variety of powerful mission statements and brainstorming our values of what transformative "sticky" learning looks like, the committee created the new and improved mission for District 107:

To create a community of inspired learners.

Once this mission was established, we were able to use this unified vision to begin establishing our goals.  The next step in the process was to create a portrait of a Pleasantdale graduate.  Given our mission, we asked ourselves the key characteristics we hope all our students possess by the time they walk across the stage at the eighth-gradee graduation ceremony.  After much collaboration and discussion, the committee agreed we hope our students are successful communicators, problem solvers, global citizens, and individuals.

With both a mission statement and our portrait of a Pleasantdale graduate in place, the Future Planning Committee then had the task of fleshing out specific goals for the three areas of Building Human Capital, Building Learning Capacity, and Building Learning Spaces.  Over the next three weeks, our administrative blog posts will delve deeper into each of these areas as we celebrate the goals that are focusing our District's journey throughout the next five years.