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Doug Elmendorf - Principal, Chase Elementary
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While working on his Master’s degree in 1997 at the University of Massachusetts, Douglas had an opportunity to teach kindergarten in Senegal, West Africa. It was then that he realized that he would spend the rest of his life working with and on behalf of children. Dr. Elmendorf has been the principal of Chase Elementary School in Middle River, MD since 2011. Since 2006, he has served as a part-time lecturer in the Department of Educational Technology and Literacy at Towson University, where he also earned his Doctorate in Instructional Technology in 2012. Dr. Elmendorf is the recipient of the MSET Best Paper Award (2013) and Maryland ASCD Judith Ruchkin Research Award (2012).
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May
It’s hard to believe that within a few short weeks we will be at the end of our first year as a Lighthouse School. As is the case with most ambitious journeys, we enjoyed both challenges and moments of elation throughout the school year. As we reflect with one another about how the year has unfolded, we know it is also important to consider outside perspectives in order to determine what has worked well and what might be improved upon. Fortunately for us, we have had many people visit our school in the last couple of months. We have enjoyed “showing off” the work we have done during the 75th anniversary celebration, exciting Night of Innovation, numerous concerts, and the very popular Spring Fling. While all of these events yielded wonderfully positive comments from our visitors, we were particularly interested in feedback from folks who tend to have a more critical eye – teachers and administrators from other schools. We had the opportunity to hear those voices as we hosted visits in “phase 4” of the Lighthouse initiative, which included visits from 27 non-pilot elementary, middle and high schools. Their experiences at Chase presumably provided valuable information on which they were able to reflect as they returned to their buildings. The unintended benefit was that we received a lot of feedback that reinforced what we thought we were doing well and helped us reconsider things that are still in need of improvement. We are grateful for our colleagues as they gave us ideas in de-briefing sessions and by dropping slips of paper into envelopes outside of each classroom for individualized feedback.
While not all districts will choose to have a formalized process for garnering outside feedback, all schools embarking on a similar journey would do well to seek out insight from those who have not been steeped in the change.
It’s hard to believe that within a few short weeks we will be at the end of our first year as a Lighthouse School. As is the case with most ambitious journeys, we enjoyed both challenges and moments of elation throughout the school year. As we reflect with one another about how the year has unfolded, we know it is also important to consider outside perspectives in order to determine what has worked well and what might be improved upon. Fortunately for us, we have had many people visit our school in the last couple of months. We have enjoyed “showing off” the work we have done during the 75th anniversary celebration, exciting Night of Innovation, numerous concerts, and the very popular Spring Fling. While all of these events yielded wonderfully positive comments from our visitors, we were particularly interested in feedback from folks who tend to have a more critical eye – teachers and administrators from other schools. We had the opportunity to hear those voices as we hosted visits in “phase 4” of the Lighthouse initiative, which included visits from 27 non-pilot elementary, middle and high schools. Their experiences at Chase presumably provided valuable information on which they were able to reflect as they returned to their buildings. The unintended benefit was that we received a lot of feedback that reinforced what we thought we were doing well and helped us reconsider things that are still in need of improvement. We are grateful for our colleagues as they gave us ideas in de-briefing sessions and by dropping slips of paper into envelopes outside of each classroom for individualized feedback.
While not all districts will choose to have a formalized process for garnering outside feedback, all schools embarking on a similar journey would do well to seek out insight from those who have not been steeped in the change.
February
It only takes a cursory glance at your Facebook newsfeed, the TV news, or the Education section of the newspaper to see that there is a significant amount of misinformation and negative news about our schools. This can be frustrating to those of us who see amazingly wonderful things happening in America’s schoolhouses every single day. Because educators are so good at focusing on the most important component of their jobs (improving teaching and learning), they are rarely able to find time to share, in a public way, all of the great things happening in schools. As a result, it is incumbent upon our administrators, Good News Ambassadors, and PTA board members to highlight the awesomeness of their schools in order to push back on the negativity that too often permeates the education-related stories shared in our information-drenched society.
Recently, David Robb, Supervisor in the Office of Innovative Learning Projects, wrote a terrific piece about the importance of telling our story, as it relates to the STAT initiative https://www.edsurge.com/n/2015-01-21-how-bcps-lighthouse-schools-changed-the-conversation. He described several of the district-wide mechanisms that are in place to document our journey. Considering the fact that seven middle schools were recently identified as Lighthouse Schools for the 2015-2016 school year, I’d like to offer some school-based ideas related to sharing this exciting story.
Get your story out there! Shine the light on what is really happening in your school. If you don’t tell your story, someone else will. YOUR version of YOUR story is the best version of YOUR story!
It only takes a cursory glance at your Facebook newsfeed, the TV news, or the Education section of the newspaper to see that there is a significant amount of misinformation and negative news about our schools. This can be frustrating to those of us who see amazingly wonderful things happening in America’s schoolhouses every single day. Because educators are so good at focusing on the most important component of their jobs (improving teaching and learning), they are rarely able to find time to share, in a public way, all of the great things happening in schools. As a result, it is incumbent upon our administrators, Good News Ambassadors, and PTA board members to highlight the awesomeness of their schools in order to push back on the negativity that too often permeates the education-related stories shared in our information-drenched society.
Recently, David Robb, Supervisor in the Office of Innovative Learning Projects, wrote a terrific piece about the importance of telling our story, as it relates to the STAT initiative https://www.edsurge.com/n/2015-01-21-how-bcps-lighthouse-schools-changed-the-conversation. He described several of the district-wide mechanisms that are in place to document our journey. Considering the fact that seven middle schools were recently identified as Lighthouse Schools for the 2015-2016 school year, I’d like to offer some school-based ideas related to sharing this exciting story.
- Leverage the ubiquitous nature of social media. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. are free and effective tools to share your story. With the ability to take pics and instantly update your school’s feed right from your phone as you walk down the hall, it’s surprising that more administrators and school-based personnel don’t make consistent use of social media. Check out Chase’s active Facebook page.
- Create a one page “snapshot” of your school’s information and accomplishments. This can be done as a hard copy or you could use a free online tool like www.smore.com. At Chase, we combine these two ideas. We created a QR code to put on our info sheet. When the QR code is scanned, the user is taken to an online page that contains school-related links like Facebook, Twitter, website, etc. Check it out! https://www.smore.com/ft0sv
- Contact your local papers. While it’s great to get a story in the big city papers like The Sun, the smaller local papers are a great resource to reach your school community. Many people still like the feel and smell of the small, local paper and the editors are often looking for fun ways to highlight schools.
- Blog. This is more time consuming, but still free. You can create your own blog or write for an organization like EdTech Review. Click here for a sample of a Chase-related article published by EdTech Review. Last time I checked, this article had over 33,000 hits, so there is certainly some potential here for reaching a larger audience.
- Create a YouTube or TeacherTube channel for your school. There are many free programs online that can be used to easily create fun and informative videos that highlight your school. Examples include PowToons, GoAnimate, and Animoto. Click here to see a short video we made with Animoto to ring in the new year.
- Make full use of Blackboard Connect (or other mass notification services). All of the ideas above can be shared via a mass notification service to parents’ email accounts and mobile phones. With a few clicks, attachments, links, and other important information can be shared to everyone who is registered in your school.
Get your story out there! Shine the light on what is really happening in your school. If you don’t tell your story, someone else will. YOUR version of YOUR story is the best version of YOUR story!
December
In October, at the beginning of our STAT journey, I wrote here about the initial challenges that we faced with hardware and how our faculty and PTA executive board members responded to these “problems.” In this second entry about our journey, I’d like to explore a much more important, intricate, and persistent challenge that we currently face. So, in both of the first two Journeys entries I am writing about “problems”? Yes. Dealing with problems in ways that foster the growth of an organization and its members can lead to other experiences that are quite positive and downright exhilarating. Ritu Ghatourey expressed this sentiment well when she said, “Life is a journey, with problems to solve, lessons to learn, but most of all experiences to enjoy.”
Now that we have our headphones and can troubleshoot our devices pretty well, the focus for our first through third grade teachers and students is planning and implementing small group lesson activities that leverage technology and maintain high levels of rigor and relevance. Because the small group instructional model is still somewhat new to us, the infusion of mobile technology devices has, in some cases, complicated the instructional model. The temptation here is to give students low level activities that will keep them busy and leave them unlikely to walk over to the teacher’s group to interrupt her direct instruction. Teachers have been addressing this challenge by collaborating with one another to develop their capacity to choose and incorporate technology-driven activities that are meaningful, yet are able to be navigated by an independent group of six year olds when the teacher is meeting with a different group. When this challenge has been faced head-on, we have solved problems, learned lessons, and experienced joy. One example includes a 3rd grade math class in which the students are assigned to specific groups that rotate to different “stations,” including one in which the teacher works with a small group. At one of the student-driven stations, youngsters have index cards that include differentiated math facts and a QR code that, when scanned, provides the student the correct answer so that she can self-check her work. Students record their successes the old-fashioned way (on paper) that the teacher collects in order to check progress for individual students.
We’re at an important part of our journey in which we are working hard to engage students with technology in ways that maintain or heighten the levels of rigor and relevance that our students experience on a daily basis. Let the journey continue . . .
In October, at the beginning of our STAT journey, I wrote here about the initial challenges that we faced with hardware and how our faculty and PTA executive board members responded to these “problems.” In this second entry about our journey, I’d like to explore a much more important, intricate, and persistent challenge that we currently face. So, in both of the first two Journeys entries I am writing about “problems”? Yes. Dealing with problems in ways that foster the growth of an organization and its members can lead to other experiences that are quite positive and downright exhilarating. Ritu Ghatourey expressed this sentiment well when she said, “Life is a journey, with problems to solve, lessons to learn, but most of all experiences to enjoy.”
Now that we have our headphones and can troubleshoot our devices pretty well, the focus for our first through third grade teachers and students is planning and implementing small group lesson activities that leverage technology and maintain high levels of rigor and relevance. Because the small group instructional model is still somewhat new to us, the infusion of mobile technology devices has, in some cases, complicated the instructional model. The temptation here is to give students low level activities that will keep them busy and leave them unlikely to walk over to the teacher’s group to interrupt her direct instruction. Teachers have been addressing this challenge by collaborating with one another to develop their capacity to choose and incorporate technology-driven activities that are meaningful, yet are able to be navigated by an independent group of six year olds when the teacher is meeting with a different group. When this challenge has been faced head-on, we have solved problems, learned lessons, and experienced joy. One example includes a 3rd grade math class in which the students are assigned to specific groups that rotate to different “stations,” including one in which the teacher works with a small group. At one of the student-driven stations, youngsters have index cards that include differentiated math facts and a QR code that, when scanned, provides the student the correct answer so that she can self-check her work. Students record their successes the old-fashioned way (on paper) that the teacher collects in order to check progress for individual students.
We’re at an important part of our journey in which we are working hard to engage students with technology in ways that maintain or heighten the levels of rigor and relevance that our students experience on a daily basis. Let the journey continue . . .
October
The first day of school this year officially marked the beginning of our STAT journey. Now that the O’s are officially out of the running to be World Champs and I’ve spent a small fortune on Halloween costumes that my children will wear for about two hours, I’m eager to reflect on our journey thus far. While we have certainly run into various challenges that accompany most major change initiatives, Team Chase is well on its way to transforming our school into a “complete 21st century technology learning environment to prepare globally-competitive graduates” (www.bcps.org). As I visit classrooms each day and talk to students, staff, parents, and community members, I realize that the primary reason for our initial success with STAT is that our team was largely well equipped with the growth mindset needed to take on this challenge. My main piece of advice, then, for any principal who will soon be leading a similar effort in his or her school, is to spend considerable time doing what you would do for any important journey . . . prepare. Below is a description of what I observe to be the steps we took to prepare and a couple examples of the fruit borne from those efforts.
In the spring of 2014, after our selection as a Lighthouse School, we spent several months working with teachers, students, and families to develop new vision and purpose statements for Chase Elementary. One of the brainstorming activities in which our stakeholders participated when building a shared vision for our school was to create newspaper headlines that we would like to see written about Chase Elementary in the year 2018. The subsequent conversations about what we needed to do in order to earn those headlines in four years gave us our purpose statement. The dialogue and collaboration that took place among all of the stakeholders in this process allowed us to realize the need to embrace a growth mindset in order to work with purpose to one day achieve our vision.
After only a couple of weeks into the school year, we encountered one “problem” related to the implementation of our new devices. Teachers loved being able to customize their instructional activities by assigning specific video or audio files to students based on individual needs, but soon realized that the students were frustrated and distracted by the sounds simultaneously coming from their friends’ devices. It didn’t take long for parents to catch wind of this developing concern. While it would have been easy for them to point to the technology as a nuisance and push for more traditional instructional activities, these parents worked together to request that the PTA purchase ear buds for all students in the 1:1 classrooms (grades 1-3)! Thanks to the growth mindset of our parent community, our students were quickly able to interact with audio books, videos and other multimedia effectively and without distraction.
While the reliability and ease of use of technology have greatly improved over the years, technology tools (both software and hardware) are still not perfect and can be confusing to navigate at times. With the infusion of so many devices and new learning tools, the staff saw a need to put a troubleshooting plan into place that would allow us to address basic issues in a quick and efficient manner, realizing that larger, more complicated concerns would need to go through a systemic ticketing process. Teachers identified peers who were natural problem solvers and/or had some technical know-how. Those individuals were put into “troubleshooting teams” and given a group of teachers from whom they could expect to receive their technology questions and concerns. As a result, problems are often addressed within hours or even minutes, instead of days or weeks. In order to maintain equity of workload among our staff members, the team decided to relieve the troubleshooting members of their afterschool “action team” roles. The team’s willingness to collaborate and problem solve allows us to continue to grow successfully through the early phases of our STAT journey.
The first day of school this year officially marked the beginning of our STAT journey. Now that the O’s are officially out of the running to be World Champs and I’ve spent a small fortune on Halloween costumes that my children will wear for about two hours, I’m eager to reflect on our journey thus far. While we have certainly run into various challenges that accompany most major change initiatives, Team Chase is well on its way to transforming our school into a “complete 21st century technology learning environment to prepare globally-competitive graduates” (www.bcps.org). As I visit classrooms each day and talk to students, staff, parents, and community members, I realize that the primary reason for our initial success with STAT is that our team was largely well equipped with the growth mindset needed to take on this challenge. My main piece of advice, then, for any principal who will soon be leading a similar effort in his or her school, is to spend considerable time doing what you would do for any important journey . . . prepare. Below is a description of what I observe to be the steps we took to prepare and a couple examples of the fruit borne from those efforts.
In the spring of 2014, after our selection as a Lighthouse School, we spent several months working with teachers, students, and families to develop new vision and purpose statements for Chase Elementary. One of the brainstorming activities in which our stakeholders participated when building a shared vision for our school was to create newspaper headlines that we would like to see written about Chase Elementary in the year 2018. The subsequent conversations about what we needed to do in order to earn those headlines in four years gave us our purpose statement. The dialogue and collaboration that took place among all of the stakeholders in this process allowed us to realize the need to embrace a growth mindset in order to work with purpose to one day achieve our vision.
After only a couple of weeks into the school year, we encountered one “problem” related to the implementation of our new devices. Teachers loved being able to customize their instructional activities by assigning specific video or audio files to students based on individual needs, but soon realized that the students were frustrated and distracted by the sounds simultaneously coming from their friends’ devices. It didn’t take long for parents to catch wind of this developing concern. While it would have been easy for them to point to the technology as a nuisance and push for more traditional instructional activities, these parents worked together to request that the PTA purchase ear buds for all students in the 1:1 classrooms (grades 1-3)! Thanks to the growth mindset of our parent community, our students were quickly able to interact with audio books, videos and other multimedia effectively and without distraction.
While the reliability and ease of use of technology have greatly improved over the years, technology tools (both software and hardware) are still not perfect and can be confusing to navigate at times. With the infusion of so many devices and new learning tools, the staff saw a need to put a troubleshooting plan into place that would allow us to address basic issues in a quick and efficient manner, realizing that larger, more complicated concerns would need to go through a systemic ticketing process. Teachers identified peers who were natural problem solvers and/or had some technical know-how. Those individuals were put into “troubleshooting teams” and given a group of teachers from whom they could expect to receive their technology questions and concerns. As a result, problems are often addressed within hours or even minutes, instead of days or weeks. In order to maintain equity of workload among our staff members, the team decided to relieve the troubleshooting members of their afterschool “action team” roles. The team’s willingness to collaborate and problem solve allows us to continue to grow successfully through the early phases of our STAT journey.
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