Blog Posts

At Margaret Stenersen Elementary School, there is a big and beautiful tree that some people want to cut down. The tree is a cedar and I LOVE IT!!! It is peaceful and I do not want it cut down. There are lots of trees at our school but this is the biggest. You are going to break our school’s heart. So many students play there. It is an old-growth tree and it holds all the school’s secrets. - Arija J., Grade 4

_{O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't.}

_{— William Shakespeare, The Tempest}

At Kandal, we are committed to strengthening our family partnerships in our school community. It’s no secret the more parents are involved in their children’s lives, both at home and school, the more they will be in the ‘know’ about how best to support their children. To this end, our kindergarten and grade 1 teachers and our English Language Learners (ELL) teachers initiated the “Parents as Partners” program.

Earlier this school year I made the commitment to report back on what I had learned as a consequence of my “shadow a student” experience.  Listening to students has been a key part of my practice over the last few years, and shadowing a student is the most recent iteration of this learning journey.

Keeping the district’s focus on equity in mind, the Dr. Thomas A. Swift Elementary school community has taken on a small project of our own. Together with a couple of other elementary schools, we are using picture books to dive into topics of diversity and equity.

Earlier this school year, leaders in our organization had the opportunity to learn from renowned psychiatrist, Dr. Shimi Kang on the subject of mental health and wellbeing.

In our school district's four-year strategic plan, we have targeted improved early learning as a means of impacting student success. At Mathxwí Elementary, all primary classrooms have committed their year to explore practical ways to improve early literacy learning.

“Now let us begin. Now let us re-dedicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world.” -- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Noticing a shift in literacy instruction across the district? Wonder what is going on in the classroom down the hall?  

It has been my practice for the last few Januarys to make predictions about possible changes in the K-12 sector. This practice goes back as far as 2015 when I highlighted the top ten issues facing our education system and some things to watch for as we sought to transform it.