The Friends School of Atlanta

Bringing forward more than 329 years of excellence in Quaker Education

Goal Setting Conferences (Middle School)

Each new school year brings notebooks, backpacks, water bottles, and, at FSA, goal setting conferences. For two days in September, parents and caretakers are welcomed into classrooms to meet with their student’s advisor, who is also their homeroom teacher. These conferences involve parents in relationship-building and goal-setting that takes place during the initial weeks of school.

Middle school students and teachers begin the year with activities that build positive connections in their classroom communities. During extra homeroom sessions and in academic classes, students are invited to consider their “hopes and dreams” for the upcoming year and to write them down. They’re asked to reflect on the “more” they’d like to explore and develop as their own. After students spend time opening themselves up to the possibilities, they are given time and support to set specific, actionable, and realistic goals that will help them stretch into their potential.

When an advisor conferences with a student’s parent(s)/caregiver(s), they bring their knowledge of the hopes, dreams, and goals the student has articulated. Advisors also bring their developing sense of the student during different types of activity and different parts of the school day. They strive to discover and affirm how a student’s goodness manifests in daily actions and interactions. Mindful of the whole student, advisors draft goals for each advisee’s academic, social, and emotional growth, along with questions to ask a student’s parent(s).

During conferences, parents add their hopes and dreams for the school year, along with any questions, concerns, or information they wish to add. This information sharing leads to the development of a few significant goals tailored to the particular student’s strengths, growth areas, and learning style. Action and resource plans are discussed as needed to ensure appropriate scaffolding and support. Parents and teachers then follow-up to discuss these goals with their students and to develop routines and strategies for consistent practice and incremental progress. A key part of follow-up is eliciting and listening to student input.

A strong home-school partnership sustains and enriches student learning and personal growth. The “whole” child is truly expansive and complex. The purpose of goal setting is to support students in stretching as they claim more of their potential, more knowledge, more strategies, more resilience, more skills, more kindness, more connection, more justice, and more joy. Conferences provide an early and important opportunity for the important adults in a student’s life to share information, listen carefully to each other, and begin a dialogue that will evolve over the course of the school year and often beyond.

Uncovering the Tools for Success

Laura James, Head of Middle School, revels in the thick of
it. During her 30-plus years in education she’s felt most at home working
directly with students, always asking, “What do children need to succeed?”  That simple question pretty much sums up her
life’s work as an educator and an administrator.

In 2014 Waman French, Head of School at The Friends School of Atlanta (FSA), asked if she could step in to support the school’s growing middle school. In retrospect, the timing couldn’t have been better.

Before FSA Laura had spent years at The Children’s School in midtown Atlanta teaching various grades, from kindergarten through middle school. She then earned her master’s degree in curriculum design for learning differences. “I then realized something that has proven to be truer than anything else I know: Everybody learns differently. It’s not just that children with dyslexia learn differently. Everyone does.”

She moved up to become principal of the Children’s School
middle school program, then retired from that several years later and moved
into educational consulting. The career move that made sense at the time, since
her mind was set on retiring from school life. But then she got the call from
Waman.

“I had zero intention of returning to the world of school,” she recalled. “I had celebrated leaving it, in fact. But the honest truth is, I was mesmerized and captivated by the faculty at FSA. The kids are wonderful here, and the philosophy and mission are aligned with everything I know. But I watched how the teachers taught here, and I knew I wanted to be part of this.” Seeing FSA in action reminded her why she had wanted to teach in the first place: to help children be the best they can be—and not just academically, but socially and emotionally, too.

Laura helps teachers design curriculums that match the needs
of the kids they have. That’s not unique, especially among progressive
independent schools. “But this is more,” she said. “Here, it’s more about,
‘What can I do to help you do your job? What can I do to get things out of your
way, so you can just focus on the kids? What do you need? Once we know, let’s
get it. And it’s a moving target. It changes. But let’s do the best we can
today, and then let’s do it again tomorrow.’”

This has brought Laura’s lifelong specialty—what’s known in
educational circles as “differentiated instruction”—to another level. Again, everyone
learns differently, and teachers aim to give students the unique help they
need. This can include assistive technology like voice-to-text, but it also be
about pushing students as far as they can go, be it in math or science or a
second language. If a student proves he or she is ready for, say, high school
calculus, FSA gives that person the tools to go forth and learn, derivatives
and all.

It’s not just what students learn, but how. “For
instance, we teach various ways a student can study and how to prepare for a
test,” Laura said. “Some study with a person, some study alone, some are in
groups. And we find that, by the time kids reach 12 or 13, they’re picking the
best ways that work for them.

“In other words, they’ve learned what they need to be
successful.”

For the middle schooler— and, for that matter, all of us—this
may well be the most valuable lesson of all.

Children are Not Numbers

John demonstrates a favorite fourth grade project: the stomp rocket.

FSA fourth grade teacher John Grijak recalled sitting in his adviser’s office during his last year at college. John had excelled as an accounting major, and sure, the subject was interesting enough. After all, excelling at something tends to build confidence. But something didn’t feel quite right. Would he be happy?

“I remember my adviser saying, ‘Once you get into the real world, things are going to change. There’s a lot of drilling here in school, but you have so many different opportunities you could pursue. Besides, just look at your grades! They say you should be an accountant.’”

Life as an adult commenced. He landed a good accounting job, met his wife, moved to Atlanta, and had a son, after which he became a stay-at-home dad. The move made financial sense for his family, but in retrospect, it also opened his eyes to a new world of opportunity. He volunteered at his son’s preschool, coached T-ball and essentially did everything he could to spend more time with his son—but the experience turned out to be so much more.  

“I remember people asking me, ‘Why aren’t you in education?’ After a while, I started asking myself, ‘Yeah, why aren’t I in education?’’

During this time John and his wife were considering schooling options for their son. They could tell he was bright, and the last thing they wanted was for him to fall through the cracks. They wanted small class sizes and instruction tailored not for answers on a standardized test but for actual student needs, both academically and socially. They found all this and more at The Friends School of Atlanta.

Meanwhile, John pursued a graduate degree in education at Mercer University and student-taught at various public schools. The public schools weren’t bad, but besides their large class sizes, they took a prescriptive approach to teaching. The approach certainly worked for some, but it just didn’t feel right for him. Children are human beings, he thought, not numbers on a balance sheet or scores on a standardized test.

No wonder The Friends School of Atlanta felt right. When he substituted at the school, he met middle schoolers who weren’t anything like the stereotypical tween and young teenager. They engaged in class, spoke their minds and knew how to present a convincing argument. When he landed a full-time job at Friends as an elementary school teacher, he began to see why the school’s approach worked as well as it did. 

Teachers continually adapt their lessons to meet the needs of the children in their classrooms. Every class is unique, as is every student. Wouldn’t a cookie-cutter approach leave some students behind?

Besides, a cookie-cutter approach doesn’t reflect the world beyond the classroom. John certainly hasn’t lived a cookie-cutter life, and his students won’t either. Life isn’t a standardized test or a prescribed teaching plan set in stone. People change paths and adapt to do what’s best for them, their families, and their communities; Friends graduates learn to think about all three.

No Such Thing as a “Math Person”

Kenny Rochester, when he began teaching math about a decade ago, thought like many people do that some people were just “math people” and others weren’t. He considered himself a math person. Growing up in New York and Connecticut, he sat in math class after math class, and it all seemed to come relatively easily. When he was accepted to Atlanta’s Morehouse College and was asked to choose a major, he chose a subject that came easily to him. The choice was obvious. After all, he was a math person.

After eight years teaching middle school math at The Friends School of Atlanta, and after being trained on a teaching approach called “growth mindset,” Kenny has changed his view—and his students have benefited.

“There’s really no such thing as a ‘math person,’’’ Kenny says. “It’s really all about your experiences. In fact, those experiences can have a real impact in how successful you are. It’s about one’s willingness to make and learn from mistakes. Honestly, the growth mindset approach has really opened my eyes. I now know that all kids can learn math at a high level.”

Many like math because of its lack of ambiguity. Sure, undergrad and grad students discover the many subtleties of higher math, but when it comes to the foundational material—arithmetic, algebra, geometry, trigonometry and calculus—primary and middle school students have rules to follow. A math problem like x + y = 10 can have many right and wrong answers; but whether they’re right or wrong isn’t up for debate. An answer is eitherright or wrong, period; x equals 9, but only when y equals 1.

The students who grasp the concept quickly like its straightforward nature; they feel good when they find the right answer. Students who don’t get the right answer, though, can grow insecure in a hurry. They then think they’re just not a math person and, whether they’re conscious of it or not, they stop applying themselves in a positive manner.

Kenny has seen this happen many times, and to turn things around, he takes a multipronged approach. First, he knows that a teacher’s impatience is the enemy. He never praises students who get a problem right and, then immediately after, turn around and express disappointment with those who don’t. That just reinforces the “math person versus non-math person” stereotype.

He instead praises mistakes. When students make errors, it’s not a failure; they’re instead one step closer to getting it right. Kenny also doesn’t shower excessive praise on students who grasp math quickly. He asks them to explain what they did, find other ways to solve the problem and sometimes asks them to help their classmates.

Kenny also gives the class what he calls “low floor, high ceiling” problems—like, say, x + y = 10. The low floor allows all students to gain a solid footing; the high ceiling pushes those who are ready for the next level.

For instance, most middle schoolers grasp the basic concept and insert various answers to x and y that add up to 10; that’s the low floor. But Kenny doesn’t stop at integers. Introducing the high ceiling, he talks about the concept of infinity, that it’s not just about the fact that numbers go on forever, but that there are infinite numbers between two points on a number line. The x variable could be 5, but it also could be 5.879832, which would make y 4.120168. How do you express this? Kenny draws crosshairs on the board, a y vertical axis and an x horizontal axis, with zero in the middle, and graphs the answer.

The ceiling rises from there, and all of Kenny’s students continue to climb, reach higher, and embrace the mathematical concepts that have built our modern world.

A Community That Never Leaves You

Want to know what The Friends School of Atlanta is like? Ask Karen McMichael, known to her friends at FSA as Kaymac. She will be retiring as the school’s administrative assistant at the end of the 2017-2018 school year, but Kaymac’s Friends School journey started years before, when she and her husband decided to send their son, Ian, to FSA in 1998.

“Our son was at Georgia State University’s Child Development Center,” Kaymac recalled. “They recommended the Friends School for him, specifically because he wasn’t any trouble and he was [and still is] very bright. They felt he was going to fall through the cracks in the public schools. We visited FSA first, and to tell you the truth, we didn’t visit any other school.”

After Ian started attending, Kaymac volunteered her time and soon found that the culture fit her like a glove. She felt at home, so much so that when she was brought on staff full-time in 2001, the transition was virtually seamless.

She’s done a bit of everything over the years. She does website updates, performs some registrar work and helps with admissions in ways that coworkers identify as completely responsive, patient and effective in bringing calm to often stressful situations. She has taught word processing, Photoshop, jewelry making, among other subjects; and, as a teacher’s aid in reading, has experienced the joy of witnessing a child’s “aha” moment, the initial spark of understanding, of conquering a small hill, looking back with pride, and looking forward with confidence. “The squiggles on the page, the letters, now mean something to them,” she said. “It’s different with every child, but once you witness it, it’s something you never forget.”

“Kaymac’s smile and gentle nature was refreshing as well as encouraging to the children that she assisted with reading,” recalls long-time first grade teacher Celest Samas. “Her love of books has inspired generations of FSA first graders.”

The entire FSA experience is shaped by a kind of empathy that anyone associated with the school—staff, teachers, students, parents, alumni—knows very well. “Early on, working here and sending my son to school here, I learned about not judging people by my life. Consider what the other person’s life is like.” That is, she doesn’t judge someone based on her own life experiences, but instead tries to truly understand the complete context, and how the whole of a life shapes a person. It’s living the expression “knowing where the person is coming from,” but on a much deeper level.

This philosophy even lends itself to her teaching. Speaking about Kaymac’s jewelry-making middle school exploratory, 6th graders Katy and Paideia said, “Kaymac gives lots of freedom to express yourself, always makes space for laughter and responds right away when you need help.”

Living it comes through listening instead of waiting to talk. It also comes through feeling at home in silence, be it during class, silent meeting or during administrative staff meetings, where silence plays a key role. After someone expresses an opinion, everyone sits for a brief period of silence, allowing time to reflect on what was just said. That builds understanding, reinforces empathy, and buttresses FSA’s unique, enduring community.

“I’ve loved this place since the first day my son started school here, and I’ve never stopped learning. It’s such an amazing community.”

Those who have worked side by side with Kaymac in the administration, whether for decades or just a few years, are not sure how to move forward without her capable, reassuring presence. “It would be impossible to enumerate all of the ways that our beloved Kaymac has served the school community,” according to Waman French, Head of School. “Speaking personally, Kaymac has provided the ultimate support during some very difficult times as well as joyous ones.”

Likewise, Nancy Bent, Director of Advancement, shared, “Kaymac is so utterly reliable, so meticulous with detail, so unflagging in her willingness to serve however she is needed. I will dearly miss partnering with her on the work of the school.”

Kaymac may be retiring this year, but she—like all the students, staff, teachers, and alums who have passed through The Friends School’s doors—will never stop being part of the FSA community.

 

By Tim Heston

Tim Heston has written for business magazines since 1996. He’s won some awards here and there, but his greatest achievement is being the proud parent of an FSA fifth grader.