Why Coulee School?

 

"Our knowledge of the world comes from gathering around great things in a complex and interactive community of truth. Good teachers do more than deliver the news from that community to their students. Good teachers replicate the process of knowing by engaging students in the dynamics of the community of truth....But our conventional pedagogy emerges from a principle that is hardly communal. 

It centers on a teacher who...delivers conclusions to students. It assumes that the teacher has all the knowledge and the students have little or none, that the teacher...sets all the standards and the students must measure up...in reaction to this scenario, a pedagogy based on an antithetical principle has arisen: students and the act of learning are more important than the act of teaching. 

The student is regarded as a reservoir of knowledge to be tapped, students are encouraged to teach each other, the standards of accountability emerge from the group itself and the teacher's role varies from facilitator to co-learner..."  

                                                        - Parker Palmer, "The Courage to Teach", 1998, 2007, 2017

We have always embraced Twelve Mile Coulee as a very special and valuable place for learning since our earliest days as a school when we were housed in seven classrooms at Tuscany School, looking for strategies to be outside in the open air as much as possible. From those beginning days we have taken up the focus of 'place-based learning' as a way to engage our learners in exploring the environment of their community as a way to value and appreciate the patterns, relationships and nuances found in nature, in Indigenous story and in the ways human beings connect with the world in which we live.

Place-based learning is "an approach to learning that takes advantage of geography to create authentic, meaningful and engaging personalized learning for students...(it is) an immersive learning experience that places students in local heritage, cultures, landscapes, opportunities and experiences, and uses these as a foundation for the study of language arts, mathematics, social studies, science and other subjects across the curriculum." (Center for Place-Based Learning and Community Engagement, 2017)

For our school, the Coulee has offered easy access to a broad landscape full of engaging, meaningful experiences that is always changing, thought-provoking and offers endless opportunities to pursue the million questions that arise with each visit from the children. Although we visited the Coulee frequently through the first four years and used it as a significant place for connecting and learning, we recognized there were multiple opportunities for learning  that could be maximized with shared intentions and expertise. 

Additionally, each school year, a few classes would apply for and participate in the Calgary Campus/Open Minds off-campus learning experiences that were frequently quite similar in nature to those learning experiences our students were already engaging in during our Coulee adventures. With a highly experienced and visionary staff, we began to consider strategies for developing best-possible learning approaches to being in the Coulee from a whole school perspective, as well as  ways to bring in our Elder, Sa'akokoto, to share Indigenous perspectives  that would assist all of us, students, staff and families, in appreciating and valuing the geographic significance of the Coulee as an impetus to learning in a wide variety of disciplines. 

In the fall of 2019, we formed our initial Coulee School Committee of 6 teachers to begin to brainstorm and research possibilities for creating positive learning experiences across grade levels together.  We worked with Sa'akokoto, with Stephanie Bartlett and with each other to conceptualize, connect to curricular objectives and synthesize a lot of information to create a working operational plan. We continued meeting periodically through the middle part of the school year, anticipating a shared, effective rollout of the initiative.  The week before we were set to launch Coulee School with our staff, the pandemic intruded and all schools were placed in 'closed' mode with teachers scrambling to work from home indefinitely. Coulee School plans were set aside and we focused on home learning as much as possible. 

While schools re-opened to students this fall but with understandable restrictions on external field trip experiences, volunteer opportunities, presentations and guests coming into the school, the prospect of continuing our learning with Coulee School was still a very viable option - made a more desirable option because it got all of us out of doors into fresh air, a key recommendation for reducing possibilities of virus transfer. The Coulee School Committee picked up the work where we had left off last spring, re-visited some of the internal design and documenting aspects and presented it to teachers in late September. Teachers were definitely interested and willing to broaden perspectives on Coulee visits to become intentionally connected, more frequent and aligned school-wide in our learning objectives, goals, tasks, questions and assessments. Over two professional development days, teachers worked together to generate a plan for learning across the grade levels, captured quite beautifully in one of our giant sketch notes by Mr. Kelly and Mrs. Low (pictured here).  Ultimately, we have adopted the mantra 'We Walk This Path Together' to guide our work. And, additionally, we are in the process of developing a multi-faceted web page where each class will ultimately be able to document their students' learnings, insights, questions and new understandings.

So, this is what Coulee School is and will be.  But why Coulee School? The answer to that is found in the Coulee itself and revealed through our experiences there.

As we launched Coulee School over these past six weeks, we have seen the Coulee transformed from golden autumn colours to deep white snowy banks of winter through this past week of late-October unseasonable frigid temperatures, and had the great pleasure to share Indigenous perspectives with our Blackfoot Elder Sa'akokotoo. We have many more plans for Coulee explorations, particularly since each visit brings us back to school with great inspirations for research, questioning, building models, sharing stories, writing stories, reading about life cycles, plants and animals. The Coulee provokes more questions in students in a one hour visit that a whole week of staying in class and trying to find out things using digital resources, books and our own memories and thoughts. 

Children and their teachers visit the Coulee and immediately feel connected - as the children will so often say, 'this is our place!'  Sitting beneath the trees or scattered across the grassy hills, students may be calm or inquisitive, gently listening and exploring or running uninhibitedly through the paths. Regardless of their stance, they are absorbing information about this magical place, sharing Indigenous stories and re-telling tales they have heard before or read, observing and asking questions plants, animals and ecosystems. These experiences prompt learners to explore further - to write, read, investigate, create, innovate and express their understandings from a wide variety of perspectives which may or may not be similar and may prompt even more questions or investigations. This is science, social studies, mathematics and language instruction in its most authentic form - response and reaction to real life and the connections, patterns and relationships evident in that real living. The Coulee inspires and invites a greater commitment to understanding, recognizing, celebrating or questioning who, what, why, when, where and how real living, growth and change is happening in the real world. 

Why Coulee School is to take teaching and learning to the highest level, provoking thinking and engagement of every child. Why Coulee School offers every learner the opportunity to investigate at their own pace with their own questions and then transfer their curiosities to their academic work. As we connect our learnings from Coulee School we build new skills and strategies as learners and broaden our perspectives wider still as we appreciate multiple aspects of life, growth and change that touches all forms of life, human and otherwise.

Why Coulee School offers opportunities to lift children from the tables and chairs they are currently firmly anchored to, bringing a learning perspective to a beautiful natural geographic feature that has a history geographically, geologically, biologically, anthropologically, mathematically, historically, ecologically.  As we explore how interconnectedness lives in the coulee, questions abound - such as these that were generated through discussions with both students and teachers:

What can the past teach?

How might we see through different eyes?

How can we observe our world in different ways?

How does the coulee shape our way of life?

How might we measure/capture/understand natural changes over time?

How are we connected?

What is the Way of the Wolf?

How do we tell our stories of the land? How does the land tell us stories?

How might we use the history of the land to inform the way we engage with it today and in the future?

How do we impact our environment? How does it impact us?

We walk this path together.

What surrounds us-- forms and connects us.

Why Coulee School is the best part of moving our learning ever further onto the land - because it inspires all of us to live in the world in ways that are more intentional, caring and aware. Our perspectives shift, we see with fresh eyes, hear with open ears, notice our surroundings, colours, sizes, shapes, patterns, lifestyles. We are the Coulee and the Coulee is part of us.

And that is why we will spend a great deal of this COVID-19 constrained school year in our beautiful Twelve Mile Coulee.

Lorraine Kinsman, Principal 

Exhaustion Caused by Vigilance...

            

"The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts." - C. S. Lewis

"Dear Tired Teacher:  When the expectations begin to feel impossible, remember because of you...today someone smiled, made a connection, become more confident and felt loved." - Marie Wallace

Friday, October 9, 2020 was a professional development day for our school. Teachers came together eagerly (appropriately socially distanced and masked, of course, with sanitizer and wipes close at hand) to explore new ideas together for our Coulee School outdoor learning project this school year. We also worked to align our teaching and learning school-wide with the scope and sequence recently outlined by our school board to keep both the online and in-person learners relatively correlated during this pandemic school year. There was energy, enthusiasm, creativity and innovation everywhere in our gym as we brainstormed, captured ideas, consulted programs of study and sought to take school outside as a healthy place of learning.  

There was also a noticeable sense of exhaustion in the room - teachers looked tired, yawned unexpectedly and apologized, moved a bit more slowly than usual as we filled in charts and sketch boards with our ideas. 

Six weeks into this profoundly different school year and exhaustion - physical, mental, emotional - is clearly visible even as teachers push forward with new ideas, seeking to find ways to continue to make learning engaging, interactive and applicable for their students. Why?

Vigilance is exhausting!!

That, really, is the crux of the whole school experience just now, in my opinion, at least for teachers and school staff. Vigilance is not a choice - not even for a minute - we are doing our utmost to ensure none of the children become ill through the course of a school day and there are no intermissions. When a child does exhibit symptoms of sickness, our vigilance increases as we strive to meet that child's needs while doubling down on our watch to ensure no one else becomes sick too. Every decision we make - academic or otherwise - is coloured and impacted by this great and tremendous need for vigilance.

                                                    

Schools have always been active, busy, interactive and creative - most teachers and students feel like the days fly by (at least in elementary classrooms and usually at EHS!) in a whirl of activity, conversation, reading, writing, problem solving, creating and adjusting our thinking. 

And schools remain busy places - just moving 400+ children in and out of the building affords a continual sense of busy-ness for sure! 

However, there are no movements of children in schools today that are not planned, orchestrated and supervised carefully - the carefree flexibility schools have always enjoyed during the 'non-instructional' moments have disappeared along with spontaneous decision making, collaboration and perpetual conversation that typically peppers classroom learning. We are all vigilant in ensuring movements are distanced, masked and sanitized without fail. It requires persistent vigilance and a high level of respect for COVID-19 to survive each school day successfully amidst carefully choreographed student movements.

The children have risen to the occasion in ways I would have hardly believed possible before the pandemic - committing, to the best of their abilities, to changes in routine, flexibility and learning possibilities. While they are accepting of every difference, it is the teachers who are charged with the responsibilities of ensuring the fidelity of cohorts all the time every day, or that physical distancing is always a factor in every student interaction and learning situation. How we meet students' learning needs are not necessarily determined by the nature of those needs, but more likely by the location of the class in the school and who else is in the classroom cohort. 

                                            

Every action in a school by a child is shaped, informed and facilitated by many teacher decisions. From the second a child enters the school yard in the morning to the time exit occurs at the end of the school day, virtually every movement has been pre-considered by teachers through this pandemic to hold physical distancing, sanitizing and mask-wearing at the forefront  as a gateway to student safety. And every action requires a teacher to consider how to best hold students responsible for sustaining directives and suggestions for school developed by Alberta Health Services or the Calgary Board of Education. These directives change quite frequently and every small adjustment generates another change in routines teachers will need to tweak, teach, implement and monitor.

In all fairness, these are the very lifeblood of teaching, the small decisions and management strategies that impact the quality of every teaching day. It's just that the pandemic has elevated the impact of our decisions as well as the number of decisions that must be adjusted immediately and then followed strictly in every given day. It has also meant making decisions from a safety perspective rather than a pedagogicial perspective - and that is not always our comfort zone. Often we find ourselves considering a new boundary through the lens of a particular age level, trying to make sense of a very adult-based regulation from a very different level of understanding. 

A few days ago, I was talking to a 7-year-old, trying to help this child make sense of staying in one place for pretty much the whole day.  This was a concept that just exceeded understanding for this little one. Having been a student at EHS for two years already, the background experiences for this student were of flexible learning where it needed to happen - easy access to the learning commons book collection, for example, or to gather around a learning table with peers to plan a story together with shared loose parts and every participant contributing ideas to be considered before they made the decision they were each ready to begin writing a story that contained some of the shared imaginings mixed and gathered from all the conversations. Additionally, this child had been away from school for six months, primarily at home with family or close relatives and friends, with limited boundaries in terms of where one could walk, sit, stand, visit with others for a brief conversation or touch books, technology, etc without worrying about sanitizing before and after touching an object. For the wee person I was having this conversation with, the world had gone tilt and, despite being reminded many times a day of new expectations and routines, frustration had reached an overload point. 

As I talked about the corona virus as a 'big sickness' and how in peaceful communities we help keep each other safe all the time, I realized these were not the ideas creating the challenge for this child to understand. The rebellion wasn't against helping others or keeping the sickness away as long as possible; it was against restrictions that made no sense in a place were freedom to learn has been the great attraction.  And I thought, "I feel the same way! None of this makes sense and I want my own freedom to move around and talk back, too - as much or more than I want it for the students!" 

                                        

And then the adult/principal/teacher part of me was made visible again, and the need for vigilance, for continued restrictions, continued cohorts, continued physical distancing and concentration on routines once again took top spot for my attention. I acknowledged with my friend that none of these routines and rules and expectations are fair but they are necessary if we are going to continue taking care of each other. Eventually, begrudgingly we reached agreement on the fact we do have a responsibility to take care of each other even when it isn't fun. We have to stay vigilant. And we both went back to work - I wouldn't say happily back to work for either of us, but we both went back to work!

As I watch children enter school using sanitizers, standing on 2m apart Xs or using their hula hoops to remind them to distance, wearing masks as willingly as they wear socks, I marvel at their willingness to just 'do it' and carry on - the resiliency of children. I also marvel at the vigilance of their teachers and support staff who every day carry out myriad acts of pandemic protective care we didn't even know existed less than eight months ago. Every classroom entry and exit, every transition to a different subject during class time where resources must change or to the Music Room or outside for PE, every coulee or community walk, every lunch time experience or body break on the playground, signing up for Google Classrooms in the event we are directed to Scenario 2 or 3 or there is a positive test in our school that leads to a class closure for 10 to 14 days, or learning to browse the school library digitally to request books to borrow, even just hanging up coats and storing boots in classrooms rather than hallways - all these small decisions require countless hours and minutes of discussion and planning to enact safely and according to pandemic guidelines. 

                                        

Teachers typically make about 1500 decisions in a regular school day - that is what we are trained to do and most of us do this without even realizing all these decisions happen at all!  Right now, teachers are making approximately three times as many decisions in a day with the added expectations around movement, sanitizing, wearing masks, constraining cohort fidelities, tracking seating arrangements, scheduling outdoor and indoor breaks to minimize contact in the hallways, monitoring bathroom breaks to reduce contact between students in washrooms, ensuring students stay in their assigned seating spots and only navigate the classroom by way of taped 'alleys', monitor students are following directional signs in hallways or monitoring transitions to lunchroom, Music or PE for appropriate physical distancing, mask wearing and hand washing outside of classrooms.  

This is all before any teacher makes a decision about supporting and developing engaging teaching and learning activities or modifying them to meet student learning needs after a six month 'break' from typical school experiences. 

It is no wonder exhaustion is so prevalent - vigilance is a significant cause of exhaustion and teachers are nothing if not vigilant these days...

I have a strong and deep faith this too shall pass, the vigilance will diminish, engaging in learning will become a much more flexible experience and all of us will breathe more easily in the not too distant future. And sleep will definitely come easily for all of us!

Lorraine Kinsman

Principal

 

Behind the Scenes on World Teachers Day

"A good deed doesn't just evaporate and disappear. Its' consequences saturate the universe and the goodness that happens somewhere, anywhere, helps in the transfiguration of the ugliness."   - Desmond Tutu

Today is World Teachers' Day and I have the immense good fortune to work alongside a crew of the finest educators imaginable - and they are delighted to work every day with your children :) 

Today's blog is a testimony to the tremendous investment these teachers are making to ensure your children are receiving the best possible learning experiences in an educational environment none of us have ever experienced or anticipated before...a peek behind the scenes of a school functioning within a tight web of medical and political rules and guidelines unimaginable until the spring of 2020...

Since March 15, 2020 I have witnessed some of the most profound changes in teachers and teaching that I believe have ever occurred. The speed and the magnitude of the changes have been gob-smacking to say the least and have impacted everything from how educators plan, assess and teach to how we let our students into and out of the building, go to the washroom and organize our classrooms.  The greatest impact, without a doubt, has been that - in. a heart beat - we are no longer making pedagogical decisions based on best knowledge about teaching and learning and children. We are making pedagogical decisions framed by rules and guidelines that have almost nothing to do with our profession that we have spent years refining, enhancing and continually improving for and with our students. 

Our profession completely changed the whole way their work would get done in less time than a weekend. Teaching practices changed entirely - virtually overnight -  with purpose, intentionality, deep care and even panache. Teachers didn't just pass the time with children, they taught and supported and kept children attentive to the concept of school when the reality of school abruptly disappeared. As educators, they changed on a dime because of their deep commitment to their clients - the children and families we work with every day. 

Nobody said, 'This is too hard! It can't be done! This will never work!" (Well - at least not out loud in my hearing anyway!).

All over the world, people began working from home and this was a tremendous shift in reality for all of us. It was a new reality for sure and the learning curve was enormous as we tried to make sense of a new lifestyle that tied us to our homes and our immediate families while we tried to make sense of work completely digitally.

Teachers began working from home while continuing to teach the children how to work from home, while continuing to sustain relationships, while worrying about assessment and student progress and whether or not the children had access to technology and how to foster relationships and care for each other even when we only got to see each other through a screen. Plans carefully honed and refined for a full year's instruction were immediately discarded, and as we learned to navigate new digital programs, apps and communication strategies teachers also wrote modified report cards and IPPs, tried to offer as much support as possible to children who required Education Assistants and supports that had disappeared with the beginning of school closures and worried over the impact of six months loss of targeted learning in schools. 

We learned to make videos with any kind of digital device, to upload and save, modify and share, create choice boards and meetings and try to assess whether our students were making independent progress in any way. As the initial shock eased, we moved into the 'Superhero' project as a way to continue to engage and nudge our students in learning, in keeping with previous learning adventures at EHS.

Teachers survived and thrived - and they changed as well. A little less lighthearted, a little more worried, somewhat less trusting of all the living we had taken for granted forever! Summer came and we all went home, hoping this would all ease in some way by September, worried about our learners and what the gaps in learning might mean for them in the future, unsure what our usually energetic new school year would look and sound like in an increasingly COVID-19 focused world.

When we found out in early August we would be opening with face-to-face, in-school teaching and learning, every teacher I spoke to believed we needed to get the children back in school. Sometimes health concerns overshadowed everything else and life did not stop happening - family illnesses, natural disasters and accidents that shatter homes and security, loss of work - all of these life events continue to colour the lives of our teachers over the summer, just as it did our school families. As we gathered in August to begin establishing completely foreign routines and strategies for safe-as-possible-entry to school, the full impact of the rules and regulations we would be functioning within began to take shape, shocking all of us in the enormity of the impact.

Since September, teachers have re-organized class lists completely to accommodate families within designated cohorts. They have re-organized classroom configurations two or three times, depending on the latest regulations from either AHS or CBE as well as the perceptions and expectations of our families.  Teachers are gathering information about their students as learners from parents, and in the relationships they are gradually re-establishing with the children. They are planning lessons that are aligned with previous work but are still vastly different - activities for learning that require collaboration, interaction or close contact are simply not possible anymore and we are drawing on solitary, independent learning activities that we know, pedagogically, do not necessarily foster the best possible learning opportunities for active children. Learning is happening at a much slower pace than previously, for just about every child. Supports are not available in the same way and it is much more challenging to encourage students to explore their ideas, investigate problems, analyze and synthesize with reduced communication and sharing of ideas. Assessment takes longer too - observations that used to occur while children worked in groups now need to be managed individually. There are fewer teachers and more students assigned to each teacher. Planning and preparing for instruction is much more challenging with significantly more constraints as we strive to keep children in seats, at tables, in cohorts, not touching each other or each other's things, wearing masks, keeping distances, washing and sanitizing their hands and drinking water to hydrate - all before we teach a single new idea or concept or practice a new skill. And, quite frankly, we really miss our volunteers!!

The challenges are enormous, daily, frustrating and limiting. There is no other way to describe them.

But the children!  They come every day with smiles and stories and the deep desire to learn. They are willingly adjusting quickly to routines and schedules they could never have imagined, happy to be back in school and together with their teachers and their peers. They ask - sometimes frequently - to do the very things they know will help them learn - work with a partner, stretch out on the floor, stand up and walk around the room and find someone else who has an idea similar to yours, collaborate on ideas or construction of a prototype or just exchange some ideas - and the answer is always the same - not right now, not yet, not today, maybe soon, no, no, no... Yet they don't get discouraged and they don't give up - they know we are protecting each other in this peaceful community as much as we are protecting ourselves. And because the children continue to give everything their best efforts, teachers are inspired, energized, ready to find new ideas and new ways to ensure these children are never disadvantaged from a learning perspective by COVID-19; that the learners in our school continue to thrive and grow every. single. day.

There are tears - frustration causes so many tears! And peals of laughter over the silliest things. Muffled voices that are strained so kids can hear are anxiously awaiting the arrival of new personal microphones for each teacher to try and carry masked voices just a little further when the children are unable to gather for even a story like they once did so joyously and easily. There are groans, sometimes, when yet another change is announced to some small routine we thought we had mastered already. Or another restriction we didn't anticipate. And exhaustion reigns supreme - everything is much harder to achieve and there is not a teacher in the school that will relax on expecting the children will get the best learning experiences possible under the circumstances so everyone is working harder than they ever have and it shows in the eyes we have come to know so well just above the masks. There is exhaustion without a doubt.

And then we meet, as a staff, to talk about energizing the learning and opening up Coulee School again and the ideas just fly! Teachers are energized, enthusiastic, creative and willing to try new things that will enhance student learning experiences. They get a student insight questionnaire back from a parent and are in awe of the great depth of knowledge of the child's learning resident in the words on the page. A parent offers an encouraging word at the end of the day and their eyes light up as they smile behind the mask. 

The world of teaching is not the same - perhaps it never will be. But the teachers bring their joy, their energy and their vision for success to school each day - their game - and unhesitatingly lean into the work of the day. Whether they are in the building or working from home as part of the Hub online learning experience, every teacher is getting up each day determined to make a difference for their students today. Regardless of tears or laughter or frustration or exhaustion. We are in this together and the example we want to set for our learners is 'we've got this - we are going to get through everything successfully with deep care and connection'. 

It is World Teachers' Day and I am deeply honoured to work with this small cross-section of teachers of the world, giving their all for our children each and every day. Behind the scenes, we are not the educators we studied and planned and worked so hard to be - we are the educators who rise to the occasion, bring the best we've got to a terribly tangled game and always, always help our children believe they are simply the most awesome of all people!

 It is a gift to be a part of Eric Harvie School and I am grateful to work with such dedicated and talented educators:)

Lorraine Kinsman

Principal