Education is About Growth Mindset

The first classroom I remember being in as a student, my first-grade teacher, Mrs. Hurst, would draw five lines on the board using this: 

The first classroom I used as a teacher had a green chalkboard with the lines already drawn on it: 

In my first four years of teaching, I evolved to using an overhead projector: 

When I was a high school principal, e-mail was just starting to evolve as a way for families to communicate with teachers. In the same building, every teacher asked their students to first send their papers to turnitin.com to check for authentic writing. Students would then print their papers and physically hand them in to their teachers. 

The last time I taught a class, it was entirely virtual. We met online. I taught online. I graded papers and projects on the university's platform. It was a far cry from Mrs. Hurst in 1981. 

Education, by its nature, is about evolution. It's about growing and changing to meet the needs of the students as they grow and change over time. That includes advances in technology, acceptable societal norms, and educational research. 

Under Tim Munoz's leadership, the Policy Committee has started discussing artificial intelligence parameters. This is a brand-new experience for all of us. We've never had to ask questions about content that can be created by Claude AI or Chat GPT. We will rely on the experiences of our teachers and students to shape our expectations. 

Artificial intelligence is just the next chapter of how education will grow into the future. We know that we won't teach our students of tomorrow the way we learned ourselves or, to take it a step further, how we teach our students today. That is our commitment as educators. 

The challenge will be for us as adults. When we were students, we didn't learn that way. When we were taught how to teach, we were not taught that way. If we must grapple with this as educators, we will need our community to grapple with us. It won't be how we all learned when we were in school, but it will be what our future students expect of us. Of all of us. 

We are breathing new life into the buildings in East Greenwich over the next five years. We must make the same promise about how we teach. The students of tomorrow are waiting. 

Greatness Not Perfection, So Far

During the Winter Holiday Recess, we welcomed 2025, and this past Monday, we welcomed back our Faculty, Staff, and Students. With more than half of our year of Teaching and Learning still left to go, I reflected on the first seventy-five days of our academic year. At our Convocation in August, I shared with our employees that this year, we would be about greatness, not perfection. Here are some of the moments of greatness so far: 

• How this community responded to the needs of the EGPS Families impacted by the Brookside Terrace fire in December. In particular, Andrea Coelho, one of our social workers, has been a consistent presence and an advocate for these individuals, communicating with them regularly and sharing what their needs are. This highlights the work of Strategic Plan Priority 2 (Distinguished Teaching and Talented Staff), Priority 4 (Engaged Community) and demonstrates the importance of Connection (one of the tenets of our Vision of a Graduate). 
  
  
• Helping Hands of EGHS, a student-run group, organized a 5K race in honor of Ryan Casey, who passed away in 2023. Mr. Casey was a graduate of Meadowbrook, Cole, and EGHS as well as a dedicated husband and father. This event was a concrete example of how our high school students are Reflective, another tenet of our Vision of a Graduate. 
  
  
• The Cole Girls Soccer Team raised money for the Women in Need (WIN) program at Kent County Hospital. Led by Coach Steve Shelton, this highlights again Strategic Plan Priority 2 (Distinguished Teaching and Talented Staff), Priority 4 (Engaged Community) and Connection from our Vision of a Graduate. 
  
  
  
  
  
• Michelle Lambert, a paraeducator in EGPS, opened a Fitness Center with her daughter. Ms. Lambert offers a class called "Unified Fitness," particularly for those eligible for special education. This continues to highlight our Distinguished Teaching and Talented Staff and demonstrates that All Means All extends beyond the school day for our employees.  

• Cole Students in Steve Garneau's classes recently participated in Lego Education's project #BuildToGive. For every heart-shaped Lego model built and shared on social media, Lego donated a kit to a child in need. There were a total of thirty-two models built at Cole. Another exemplar of our Distinguished Teaching and Talented Staff, our Engaged Community commitment, and the importance of Connection. 

With more than half of our Teaching and Learning year left, EGPS will provide many more examples of greatness, not perfection. We will demonstrate our commitment to the priorities of our Strategic Plan and our emphasis on the Vision of a Graduate. This is the work of Teaching and Learning in this community. 

Happy 2025!

Learning From Our Students

After graduating from the College of the Holy Cross in May 1996, I joined a volunteer program that no longer exists: Inner-City Teaching Corps. The program placed recent college graduates in classrooms in Chicago's forgotten neighborhoods. It was modeled after the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, which was much more broad in terms of the volunteer opportunities. We lived in a small community with a limited budget, but we all taught. 

Without a degree in education or certification to teach, the program partnered with Loyola University Chicago to obtain temporary licensure for us. When I left Chicago in 2000, I knew I wanted to be a teacher. However, all I had was four years of teaching under my belt. 

I found a thirteen-month program at Fordham University that came with a New York State teaching certificate, along with a Master of Science in Teaching degree. I was a full-time student, but because of the program's duration, we were required to complete a portfolio of our work instead of writing a lengthy final project. The title of my portfolio was "Learning From My Students." 

Fast forward twenty-three years, and I was at the Hanaford School for classroom visits last week when Ms. Colleen Hanrahan invited me to the front of the room to complete a challenging math problem. The class read the question aloud to me, and I started to show my work. I knew immediately that I was going down the wrong path, as there was an almost instant buzz in the room. Fortunately, the students and the teacher were more than happy to help. With the right prompts from both Ms. Hanrahan and her students, I was able to find my way back to the correct answer. 

It was so important for Ms. Hanrahan and her students to see that we don't have all the answers. Often, when I ask students what the superintendent does, the response is: "You're the boss of the principals." Technically, that's correct. However, this is my answer: 

• My job is to ensure that every student who comes to school feels safe, welcomed, and included so they can learn to their potential. When students feel those things, they have the freedom to make mistakes, which is the best way for us to learn. 

Just by the fact that we have degrees in education and licenses to teach, does not mean we have all the answers. Just because we stand in front of the class, with a well-thought-out lesson plan, does not mean we won't be stumped. Just because we are adults does not mean we know it all. 

But let's be honest, we sometimes slip into that mindset. Adults know more than children. It's just nature's way. We've been around the block more than once or twice. We've been in their chairs. We've completed our education.  We have college and advanced degrees. We pay mortgages. We pay taxes. We are adults!

In 2022, I wrote about a colleague whose humility in education was inspirational. Frank Raispis was committed to staying in education, as long as he continued to learn. He wasn't interested in titles, degrees, or teaching licenses. Mr. Raispis was interested in learning and had a life full of it. 

I love being a Superintendent of Schools. Whenever I'm discouraged by the work of my office, I leave and visit a classroom. Whether it's on the floor with a first grade at Frenchtown or Meadowbrook. Or perhaps it's in an advanced science classroom at EGHS. Maybe it's wandering into a foreign language lesson at Cole. Or finding my way into a self-contained class at Eldredge or Hanaford. It energizes me. It inspires me. It reminds me why I went into education in the first place. 

After last week, my Fordham portfolio needs a few more pages. For Ms. Colleen Hanrahan. For her students. 

For teaching me that I still have plenty to learn and so much more to grow. 

Photo courtesy of www.medium.com

It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year

At least, that's what Andy Williams said. The popular Christmas song was written in 1963 by Edward Pola and George Wyle, and I have distinct memories of it playing on my parent's record player during the holiday season. Yes, a record player. I currently have that song, along with many others, on my iPhone playlist. I have fond memories of Christmas in our home, for almost every year except one. 

My grandfather passed away in the spring of 1983. That Christmas was different. It was somehow muted and slightly less "bright" than the others. There was an empty seat at the table that would have been his. 

In the East Greenwich Community this holiday season, there will be three empty seats that families will experience for the first time. Dr. Steven Arnoff, our former Director of Technology, passed away on November 24 last year. Ryan Casey passed away on November 18. Bob Houghtaling passed away on December 8. None of those deaths were expected, and each person left an indelible imprint on many, many people. 

When My Wife was eight years old, her dad passed away. Since then, almost forty years ago, every holiday season has been bittersweet. Patrick Gendron missed all of the significant milestones in her life: sweet sixteen, high school and college graduation, first job, our wedding, the birth of our children, and all of the celebratory moments in the lives of his grandchildren. 

I never got to meet My Wife's father. In his honor, we named our oldest son Patrick Michael. His pictures are in frames in our home. 

Not every family will be decking the halls merry and bright this holiday season. For some, the losses of loved ones are fresh and still tangibly painful. For some, the losses of others are distant memories, but the feelings are so close that we could almost touch them. For me, I can go nearly eleven months of the year knowing that my grandfather passed away forty-one years ago, and I can accept that. Yet, I wanted him to be at the table with us Thanksgiving and to have had the opportunity to meet his great-grandchildren. And I will want him to be a part of this year's holiday traditions, which are dotted with the ones I grew up with that he was a part of. 

But the show must go on. There is the business of Teaching and Learning. There is the work of building the budget for next year. The families of East Greenwich Public Schools expect us to be ready to engage, instruct, assess, and meet the social-emotional needs of our students in this hectic time between Thanksgiving and the Winter Holiday Recess. 

Whether the 2024 holiday season is causing us to miss loved ones who just passed away, those who have been gone for decades, or perhaps some people are fortunate to not be grieving any loss at all. They might be aching to be reunited with estranged loved ones. They might be dealing with a family member struggling with mental illness or an addiction. Or any myriad of items that impact families. 

We can be kind. We can be gentle. We can be compassionate. We can be empathetic. We can listen. We can withhold judgment. We can create safe spaces for people to not be OK. 

Then it can be the most wonderful time of the year. 

Photo Courtesy of Steph Edwards (@toyoufromsteph)

Comparison is the Thief of Joy

One of the ways that the winter months impact me is the lack of daylight. It's not the cold, I grew up outside of New York City, and experienced real winters. I also lived for ten years in Chicago, and it's called the Windy City for good reasons. Wind chills there were the real thing. It's not the snow either, as I lived in Vermont for fifteen years, where I owned a snowblower and learned to ski as an adult!

It really is the lack of daylight. It's hard to go to work in the dark and leave in the dark. While there is brilliant light in every one of our school buildings, thanks to the tremendous faculty, staff, and students in East Greenwich Public Schools, we are seeing more and more darkness. That reality will continue until Saturday, December 21, 2024. That day has the shortest amount of daylight in the northern hemisphere. Just days after that, we will start seeing more light until the peak on Saturday, June 21, 2025. 

But I read something from The Washington Post (free article, with e-mail registration) in November that put all this into perspective. I read about the town of Utqiagvik, Alaska, located 330 miles north of the Arctic Circle. On Monday, November 18, at 1:27 PM, the sun set, and it won't rise again until January 22, 2025. For sixty-four days, residents will be essentially living at night. They will not see the sun for more than two months. There is not less and less sun, as we experience, but no sun. None. I don't know how I would feel about that. 

However, the article pointed out that the people who live in Utqiagvik will have the same amount of daylight as those of us in East Greenwich, Rhode Island. We all experience the same number of hours of sunlight over 365 days. How do I know this? Per the article, on May 11, 2025, those living in Utqiagvik will see the sun rise, and it won't set again until August 19! Honestly, I'm not sure how I would feel about that either. 

Sometimes it's about our perspective. Sometimes, it's how we think about another person. Sometimes, we have our blind spots. Sometimes, we can't see the whole picture. 

We are just coming off of the Thanksgiving Break, and whether it was a festive celebration or celebrated quietly, it is a time to be thankful. Thankful for what we have, even if we don't think it's much. Somewhere, someone else might not share that same perspective. Comparison really is the thief of joy because, in the end, we all get the same amount of sunlight. 

It Really Does Take A Village

We are one-third of the way through our year of Teaching and Learning together, which is really hard to believe. For me, time seems to move quicker the older I get. I must have blinked because, just yesterday, the days were long, and the calendar said August. In reality, December is next week, and we are only fifteen days of Teaching and Learning away from the Winter Holiday Recess...

I saw this graphic recently on Facebook, and it inspired me to be as articulate as I could be, across our district, about how thankful I am for education in East Greenwich Public Schools. 

As we approach Thanksgiving this week, I am mindful of all the people involved in making East Greenwich Public Schools' education a reality for every student. It is a collective effort from all our employees and this community. 

• It begins with our School Committee: Seven individuals, chaired by Alyson Powell, committed to ensuring that All Means All is not just the name of our Strategic Plan. 
  
  
• The Town Council: President Mark Schwager leads a group of elected officials who support public education both in terms of its day-to-day operations and its commitment to our future. 
  
  
• The School Construction Committee: With Andrew Nota as Co-Chair with me, and our construction partners, this group continues to shepherd the work of our Master Plan, which will breathe new life into our buildings. 
  
  
• I'm proud of our Facilities Team: Under Bob Wilmarth's leadership, these individuals demonstrate stewardship in all six buildings. 
  
  
• Our Technology Team: With Chris Scheib, this team ensures that both our infrastructure and hardware can support the needs of 21st-century education. 
  
  
• The Office of Finance, Administration, and Operations: Maggie Baker leads a team that carefully manages our budget of almost $50 million. This office also works with our transportation partner, Ocean State, and is home to Human Resources. 
  
  
• Student Services: Neil Marcaccio and our special educators serve students and families eligible for Individual Educational Programs (IEP) and 504s to meet their needs and make our curriculum fully accessible. Under this umbrella is Leigh Oliver, who is leading the effort to ensure best-first instruction as part of our Multi-Tiered System of Supports. 
  
  
• Aramark Food Service: Monique Herard works with her team to offer healthy meals for our students and is partnering with us to continue to meet our students' needs. 
  
  
• Our Building Principals: Eight educational professionals focused on instructional leadership along the continuum of our K-12 landscape. Our students' needs are as diverse as the student body itself, both academically and social-emotionally. 
  
  
• Our Teachers: These professionals work tirelessly to engage our students and create spaces that are safe, welcoming, and inclusive, where mistakes are welcome, and all can grow to their potential. 
  
  
• Our Paraeducators: The educational support personnel help ensure all students have fill access to the educational programs we offer. 
  
  
• The Administrative Assistants: Otherwise known as our "Directors of First Impressions," these individuals are often the first faces and voices we see and hear throughout our district. 

None of these areas are more important than another. We all rely on each other to make Teaching and Learning in EGPS a reality for all of our students. It is an interdependence that trusts the professionalism of every single individual who is an employee in our district. 

As we continue to strive for greatness, not perfection this year, I hope we can make gratitude a priority. Especially as we enter perhaps the most hectic time of the academic year, the time between the Thanksgiving Break and the Winter Holiday Recess, let's be sure to give each other the benefit of the doubt. We are, and will always be, better together. 

Photo courtesy of www.allaboutautismbni.com

On Hope

Education is an act of hope. The work is fundamental to a democracy, and it cannot be done in a silo. Planning a lesson, delivering a lesson in a way that reaches and engages all students, assessing a lesson, and reviewing said lesson is a tremendous undertaking. It takes days, hours, and minutes that are rarely seen by anyone other than the educators themselves. All of those parts of teaching (planning, delivery, assessment, and review) are themselves acts of hope. 

The hope that the lesson takes root. The hope that the delivery connects with all learners in the room. The hope that the assessment reflects the effort of both the educator and the student. The hope that the review will offer blind spots for further growth. 

In a recent blog post, Meghan Lawson pointed out the distinction between wishing and hoping, which she points out are often conflated. A wish is something that one does with candles on a cake for a birthday. As I've detailed above, hope is much more intentional and takes substantially more work. And as it turns out, hope is much more transformational. 

Ms. Lawson detailed her growth around the science of hope that started with Jamie Meade,  the former vice president and chief of staff for Battelle for Kids. Ms. Meade then led her to the psychologist C.R. Snyder, who developed the hope theory. There are three components: 

• Goals: establishing personally meaningful goals.
  
  
• Pathways: uncovering multiple ways to achieve each goal.
  
  
• Agency: believing we can overcome obstacles to achieve our goals. 

Ms. Lawson also shares two more facts about hope, distinguishing it further from a wish. 

• The first is from the book Hope Rising, by Casey Gwinn, J.D., and Chan Hellman, Ph.D. "The predictive power of hope is greater than any other character strength." 
  
  
• The second returns to Ms. Meade, who points out, "Several academic studies indicate that hope is a more robust predictor of future success than a student's ACT score, their SAT score, and their GPA. In fact, hope is a greater predictor than GPA as to whether or not a college freshman will return to campus in the second semester." 

Let that sit with you for a moment. Reread those two quotes. Then, read them out loud and count to thirty before continuing. 

Recently, there have been many discussions in East Greenwich about the scores our students are earning, and comparing us to our neighbors in Rhode Island and Massachusetts. I wrote about that in October, urging us to remember the Roosevelt quote that "comparison is the thief of joy," but more important than that is a distinction Sarah Courtemanche-O'Brien made when she updated our School Committee this past week. During this presentation, Ms. Courtemanche-O'Brien noted: 

• College Board PSAT and SAT assessments have been restructured over the last year, with this cohort data reflecting student use on the new digital platform Bluebook. The platform has reconfigured the assessment design, making the PSAT and SAT adaptive assessments based on student responses. 
  
  
• The scoring mechanism for these adaptive assessments is no longer the same. In previous years, these assessments used classical test theory: an equal number of items were incorrect for you and me, and we received the same score. Now, the assessments are using item response theory, a model that accounts for the fact that students may guess and might get different scores with the same number of right/wrong based on the rigor of what is right/wrong. 
  
  
• As such, the Math and English Language Arts (ELA) data are not comparable to previous trend data. 

So, where does this leave us? 

With the science of hope. With goals, pathways, and agency. With a predictive power greater than any other character strength. With a robust predictor of future success. We're right back where we started this conversation. 

Education is an act of hope.