 My name is Michael Morris. I'm the superintendent of schools for the Amherst Public Schools. And welcome to the next episode of Window Into Arps. Today I am thrilled to be welcoming the administrative team from Wildwood, Principal Nick Yaffe, and assistant principal Allison Estes. Thank you so much for joining. Thank you. It's great to be here. Thank you. And I know one of the things that our viewers always like to hear about is how are things happening at the school level. And what does that look like for students? What does that look like for staff? And what are some exciting new things that people may not be aware of? And, you know, many times our viewers are both families and students sometimes in the community, but often families have had children in the schools many years ago, and it's really helpful for them to be able to reconnect with the school their children went to and they might have been a part of. So really appreciate you both coming. And before we talk about Wildwood today, I'd love to hear a little bit more about yourselves. I know you both pretty well, but especially for the viewers. I'd love for you to tell the viewers a bit about yourself and what motivated you to become an educator, both of your incredibly talented intelligent individuals, and many careers you could have taken. And I'm interested how you got to be working with young people and bettering their future. So, Nick, would you mind if I start with you? Okay, so a long time ago, back when I was a youth in the Cambridge, Massachusetts area, I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do with my life, like many people at the time. And someone asked me to actually do a shift in what was a parent co-op, a daycare. And I was 20, and I said, sure, that sounds good. I'll try to do that for you. And I just remember this feeling of like joy that I got from that experience of just being around children, just I felt like I could express so many different parts of myself and also make a difference. And from there, it just gradually led to wanting to learn more about it. I figured, okay, I'm volunteering, then I start to substitute. And I thought, this is really fascinating, the world of children. So I've been doing that ever since. That's great. And what brought you, before we go to Allison, what brought you to Amherst and your current position of being a principal, as opposed to working more directly in classrooms? Yeah, so sometimes in life, things just kind of happen without a real plan to it. So I came to Amherst from the daycare I went to becoming a teacher and becoming certified to be a kindergarten teacher. And so I did that at a school connected with Tufts University. And it was a lab school and so there was a connection between research and colleges. And at that time, Amherst had a lab school as well connected to UMass called Marks Meadow. And so we moved out here specifically so I could work there. And also my wife and I really were looking for a place to raise our family that had diversity in it. And Amherst had that. We wanted our kids to grow up where they could start to understand differences by going to school with kids that were different from them. Fantastic. Thank you very much. Allison. Well, there's so many different moments of when you want to come into education. I had a desire to be a teacher for a very long time, but my mother was a businesswoman and she made it very clear that that's what you should be first. So I was actually a programmer for a while. But then I was feeling like it was a very hollow space for me and then I was placed on a project in the Atlanta City Public Schools, helping them get systems installed. And I just loved walking into every single school. I loved the smell. I think it was peanut butter and paste or something. And I just thought it was a great environment to be around people who cared about the future so deeply. And so I was sitting there watching 60 Minutes One Day and Marva Collins, who's an educator in Chicago, was being interviewed. And she was so dynamic and so inspirational. And I said, you know, I can't spend 20 years doing something that I just don't believe in. I have to go into education now. So that's how I started into that space. And I went to school at night and got my degree. So that was a second career, matter speaking. But I didn't spend very long as a consultant. It was only a year or two. But it's been a good space to be in just because you are helping communities in a space from being proactive. And that's what I really believe in. With so many other professions, people are in a state of desperation when they need to find a lawyer or a doctor. But in schools, they're really operating from the space of hope and belief in the future. And I really want to be a part of that and to hopefully be a part of the solution. That's beautiful. Thank you both. And so now you're both in educational leadership roles. I know you've both had long teaching careers before you entered being a leader. And so I'd love to hear a little more about what motivated you or interested you. Nick, you started touching on it a bit earlier, talking about Mark's Meadow. What motivated you to change roles, staying within education and all the things for all the reasons that you both indicated. But the role of a leader is both exciting and challenging and probably has moments that are very different than that that you have as a teacher. I can think of my teaching days and remember quite differently. The flow of the day was quite different even if the goal of the day was the same. So I'd love to hear a little bit and maybe you can stay with Allison on this one. What motivated you to enter into a leadership capacity? Well, I had initially started out with doing a lot of computer and data stuff for teachers because that's something that I can do. And so helping people interpret statistics and then also how do you just get your computer working in the morning. So I started volunteering and then becoming the teacher leader of assessment for the school system I was in. And I really enjoy seeing the systems that are connecting different grade levels. I find that really fascinating how to create a system that works well. And so I decided to get my administrator's license in New Hampshire and look for opportunities that will allow me to be able to operate for more of a systems capacity, not just in the classroom setting. So this is the first opportunity I've had to officially do that even though I've had different opportunities as teacher leader positions in the past. So it's exciting to be on that side of things. Good. Thank you. And one of the things that you did, Allison, that really struck a chord with me. When she knew that there was this opening for leadership at Wildwood Allison, one of the first things you said was how can I serve the community? And that, I think, to me really struck a chord as one of the essence. The essential points of leadership is that if you're coming from a place where you're going to serve this community, this incredible beautiful community like Wildwood or like any of our schools, then the leadership will happen in a wonderful way. People will see that you're there to serve whether it's the parents or the teachers or the kids. That's why you're doing it. And so as soon as you said that, I said, oh, this is the right, I thought to myself, this is the right person for this type of work. Because, you know, leadership, I do feel like we have this almost like a sacred responsibility to our communities. So as you said, it's like hope. There's something special that I find about the elementary school that I think you're touching on in that for all of us, it's this confluence of like hope for, you know, every parent who's sending off their kindergarten up to sixth grade. They hope the best, you know. And then the teacher is, if we can, one of the things that I found in terms of shifting the leadership like you were talking about, is like to keep people inspired. Like every, we all know, because we went into teaching, you went into teaching, you're coming for this place of wanting to make the world a better place, you know. And so if you touch on that inspiration with our staff, then things really start to take off. I had this interesting experience over the last few weeks and what both of you were mentioning resonated is I've had the opportunity to be in a number of different preschools and daycare settings and meet families as they're entering the district in the next one to two years. And then come back to the middle school where we had a number of seventh graders recently show up and to think about the difference in the juxtaposition of where students are at age four and five when they're entering our schools to when they leave elementary level usually at 12 or 13. It's so foundational and it is inspirational because what families are wanting their students to experience over those seven years, it evolves over time. But just that hope and that language that you're both using, I definitely continue to hear as I talk to more preschool families and what they're looking for in an elementary school experience. So now getting more specific on Wildwood, what are some neat, exciting things happen? There's always neat exciting things happening at Wildwood but for many of our viewing audience they may not either have children or be connected to the school. So I'd love it if you could share some things happening at Wildwood that you'd want the larger community to know about. And either of you could start. Well I know I'm really excited about our open house coming up. It's going to be a student-led open house experience which is the first time we've done that. And I think that the opportunity to let children say these are the areas of my school that I'm proud of and these are the things that I want to share with you. I think that's a really exciting opportunity. I personally as a parent have never been in a student-led open house experience. And I think that opportunity to see my child with my me in that space with their teacher all in that space so quickly in the beginning of the school year I think it's going to be a powerful moment and one of pride because there's so much to be proud of in what you see happening in the school every day and you see the children happy to be there. And that's the part that sometimes doesn't get carried through in translation when kids come home. You don't always get the same things happening so I think creating that integrated moment is really important. So I'm excited about that. Yeah and me too. I think there's going to be a lot of excitement in the building on that night and it ties into what all the IMRS elementary schools have been looking at. I would say over the last six, seven years it's really this idea that so how do we engage students? How do they participate fully in their learning and we've come across this philosophy of where they're taking ownership for their own learning. So this is a natural extension of that. So where our students, I think if you walk into Wildwood you get the sense that their voices are there. You know they're heard, they're comfortable speaking to people. So if you go up and you say well what are you learning they can explain that to you and explain their thinking around that. So in this case they're going to be doing it with their parents and so we're very excited to have them have that opportunity. And so piggybacking off that what are some of the major goals that you both have for the school this year? What are things that other than the open house that you're actively working on and perhaps spending faculty meeting time or when you connect with the parent guardian organization. What are the types of things that are the work of the year in addition to the primary work of educating students? 180 days a year. Yeah well as you've talked about this school committee and we've talked about is that it feels like Wildwood and all the elementary schools are poised to embark on this process of what's our vision for our school and embrace that. So that's really going to be a year long discussion, activity with our staff, with our families and with our children. So what is the Wildwood identity? What are our values? How do we express that? What are the things that all of us agree as teachers, as faculty to commit to? So we have areas that we've been exploring like student ownership. So some of the exciting aspects of that have been going into what we call project based learning. And so at every grade level they have developed a project that allows children to look at something in depth. So the idea that they go deeper into their own thinking and then they express that to an audience, an authentic audience. So we're looking forward to doing more of that work. Yeah the student-led inquiry aspects are deepening the project-based curriculum into really helping a student investigate their point of entry into the curriculum. I think student-led inquiry is a really exciting space. As a teacher, you don't know where it will lead. So it's a little funny feeling when you create a lesson or an experience in which you're not sure where a student is going to go with it. Because there's about 20 little minds in there and they're going to go into these little fissures and ideas that will really take you into another space because you hadn't thought about it. And so much of lesson planning is trying to predict the outcome. This is your finished product. This is what's going to look like. And I think student-led inquiry is really trying to burst that open a bit so that it's still high quality. It's still an expression of expertise, of proficiency. But it's not as predictable what that outcome will look like. So I find student-led inquiry really inspiring and that's something that I know we're in like the second or third year. Because I know last year we worked on it and we're doing it more this year and this is my second year at this point. I'm sure that they started a little bit before then too but it just seems to be an opportunity to even go deeper in richer. Yeah and I think the other part that you're touching on is that I see it also as a thread that connects all the subjects. So if kids learn to ask good questions and then to investigate, that can happen in math. So in math we want our children to ask good questions. And then when you walk into a class where they're discussing a book that they're reading you want them to ask questions about the author's intent and similarly in social studies or around social justice issues or science. So inquiry is a part of everything that we're doing and so if you're teaching them how to ask good questions how to then weigh the evidence that they see and pull from that and then to express themselves it's going to connect the whole curriculum. That may be good advice for not just children but many of us at the end of the moment so I appreciate that focus. I know that parent guardians are a huge part of what make Wildwood a Wildwood and I wondered if you could share a little bit about how families do connect with the school regularly and also some of the work of the PGO and how that contributes to what Wildwood offers its students. Do you want me to go on this one? Yes, sure. Do you want to go? Yeah, whichever. Well similarly we want parents to be our active participants. We see partnerships as so important just like the foundation of our school. I guess one of the things that I would say is that just building that trust with families and that they can speak up and they can advocate on behalf of their children and what I see us doing is then we come together and then we try to solve the problem. Whatever is going on, whatever the concern is so that's the number one thing I would start with is with trust. I really admired how the PGO, I remember I was at parent pickup or one of the events that we were hosting and a parent came to me and said how important it was to try to create the most diverse PGO possible and how can we reach greater members of our community and I know that that's a goal in so many parent guardian organizations but in my experience it's usually the teachers who are trying to put that forward but this person was saying this is something we're really working on so yet again I'm just amazed at what a wonderful community Hammers is and I'm so happy to serve it but so that effort and then the student government council the SGC wanting to figure out well how can we use the student led open house to understand who's coming and if this effort is creating more access for different communities to the school and how are they responding to that experience and how can we measure that and see how that information can feed back to the PGO so that whole process of trying to use these entry points of bringing families together and making sure that they're represented in the different organizations in the school is just vital to us being a thriving and growing space so I was really excited to see all of those connections developing in just the first month so I'm excited about that too Yeah, the one thing I want to throw out there for you both is that I found like one of the strengths of Wildwood and there are many is how much students and families are honored and celebrated around the school so I think of the first day of school where the UMass band is there and families are there and kids are being welcomed I think of the map that you have at the front of the school where students are able to put their identity up and I didn't know, I guess the question is is that intentional or is that sort of how things have developed but it is notable, you know and not just in Amherst but in the last couple of months I visited schools in a number of other districts and I've often shared some of the examples I've seen at Wildwood with other schools because I find it so powerful and poignant the kind of celebratory routines and rituals that surround Wildwood and start of the year at the end of the year and I didn't know if either of you could talk a bit about how you experienced that I don't know I'll start and then Alice can also talk a little bit of how she experienced it as a parent and then as a new teacher coming in so I think you've hit on something so I know we're going to go through this whole envisioning process but when we started talking about it as a staff someone just started to speak up about welcoming and so to me welcoming is really the foundation of Wildwood also the two W's go together Wildwood welcomes so that as soon as you come in that you are welcomed whether you're a parent, child or a staff member and that people see you and welcome you and that you see yourself and so that you're walking around Wildwood and you see something about that you can connect to as a family or a child and so the map does that the photos right by the front door that says love makes a family that we take and so you can see families whether you see your own family or families like you and then you greet it and that you have full value so that it is intentional I would say when we first started to do some of this work nine years ago at Wildwood we read an article that we still come back to as well as good seeds grow in strong cultures and so this idea of how you build up the culture of the school is something that we think about all the time and Allison well I had decided to move to this area before I found a job so that was an adventure in and of itself but I really wanted to find an area that was more diverse for my child to grow up in and we've been living in New Hampshire to be in a space that represented that experience for him and also myself I was ready for that as well so I'm looking and I saw Wildwood and I thought well let me go visit and I brought him down on his February vacation and school was in session here because New Hampshire has a staggered one and we walked through the front doors and immediately you see that map and we both were like oh that's so cool and so that's just such a nice thing to feel welcomed in that space because that is not something that's typical and then you walk through the front door and the secretary Joyce Gooden is welcoming you with this like she doesn't even know me but she makes me feel like I'm family immediately and says oh let me show you to the school and I'm sitting there walking through with her and she's bragging about the spaces and I'm noticing the posters the purposeful effort to make sure that different groups are represented in all these different spaces and that's not something that you see everywhere and every smiling people which is I actually think that's really important in school environments when people are smiling but it was clear to me that the effort to make sure that the culture and the families are represented in some way to the literature that was being displayed the efforts on the billiton boards to make sure that they had a diverse representation for the read aloud moments that they bring in readers from the community I mean these are all moments where you have an opportunity to increase diversity increase representation or you can ignore it and it was clear to me just in that one one hour tour that really was working hard to represent its community and I wanted to be a part of it at that time no one knew I was a teacher so when I saw that there was an opening that's when I took the opportunity because I learned a long time ago that when you are dedicated and you work hard that there's any number of school systems that will take advantage of that but you need to be a part of the system that will feed you as well and so I wanted to be a part of a space that I knew I could serve but also I could grow and that's what I needed to be the next part of me on my journey so I was very thankful for that opportunity as are we that you chose us I think the other part of that that you saw was that the staff are embracing this vision of welcoming and so you just feel like you have this whole army of new people out there or we're bringing in new people and helping them get settled and the children too so every year we welcome between 40 and 60 new students and grades one through six so the kids themselves oh do I have any new kids in my class and they'll give them tours and the other part that I was even more excited about they're actually starting to embrace this idea and they coined that phrase the current sixth graders when they were in third or fourth grade they came up to me and said they had these posters and they were be who you are and they started putting them all over around Wildwood and they did these skits at the assembly and that was just like oh okay this is when it can really happen if it's if the vision is embraced by everybody it was like they created a social norms campaign yes they did they did yes they did and there's always work to be done we all make mistakes and learn from them absolutely if viewers are interested in getting in touch with you what's the best way they have an idea they want to follow up with you what's the best way for them to be in touch with you email, phone what would be that and phone numbers are always accessible that way I mean in terms of frequency I check my email every day this isn't a quiz no I mean so would you mind sharing your email address and the good folks at Amherst Media will put it on the bottom okay so to reach the educators at Wildwood you have SDSA that's my E-S-T-E-S-A at a-r-p-s dot o-r-g that's it I did that every day I was emailing parents last night I felt good about that they said thank you for the prompt response I said thank you it's a goal it's a goal to get there yes you can also set up time to talk too so my email is y-a-p-n-y-a-f-f like in frank e-m at a-r-p-s dot o-r-g but people can also just call number 362-1400 and set up a time to talk so anything else you'd like to share about Wildwood this year 2018 you've shared an awful lot on that question I don't know I know that I'm excited about all the different opportunities we haven't even started to do the big push for professional development among the staff that's exciting that's all coming up that's all exciting stuff you know math centers I mean it's just there's a lot of things coming it's only October 1st it's just a lot to look forward to I totally agree and I think schools are always in the process of becoming so I think that's I think I feel very, very lucky to be in my position to serve such a community where you have educators that really care and really care about us being the best that we can be so they're constantly coming up with new ideas or ways that we can get better families who care and kids yeah well thank you you both create that environment where all the stakeholder groups feel comfortable coming in to share things that we can do to best serve our community so that doesn't happen naturally when it comes to the culture that gets built from the leadership so I thank you both for being here today and thanks for sharing a bit about Wildwood with the larger community and I thank you to you, our viewers for watching the latest episode of when doing to ARPS we'll be back next month with an additional episode thank you