With less than 30 days left till the end of the school year, I’m preparing to cry big tears as I say good bye to the kids. It’s been one challenging, exciting, unusual year: full of swings, ups and downs. We’ve made it through though, ended up being tougher than I expected, and are finally on the track to the awesome 2022.
What started as a small school of 25 kids grew to a 40+ learning community, between the ages of 4.5 and 14. This year we’ve added a mixed class of middle schoolers. And while they were not the easiest bunch to deal with, they challenged us to grow more than we anticipated.
I’m wrapping up the year with some conclusions about our learning process at KAIZEN, and some take aways for the next school year.
What we will talk about:
- Outdoor matters
- Culture comes first
- New understanding of teaching literacy
- Projects or no projects – that’s the question
- How far do we want democracy to go?
- Moving towards mastery-based assessment
- How can we inspire more self-directed learners
- Integration, integration and once more integration
Let’s kick off!
1. Outdoor matters
This year’s lockdowns forced us to continue with our outdoor programs. Again and again I’m happy that we’ve had teachers who themselves are fans of outdoors and didn’t mind spending days, studying outside.
Outdoor Fridays
Our city Fridays merged into outdoor Fridays (due to the lockdowns) and we spent most of them outside: in the forests, next to our river, in our backyard. We’ve added more outdoor leaders, as we started to expand our partnership with GoЙra (our outdoor education companion). We planned to coordinate outdoor days with our science curriculum, but they ended up being more free-range and self-directed. Still, we saw these days as a great opportunity for us to build a community of learners, to work on our school atmosphere, to bring everyone together.
These Fridays ended up being the perfect medium for connecting our middle schoolers and ‘baby KAIZEN’. Initially reluctant to hang out with each others, by end of the year we had 12 year olds leading an outdoor trip for the primary school!
Outdoor modules
It wasn’t always easy to adjust the academic curriculum for outdoor learning. We ditched the required daily outdoor module and relied on teachers’ inspirations to take the learning outside. It took some encouraging discussions and knowledge sharing, but we managed to keep our learning outdoors throughout the week. Our middle schoolers particularly found the outdoor learning exciting and we definitely plan to expand it in their weekly schedules.
What’s in store for 2022?
- More outdoor! We realized we are quite a huge group now and will need to split up for our forest adventures. Smaller kids will spend most of their Fridays exploring in an unstructured way, while older kids will have more science curriculum tied up to the days.
- We are also thrilled to prepare the next year curriculum together with our outdoor partner GoЙra and are planning to use outdoor days as very effective instruments for culture building as well.
- And finally, more outdoor for the middle school. Forest Fridays are great, but integrating outdoor in their science or language learning would be our target for next year.
2. Culture comes first
In 2021 we had a lot of new children joining our little community. And as we grew, we realized that maintaining ‘our bubble’, with our values and philosophy wasn’t as straight-forward anymore. However, just like agile learning centers, we came to a conclusion that our organizational culture was key to being KAIZEN.
Starting from January we started focusing more intently on developing our culture. Firstly, we summarized our Framework of Learning, with the culture, as defining element to our puzzle. Then we made sure our values were visible throughout the classrooms with Value Cube, dedicated every week to discussing one value: in our lessons, in morning circles, on Monday’s school meeting, and in day-to-day conversations. By being more mindful about our own behavior and how we manifested KAIZEN values as teachers, we were able to bring back ‘the bubble’ and integrate new children within our practices.
I’ll be honest – we still haven’t cracked the middle schoolers yet, as all of them came with 5-6 years of traditional school experience. However, Value Cubes and regular discussions around culture have been taking place in our 5-7 grades as well, as we see a huge progress, compared to the start of the year.
What’s in store for 2022?
Take it even more forward.
- We are inspired by the intentional culture creation at the ALCs (see their toolkit for inspiration), and definitely realize a need for a bit more structure in our approach to culture development.
- Next year we plan to bring together our primary and middle school as well. Hopefully that will help to bridge the cultural differences we still have between our groups of children.
- Taking a deeper look at our own behaviors as school adults will also be a huge part of our summer training program for teachers.
- Most importantly, now we know for sure – culture comes first, before any academics even have the chance to start.
3. New understanding of teaching literacy
Traditional Ukrainian school program is quite strict on separating literacy competency into individual subjects: Ukrainian language, Ukrainian literature, Foreign literature (in middle school); language class and reading class in primary school. As a bilingual school, we started exploring deeper how literacy is taught in English National Curriculum or in Common Core, and we found some key differences, compared to Ukrainian National Curriculum.
In the primary school
We focused a lot on reading – in English as well as in Ukrainian classes. Our Ukrainian teacher concentrated on developing strong reader and writer competencies, instead of simply drilling grammar details. Our children did a lot of writing prompts and individual reading, and we see a big progress in their language abilities.
With English language, we also did a big focus on reading: third graders explored the ‘Children of Noisy Village’ by Astrid Lindgren throughout the second semester, while second and first graders did a lot of phonics-based reading. We’ve started expanding our English library and realized a need for an actual large library, where we could fit our books!
We didn’t do much aligning between our English and Ukrainian language programs, and we see it as an area of improvement for next year. The more integrated they are, the better we see children understanding basic literacy concepts.
In the middle school
Firstly, we started off our year by ditching traditional division of Ukrainian language arts on separate subjects and ended up with ‘Culture’ as our integrated school subject. It was by far the best intuitive decision that we’ve made and by end of the year we were completely convinced that this is the way forward. We also drastically narrowed down the number of required texts to be read by the kids, and focused a lot on creative writing, using the Story Cubes. This proved to be extremely successful, as many of the kids, who were reluctant to write before, ended up writing full-feature stories, as individual projects by spring. Additionally, we started integrating language and art mediums, which was very popular with kids.
Our 5-7 graders didn’t grow up in bilingual environment and therefore their English language learning wasn’t as integrated (or as intense) as in the primary school. We had a very diverse group of English learners in our small mixed class and this made the instruction much more challenging. By end of the year we came to a three-class English routine: weekly Reading Club, Speaking Club and a more traditional grammar-focused lesson. The involvement of native speaker definitely helped break the barriers in speaking, however, we want to make a much stronger focus on English language in middle school in the upcoming year.
What’s in store for 2022?
- Strong integration of language subjects
- Better planned integrated Ukrainian language curriculum for 6-8 grades with focus on developing reader and writer competencies, instead of traditional grammar + biographies + dozens of texts to memorize
- Better alignment between English language arts and Ukrainian language arts in both primary and middle school
- Stronger focus on differentiated instruction with our middle schoolers
- Continue working with our international teachers, who are the core of our bilingual program
4. Projects or no projects – that’s the question
2021 was supposed to be a year of project-based learning in both primary and middle school. Little did we know that our vision will grow and evolve as well.
In the primary school
We kicked off with an idea of Arcs (shamelessly borrowed from SF Brightworks in San-Francisco, USA), and their three stages of Exploration, Expression and Reflection. In the first semester of primary school we had a relatively successful project, based around Pets, and a similarly successful Fantasy theme-based projects. As a result of the first, our kids did a fundraising drive for an animal shelter, hosted an online charity sale; for the second, kids from 2nd and 3rd grade created their own clay stop-motion animations.
While both project outcomes did look quite impressive, we ended up extremely exhausted as teachers and questioning ourselves: where do we let go, if kids don’t drive? Where do we push in order to keep the quality? What should be the balance and integration between projects and academics? Project coordination also took an extra legwork from our teachers and by end of semester one we were utterly exhausted. Thus, we made a strong decision in January to ditch the projects altogether. We agreed that teachers are welcome to integrate into themes as much as possible, however, no project outcomes were expected. While this was definitely less impressive, it was clearly a good decision, as it allowed us space to re-evaluate our approach to projects, project-based learning and managing projects at school.
In the middle school
With our older kids we also started off full of excitement. We thought that presenting them with open plan would release great amounts of excitement and creativity. Alas, that was not the case. Our first and only autumn semester project was Waffle bake sale, which was surely fun and again – quite impressive for parents, however, it was far from being self-directed and student-driven.
In the second semester we accidentally (yes, I am not ashamed :)), stumbled upon the idea of individual projects, as we were all working online at the moment. Turned out that it was THE approach to have with the middle school. They worked stronger on their passion projects. The results were very diverse, but we were happy that all projects were totally and completely student-driven. In the second round of individual projects we saw kids teaming up in organic teams. This led to more challenging products and much more creative outcomes. We also allowed ourselves to challenge the kids in their project ideation phases and by the end of spring came around to the same Arc idea, but in our own KAIZEN way.
What’s in store for 2022?
- We still need to clarify our approach to projects in the primary school. As we are more clear on curriculum requirements, we can do a much better planning of arcs for next year.
- Individual projects are a way to go. If kids end up teaming up with each other, it’s definitely a bonus, but not a requirement.
- Who takes up the role of project coaches in primary school? What is the extent of coaching required in the middle school? These are the questions to be answered still.
5. How far do we want democracy to go?
How can we manage the school together with kids? How can we share the responsibility for managing our learning community? These were the two main questions, that we were starting to ask ourselves. It was much easier to test them this year, as our kids finally grew up and the middle schoolers turned out to be a perfect ‘ground’ for trail and error.
We had a Constitution revamp with our primary school at the start of 2021. The document had been voted upon a year prior, but needed some revisions, as we had new children joining in. Mainly third and second graders led the discussions around the rules and regulations, while smaller kids rarely questioned them. However, we did have a voting procedure and we see the need to include the legislative meetings in primary school more often.
Main legislative party took place in the middle school. 11-12 year olds got excited with the possibilities of influencing the school community and it was very interesting to observe how their ability to propose legislative motions, to debate and offer alternatives, to convince others and edit motions on the go improved. In the second semester we had two legislative meetings, which ended up with a Code of Regulations. It took us, the middle school leaders, a while to realize that we can delegate more and more to our students.
What is in store for 2022?
- Course on rights and responsibilities, on how democracy works for middle schoolers, and potentially upper primary school kids
- Transfer of power to manage legislative meetings from adults only to shared adults-children
- More regular legislative meetings that will hopefully become the ultimate decision-making power in managing our learning community
6. Moving to mastery-based assessment
And final, but definitely not the last one – mastery-based learning. This year we wanted to work on on our assessment systems, both in primary and middle school.
With smaller kids we wanted to have a better understanding (for them, as well as for us), where each kid is in terms of subject progress, their personal learning goals, etc. We introduced Individual Learning Hour, as a block in our daily schedule, during which children received individualized tasks or could choose to practice skills that they lacked. Our third graders are definitely on a good path towards independent learning, however, it is still too early to say so about the younger graders.
We tried working on mastery paths, learning goals, assessment checks, but due to the lack of time and resources, we didn’t succeed in properly exploring the topic.
In the middle school we went from monthly goal setting to a complicated system of Homework Tracker and ‘accepted/rejected’ assessment system. In our 5-7 grades teachers set their own criteria for homework acceptance, and either pass or fail. If the student fails, he/she can re-do the assignment as many times as necessary to pass. All the passes are counted towards weekly percentages of accomplished homework assignments. Students need to maintain not less than 60% of homework passed by every Sunday evening. If not passed for one week, student gets official notice by school leader. If not passed for two weeks, parents receive the written notice. If three weeks see no results, student stays at home until the assignments are submitted and evaluated.
The system is surely not perfect: the criteria for acceptance, while logical, is still mainly set by the teacher and is not always clear, students are not used to re-doing homework multiple times and get frustrated, adding assignments to the excel Tracker takes a while and some tasks get lost in the process. However, the system pushed our students to work on a higher level, to try and submit their homework in a quality way from the first time, and became quite a motivation for them to work. Not going to school (or getting banned, as we called it informally) became a negative consequence and I guess that is also a good result 🙂
What’s in store for 2022?
- Our assessment system definitely needs a work out. How can we make it student-centered, feedback-focused, mastery-based? That is one of our main challenges for the upcoming year
- Implementing goal-setting and review, regular reflection on the learning and self-evaluations is also an objective for our curriculum for all the grades
7. How can we inspire more self-directed learners?
One of our key areas of KAIZEN is self-driven learning. And I have to say that this was and still is the least developed area in our approach. We, as teachers and school leaders, constantly debate the merits of democratic schools, the level of responsibility that childen should take (or not take up), and how far we, at KAIZEN, are ready to go forward with self-driven approach.
In the primary school
This year we tried designing daily schedules that would give some flexibility and transfer some of the decision-making to kids themselves. Our third and second graders are quite self-motivated and driven learners, and it was inspiring to see them manage their own study time during Individual Hour. Module system (instead of traditional class/subject system) gave enough space for teachers to co-create their daily learning activities, together with kids. Some classes started introducing learning centers, especially in math, where children could CHOOSE what to focus on in their learning.
However, I have to stay that it was still very much teacher-facilitated. We realized that ‘letting go’ requires a completely different approach from school adults and we aren’t sure we are completely there yet.
In the middle school
With our middle school we started off clearly in the direction of democracy, inspired by the agile learning centers. And within one month we realized that we had to scale back. Scale back A LOT. We expected some de-schooling process from our middle schoolers (who mainly joined us from traditional schools). But we didn’t realize how LONG the deschooling process would take. What we thought would finish in one month took at least 4-5 full months of continuous negotiations and adjustments.
However, the closer we approached to spring, the more responsibilties we shared with our kids. We ended up with a schedule that was essentially half/half: 3 hours of the day was dedicated to required classes, while the other 3 hours were focused on individual projects and two-week courses, arranged upon children’s requests.
We also started shifting the responsibility of managing our learning community to the kids. If at the start we attempted to mediate most of their conflicts, now we set the medium, but let them mediate the conflicts on their own. Managing their school rules via legislative meetings also gave kids more space for decision-making.
What’s in store for 2022?
- Transfer more power and decision-making to the kids in the middle school and upper-primary school. The more we do so – the more they grow. And while it is not easy for us to do so as school adults, we realize that this is the way to go, if we want to inspire self-driven learners
- Allow kids to co-create their own schedules
- Design a way for children to manage their own individual learning paths
8. Integration, integration and once more integration
While primary school Ukranian curriculum is quite straight-forward and rather well thought-through, middle school curriculum is well, for the lack of a better word, one big failure. It took us a few months to realize that sticking to the national grade standards is not only against psychological development of kids, it also gives no complexity and builds no real competencies whatsoever.
Our main subject of integration this year was Ukrainian language/Ukrainian literature/Foreign literature. We followed the language arts approach, focused a lot on guided and close reading, as well as worked on developing writing skills in children. The integration proved very successful. Adding arts, combining language learning with georgraphy also helped kids get a bigger picture of the texts they were reading.
However, we still had the traditional science subjects – geography/biology in grade 5-6 and chemistry/physics in grade 7. And we realized that this is definitely not HOW we want our kids to learn in the upcoming year.
What’s in store for 2022?
- Review science curriculum in primary school and integrate it with our outdoor days – put it where it actully matters most
- Come up with ways to bridge together separated science subjects in the middle school. We won’t have the capacity or resources to integrate them properly, however, achieving some level of integration is our definite plan.
As we go off to the next school year, I can’t keep thinking about how far we have come already. Our central value ‘KAIZEN’ – the way of continuous improvement – is at the heart of everything we do. And I can’t wait to see how KAIZEN develops and grows in 2022.
Written by Oksana Arkhypchuk, KAIZEN founder and director