Rancho-Kalama Trans-Pacific Collaboration Begins

I got a little ahead of myself in the last blog post. I tend to do that when I’m excited about something. In my last post I discussed plans to start a collaboration program with Rancho Minerva, a middle school 2500 mile away. In order to report on the program I have adopted the PDSA (plan, do, study, act) model. This model is a well received practice when starting an action research project, especially one that focuses on educating adolescents in the 21st century. See below for a quick explanation of each step as well as visual representation of the process

Plan: To develop your knowledge and expertise of your choice topic or question, you will curate at least 6 different resources that help you further your knowledge based on a particular topic.  The resources that you cultivate should help you with your determine the direction of your action research project.  You can use scholarly articles, videos, websites and tools to support your project.   For each resource selected you need to identify the source, describe what it is, explain how it helped develop your thinking about your topic and how it will impact your teaching.

Do: What are you going to do differently to impact students in your classroom? Summarize the process of your actions.

Study: Collect and Analyze Evidence: Analyze the data you collected and determine the outcome(s).

Act: Reflection and Next Steps: Based on your actions, explain the outcome of your action research project and next steps.

So, I should have began at the beginning, by saying that the planning process for this project began without me. While I was in Japan this summer, my principal attended a summit that I was supposed to go to as well. While there he met with the principal for Rancho Minerva Middle School in San Diego. A couple months prior, (May 2016) a group of leaders from Rancho Minerva and VIDA (Vista Innovation & Design Academy) came to our School on Maui to discuss some of the programs they have put in place at their schools and to workshop or experience them. Fast forward to the summer summit where both principals continued to toy with the idea of how we could work together or collaborate more. This led to the Rancho Kalama Summit (October 2016) of which I wrote about in a previous blog entry Global, Cross-Curricular Collaboration.

Now on to the “Doing”-One of the first steps for us to accomplish prior to launching was to create a short video to show to our respective teaching staffs. This video is an introduction of what the program is, why we are doing it, and what we hope to accomplish. watch video

As seen in the video, some of the teachers who attended the October summit had there students begin collaborating. Students, one from each school, were paired up and began learning about each other. This was great because it gave us a look at some of the lessons and takeaways on a smaller scale. Like how to set up a google shared classroom between two schools 2500 mile away. How excited are the kids about the project? Do they feel empowered to make it their own? With this info we can move forward to the study phase and analyze the information gathered to understand the impact and compare our analysis to the “PLAN” then launch school wide.The full launch of the program will happen in the weeks leading up to winter break.