 I'm your host, Winston Welch, and I'm delighted you're joining us today, where every other week we explore a variety of topics, organizations, events, and the people who fuel them in our city, state, country, and world. As a disclaimer, any views or opinions expressed by me are strictly my own and not connected with any organization I might be affiliated with. Welcome me today in the studio is Buffy Cushman-Pates, school leader of Seeks, the school for examining essential questions of sustainability. That's unethical. But with that, I would like to welcome you to the show today, Buffy. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Well, you know, it's an interesting school. I have actually met students who have gone to Seeks. One of them was actually my neighbor across the street, and his mother was a very interesting lady. And she wanted to enroll her child in a different type of school. And so we were talking, and then I realized, oh, wait a minute, I've heard about this school before. So tell us what is Seeks? Well, it's a public charter middle school, and there's a lot of pieces to that. It's a public school, it's a charter school, and it's a middle school, which is to say we serve students in sixth through eighth grade. Any student who wants to go, really, and if we have more students interested than we have space available, we have to hold a lottery. You have to hold a lottery. You have to hold a lottery. You have to know admissions criteria, know tuition, we are a public school in that sense. So you don't obviously, for those of us who may not be familiar with it, what is a charter school? Yeah, it's a really good question. So for what it's worth, there's a Think Tech episode on me speaking about what a charter school is. Okay. For what it's worth. But basically a charter school is a public school of choice is the way I like to think about it. So students have to still take the standardized tests and are ultimately driven by common course standards. We accept all students, there's no admissions criteria, in those ways it's a public school. A charter school means that you have the freedom and flexibility to choose the curriculum. So even though we're still driven by common core standards and our students still take the state tests, everything that happens in the middle is really up to us. So that's why parents might choose our school because they like, for example, our schedule, how we spend our time in our day, or our project-based approach, or our community-based approach. You can really have a focus in your school and ours is examining essential questions of sustainability. It's a big picture. Examining essential questions of sustainability. So those are three big words that have variable meanings, especially in an environment now where even the EPA is, you know, gutting sort of science-based understanding. And so how does that factor into what you all do? Do you teach science by, or do you teach sustainability? How do you approach what is sustainability and what's essential? I'm going to say what, like, teaching is kind of, people have an impression of teaching as adults or people sharing content, saying like, I have this content, let me give this content to you. And then instead, our approach is investigations and examination. So it's content, content, content. Let's look at it. Let's evaluate multiple perspectives. Let's think about how these things are all systemically, like, interact with each other and we really want to give students exposure to a whole wide range of experiences and perspectives and let them try and understand how it all works together. Of course, we try and guide them, but we're not a school where we're brainwashing or trying to put a particular, like, way of thinking in students. We're really trying to help them examine things that are so essential questions or things that really matter, you know? What are the things that really matter? There is actually, it is an educational term also, essential questions. Okay. And that means it can be approached through lots of different lenses. You can approach it through lots of different subject areas. You can examine it again and again and get different answers every time. So these are things that define an essential question and sort of edge you speak and that's how we approach it too. So some examples of essential questions of sustainability. One right now is how can we learn from our past to better prepare for our future? Very simply, how do we care for our au plois? And then the third one that our students are examining right now is what does it take to feed our community? So you can see how, like, robust these are and you can approach them from lots of different ways. Yeah. I can see a sixth grader looking at how do we feed our community. So you're looking at all kinds of things from growing our own food to importing food to what happens if there's a hurricane that wipes out the porch. And helping them understand how all these things are so related to each other and how we have these dependencies and how we need to sort of build our own understanding of how food systems work. Our students have grown an amazing amount of food on our campus this year and their goal at their project that they're all working towards at the end of the year in this group is to put on a dinner for 200 people where they have produced all of the food themselves. As far as to create a field from what used to be a dirt parking lot and like enrich the soil, grow corn and beans and squash and that corn has now been harvested and dried and turned into cornmeal that they're turning into tortillas. It blows my mind. That's awesome. It's really amazing. I believe the student you know is actually in that group. Okay. So and these these students then do you find it's the students actually say, you know, I really am not excited about going to school and then they go to their parents and say, is there something else or is it the parents or choosing our school? Yeah. How do they find out about it? Word of mouth is typically how students find out about it and parents I would say I would I think more than half of the students are going to our school because their parents want to go to school but ultimately it's parents that are you know it's age appropriate that parents of 10 and 11 year olds which is when you know this decision is being made about middle school it's age appropriate that parents are looking for schools of choice for their kids at that point and parents have a sense of what they want for their for their kid. People choose our school for all kinds of reasons. Some people choose it because it's a smaller school. You know most middle schools are on the order of four to eight hundred students and our school has a hundred and eighty students. We don't necessarily have small classes but we have small school so that makes for a nice community feel. Some people choose it because of the sustainability. Some people choose it because it's project based. Some people choose it because it's convenient. We're in Kaimuki. We're on the campus of Kaimuki High School. Yeah we share. We share with Kaimuki High School. Yeah. What is their enrollment just by comparison? I think there are about seven, a little over seven hundred this year, between seven hundred and seven fifty. It's a big campus though. There's room for all of us. It is a big campus. It's a huge campus. And so obviously yours is a middle school right now and what are the plans for the future or are you happy just to say at a middle school? Our vision is to grow into a sixth or twelfth grade school but it's all a matter of facilities, dependency and so what's topic for another time. Okay. And so you said a hundred and eighty students. So you've got about, is it equally divided between the grades? Yeah. Seventh and eighth, about sixty students per grade level. That's our model. Yeah. So how does one go about starting a charter school? Can I start a charter school that wants to focus on painting and drawing? You could try. Okay. Yeah. I mean it's an incredibly rigorous application process through the Hawaii State Public Charter Commission and they have an application cycle that opens up every year. It's about a, I think the application cycle is about six months and then you get approved or not approved. It's pretty hard to get approved. Pretty hard to get approved. Oh yeah. How long did it take you from conception to actually opening your doors for students? Less time than it should have. Ultimately they have actually changed the process in the time since we did it. For us it was we were approved in December and we opened our doors in August of the following year. Which is Greece lightning speed or anything? It was crazy, crazy quick, but they've changed the process since then to not an 18 month window between when you're approved and when you open. And we didn't have to do it that fast. We wanted to do it that fast. We had the idea. We were ready to do it. We were able to pull all the pieces together including facilities is the biggest challenge. Yeah. Facilities because charter schools are not provided a facility unless they're a conversion charter. But most charter schools are a startup which means they originate with an idea and that idea gets approved. And then they have to go find the facility. And so do you end up paying like rent to come to this door? We did. We paid rent for the first four years of our school. And now that we're coexisting, we're in an MOU relationship with the DOE right now for our small part of the Kamaki High School campus. So your funding is primarily through? Our funding is directly through per pupil. So we get funding directly from the state of Hawaii. Well, from the state of Hawaii to the public charter school commission. And then they give it to each of the charter schools based on their enrollment. And so we have to tell them our enrollment predictions in advance. We get around 7,300 per student to run our school. We pay for our curriculum, all of our teachers, our facility and all the things that it takes to run a school, all the operations. Wow. Yeah. It's a lot. It's not quite enough. Facilities makes a really big difference because if you end up spending a lot of money on rent, then that makes a really big dent in your overall school budget. And then things like school lunch and that kind of thing. And then do you use the same facilities for lunch and things like that at the Kamaki High School? Right now we do. Yeah. That's one of the really advantageous things about this partnership is that we were able to access some things that we hadn't previously been able to access, including a school lunch program, including athletic facilities that just fields. We're just able to play on the fields, which we'd like to play. Absolutely. And how many teachers do you have at the school now? We have about 15 full-time teachers from two English, two math, two science, two social studies, three arts, three arts teachers, arts and electives teachers, and then three special educators. Okay. So you do have special educators? Absolutely. Yes. And that's part of what it means to be a public school. So we accept all students. Our specific model for special education is full inclusion. So it's students whose IEPs, this is really technical speak here, but whose IEPs can be met in the general education environment with support. IEP is an individualized education plan. Okay. And you mentioned the Common Core. I think that probably people my age, they don't know what the Common Core is. What is the Common Core? Common Core is a set of standards that describe what students should know and be able to do. It's as simple as that, although it kind of gets a little bit of a reputation as though there's a curriculum to go with it or something like that. But ultimately Common Core is a set of standards that a lot of states, I think 35 or 40 states have adopted that say in English and these grades, your goals should be that students should be able to, for example, make a claim and support it with evidence. And math, it's that they should be able to make a quantitative claim and support it with quantitative evidence. Those kinds of standards. Does it mean that students should be able to figure out, for example, Algebra or Geometry by a set of certain grades? Yes. Yeah. Those are included in there. And is that what we hear about taking the test or teaching to the test? And we hear that thrown around. Yeah, you do. And so the test and the standards are not the same thing. The test is ideally the test tests on the standards. It doesn't always. But, you know, you can get some information about how the tests work and, you know, if they're multiple choice. The tests have changed a lot over the last five years. I don't want to say I'm an advocate for testing for a lots of testing. I'm not. It's just part of our reality. And we think of it as our students doing well in our standardized test is one measure of many measures of our students. It's not the ultimate one. Ultimately, our measure is we're trying to create students who are stewards of planet Earth and healthy, effective citizens of the world. Sounds very lofty goal. It does sound lofty goal, but it's what we need. It is exactly what we need. So you say that again, that you will create, your goal is to create. Our students are stewards of planet Earth. Stewards of planet Earth. And healthy, effective citizens of the world. Yes. And I think really an important part of that, healthy is happy. Especially in the middle school years. Healthiness, like being healthy involves also being happy. At least not hating school. Thinking that school is some place that you want to go on a daily basis, because you're getting something from it, and your life that you're living right now is worth something, not just preparation for your long-term future. What an amazing environment these kids get to be in and learn in. And just a totally different way of looking at education and learning. Because it's really about putting the emphasis on the learner. Yes. And letting her or him decide the best way to learn and working inside of the IEP for that. And do you teach some of the courses yourself, or are you just busy administering? I wish. And how old is the school at this point? The school is in its fifth year. This is its fifth year right now. We're finishing. 2017, 2018, school year is our fifth year. We opened in 2013. Okay. Well, we're going to take a very quick break, but I am talking today with Buffy Cushman-Pates, who is the school leader of CEEX, the school for examining essential questions of sustainability. And we are on Think Tech Live Network Streaming Series. We'll be back in just a moment. So come sit with the cool kids. At Out of the Comfort Zone on Tuesdays at 1. See you there. Hi. My name is Bill Sharp, host of Asian Review, coming to you from Honolulu, Hawaii right here in the center of the Pacific Ocean. Asian Review is the oldest of the 35 or so shows broadcast by Think Tech Hawaii. We've been in production since 2009. Our goal is to provide you, the viewer, with information, breaking information about events in Asia, Asia being anything, from Hawaii west to Pakistan, from the Russian Far East, south to Australia and New Zealand. We hope to see you every Monday afternoon at 5 p.m. But did you have a baby? We're back and we're live. I'm Winston Welch and we are live. This is out and about on Think Tech Live Streaming Network Series talking with Buffy Cushman-Pates, the school leader of CEEX, the school for examining essential questions of sustainability. So we have a very interesting charter school here that you started five years ago. You got 180 kids. It's grade six through eight. Right. You got about 15 teachers and have a very interesting approach to learning. You receive money from me, from the taxpayers, right? Yes, that's right. And it sounds like just not enough to really do what you need to do, but you make do with what you've got. And do you have other additional sources of funding? You have fundraisers. We do fundraising, yes. We do fundraising. We do grant writing. And those things help a lot, especially in terms of sort of visioning for the future or building a new project and new programs and systems. When you were looking at developing this school, what were your models? Is there some curriculum on the mainland or maybe in Finland or somewhere else? Yeah, there's good stuff happening all over the place, for sure. I did a year where I was something called an Einstein fellow. I got a really, in Washington, D.C., got exposure to a lot of different best practices in teaching, good teachers, and then national programs that were happening, also school programs in the D.C. area. The following year I spent a year in graduate school, Harvard Graduate School of Education. Again, lots of exposure visiting schools and kind of seeing who's doing what and just picked the pieces I loved and tried to put them all together into one school model. How long ago did you have this vision of starting a school like this? I mean, it's hard to know when a dream begins. I think I've been thinking about starting a school for 10 or 12 years, but I didn't really have the confidence or feel like I had the collection of pieces I needed, which is why I went to that school leadership program to try and make sure they had as much as I possibly could. You could never know everything, by all means. And what was your background right before you started the school? I was a teacher. Yes. This all was born from my passion for teaching, my passion for helping kids learn and be a part of the world in meaningful ways. It sounds like the school has that. So we have a sample of the weekly schedule that a student might look at here. So tell us what we're looking at here. What is this schedule? Sure. I'll talk you through it. So first, our teachers come a little earlier than our students, but you'll notice our student school day doesn't start till 8.30, which is a little later than most because we know a lot about teenage sleep patterns. Research tells us that teenagers don't wake up until later in the day. Yes. So we actually made this based on the idea of our school being both a middle and a high school someday. And we start with physical activity. So for the younger ones, it gives them a chance to sort of get their oogies out when they need to run around first thing in the day. And the older students, it allows them to wake up. We start with physical activity. We have advisory groups, which is small groups of students and teachers who really have just like a family approach every day. They greet each other. They do a sharing. And then they play together. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, their physical activity is something that's consistent for the quarter. They might choose to do yoga or gardening or soccer or ultimate frisbee. And those are physical activities where we have community volunteers come in and help lead those so that our teachers can co-participate with our students and everyone gets to be a learner together during that time. That's awesome. So you've got the students and the teachers taking yoga class together. Oh yeah. Yoga is popular. This year, we've had to have two yoga courses per... Tuesday, Thursday period. Or Tuesday, Thursday period. Yeah. Gardening is there's also a stream cleanup one happening this quarter. So the physical activity options change by the quarter and by who we have access to in terms of community volunteers. We have a lot of parents that come in and help. So I was going to ask you about volunteers. Yeah. So let's throw that in there right now. Sure. So you've got probably normal parents coming in to help with their kids. But you might have some yoga teachers or maybe something else, some gardeners coming in. Yes. And we have both of those things happening right now. But yeah, those are welcome. We also, you know, we have slacklining as an option this year. I don't even know what that is. Like imagine a low balancing thing. I think it's only a foot off the ground. It's not very high, but it's surprisingly difficult. Oh, yeah. Slacklining. Yes. So you've got your approach, I can just see to physical education is very different rather than everybody has to go out and pretend to catch the baseball or whatever that does not suit them. And so we don't, we even don't call it physical education. We call it physical activity. The purpose of it is just to wake your brain up. Open doors, doing physical things, engaging different parts of your brain. That's the purpose of it is to engage your brain differently because then you've got blood flowing through your brain that really there's research that tells us about this. There is a running group. You know, there's the opportunity there's football, there's things for the different kinds of students and they get to choose. That's so great. So and, you know, when you're talking about questions sustainability, you've got, you've got a river that flows right into your brain when you're picking up trash and, Debrea, you're learning a lesson like, how does this stuff get in here? I'm sure they take it right back to the classroom. Speaking of that, how aware are your kids of stuff that's going on in the news? Are they? A lot. They're very, well, I think so, but can I, can I finish telling you about our schedule because I only got so far and it kind of helps answer your questions. Okay, so we did, we did some physical activity. We start with physical activity. We start with things that students are learning in other schools. They have every student as a math class, an English class, a social studies, a science. All of our students also have an arts class and all of our students have an elective option. So electives might range from language lab to, I think we call it school tools, you know, more like a study hall to attitude of gratitude is one of our classes where students, it's a visual arts approach. It's a hands on visual arts approach where they're trying to make things that express gratitude. Anyway, electives are cool. Arts classes are cool. We're both performing arts and visual arts. But our more standard traditional subjects, English, math, science, social studies, those are also really quite rigorous based on common core standards again. And our teachers are really passionate about those subjects. That's what I look for first and foremost in hiring teachers. People that are really passionate about their subject. You asked me what I did before. I was a, middle school math and high school science teacher and there is honestly not much I like more in the world better than helping students learn math, especially middle school students. And I really think that math is incredibly useful and powerful and I want to hire other people that feel that way about their subjects. Okay. So take a math class. How might you, how might the Sikh school approach differently then? We do investigations. So math classes are not about drill and kill and math classes aren't about like, here's how you, to divide fractions you flip it and multiply and you don't just, you know, memorize an algorithm and do it 27 times in a row. In our class, we try and, in our classes, we do investigations to help students understand why you do something. And so they build their own understanding usually through manipulatives and through sorting things out. Lots of group work, lots of projects and then in a way kind of develop the algorithms themselves, test it and then they practice it. And so it's really understanding of the reasons behind the math based on a real-world context. So it's not, you know, back when we did math, it was, here's how you do it, here's a bunch of easy problems that get harder, and then here's some word problems, right? We approach it starting with the word problem, you might say, whereas here's the real-world application. Let's use this to help us understand why and how and then practice that. Would you say that when the kids are in a math class, for example, and we check it out and take it home and like you said, we start with easy things. I always said, see Dick and Jane, see spots, see Dick and Jane run and then suddenly you're reading like theses in your graduate school and you think, we were tricked at the beginning, but if you learn from the beginning, this is how you're going to use it. It's very useful. Do the kids learn from each other more? Do they learn from the teacher more? Do they learn from themselves more? Or is it just about all of the above on, you know, so for in math, for example, the teacher is a content expert and sometimes you just need to say, how do I do this? Help me with that. Well, in our EQS block, which we haven't gotten to really, but the end of the day project based block, that is everyone co-learning. Nobody knows all the stuff there is to know about sustainability. So they're learning from each other as much as they are from anyone else. Tell us about the EQS blocks because you've got four of them in a week. That's right. Four of the five are examining essential questions of sustainability. So the end of the day students, 60 students, five teachers all working together to examine an essential question of sustainability. I gave you some examples at the beginning of the program, but they examine for a whole year in the beginning it's students kind of getting exposure to the various content disciplines and how you might apply those things in a project so there's like a mini math project, second phase we call it, so the rest of first semester teachers have designed a project related to the essential question of sustainability that all the students work through together and in that project they incorporate English, math, science, history and arts because they have all those teacher content experts working together to help design it and then in third and second semester phase three we call it which is what our students are now they've already done a project they've learned a lot of content related to the essential question of sustainability so now our students are designing their own projects so for example one of the how do we care for Ahupua'a what they did for their project that the teachers led them through is that all of the students work together to create a coffee table book based on the humans of New York so they interviewed lots of people wait this is actually how do we learn from the past every student did a humans of New York style interview with someone in our Kaimuki area and then they presented those at our exhibitions of learning so all EQS's end with exhibitions of learning and now students are building off of what they learned from all of those interviews and all those community members and they're designing their own projects it sounds like a really interesting way for students to become engaged interested with a lot of support from other like-minded students really supportive learning environment for teachers in a real world environment where they can come out and bring in whatever's outside in and sounds like just a fantastic learning environment where do we go to find more information on this Seeks.org you can learn a lot about us at Seeks.org SEQS.org we do have our students have public exhibitions at the end of each semester so that's a great idea and when would that be I believe coming up on May 7th May 7th okay so it'll be on our website Seeks.org SEQS so well as always we this goes by so fast we couldn't cover nearly enough of what I wanted to talk about as always but I really appreciate you coming down at least giving us a basic idea of what Seeks is and so people can go out to Seeks.org to find out some more information about the school we are out of time and have to wrap it up I am Winston Welton this is out and about on Think Tech Live streaming network series and it has been our delight to talk with Buffy Cushman-Pates school leader of Seeks the school for examining essential questions of sustainability found at SeeksSEQS.org thank you for tuning in we welcome your feedback thanks to our broadcast engineer Ian Davidson our technical producer Ray Sangelang our floor manager Robert McLean and our intern floor manager Brianna Vives and to Jay Fidel our executive producer who puts it all together I'll see you here every other Monday at 3pm for more on Out and About Think Tech Hawaii Aloha everyone