Impact Cycle Sharing

Thank you to all teachers who shared their Impact Cycle results yesterday afternoon.  As we (Laura, Chad and myself) made our way through the different groups sharing, we saw the level of learning, self-reflection and collegiality has truly been elevated to a new level of professionalism when talking about teacher practice here at Ka`imiloa.  I remember how in our first year of Impact Cycle work, we were unsure what action research entailed and this lack of certainty or clarity with the process often left us frustrated and wanting to give it up.  I am so glad we all persevered and continued to go through our 2-3 cycles per year.

Some of the comments I heard are evidence of the strides we are making as individual teachers and a teaching staff with not only our professional practice, but also the shared belief that Ka`imiloa will be a place where "Teachers see learning through the eyes of their students and students see themselves as their own teachers".  The comments follow:

• I realized it takes practice and more practice for my students to learn some of the skills we want them to learn.  It's not just a one time thing.
• I needed as a teacher to let students struggle to learn - to give them time to learn from their mistakes, just as I learned from my struggle and mistakes.
• Feedback is not just for students, but it's feedback to me on how students learn.
• The disposition of making connections is something I want my students to have, more than at a surface level but in making connections to different content areas and ideas...
• It was hard for me to reflect and figure out why students were not learning their vocabulary words, but I kept trying to think of different reasons "why". That has me trying another strategy.
• Though our students were still reflecting at the very surface level according to our rubrics, we kept at it and didn't stop and at the end, we could see the difference it made when we looked at their journals and self-reflection writing pieces.
• Every morning, the students know what they have to do for the first 15 minutes of the day with their vocabulary words.  It's this continuous practice that gets them better at learning a skill.
• It's very important that every grade level goes deeply and knows their standards well before we can align standards across grade levels.  
• We are looking as a grade level to see if our formatives Pre, During and Post are aligned to what we are teaching in our Unit of Studies work.  

As we go through doing our Plan-Do-Check-Act for the processes and programs we have in our school what Impact Cycles have shown me and reinforced in our mind is that not all data can be quantitative.  Just as the voices of students who share the impact a teacher made on their lives through their scholarship essays 7 years later, not all data is represented by a "hard" number.

Brene Browne in her Ted Talks shares the qualitative or soft data we share when we "story-tell" our narratives about students and their growth is "Data with a soul."  I could not agree more.

Thank you for the hard work you put into the two cycles of impact researching you did this past year.  Looking forward to next year's Impact Cycles!

Deb Hatada, Principal
Kaimiloa Elementary School
Office (808) 689-1280   FAX (808) 689-1284