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HOWLAND – School has been back in session for two months, and one of the district’s principals offered an update on how a program the school has utilized for two years has affected its culture.
The Howland Board of Education at Monday’s meeting heard from Howland High School Principal Joseph Simko, who wanted to focus on the cultural and academic aspects of school life, which he said are the “two major prongs” at the school.
Simko said the idea of building pathways has been a central theme, using bricks as a metaphor because they can be used to build either a path or a wall, and part of students’ jobs are to help build pathways and opportunities for their fellow classmates, similar to what educators do for their students.
Simko said part of the groundwork pushing that theme is the Capturing Kids’ Hearts training, a K-12 educational program and professional development process designed to improve school culture, build positive student-teacher relationships, and create self-managing classrooms.
“There’s several great things that have come from it, including (a) focus on student experience where they have social contracts in every classroom,” Simko said. “And those social contracts can be very much so be very, very different for a general education freshman class versus an AP or CCP senior class.”
Simko said that while the contract for a general or special education classroom might focus on seeking very certain behaviors, staff members focus on college-level behaviors in an AP or college class.
“The staff has been great about understanding that if you make a collaborative contract with kids about behaviors you all agree upon, sometimes, it’s not simplistic. Behaviors might be how you study as a college student,” Simko said.
Simko said students have been “awesome” about being leaders thus far, which is built into the staff support and building teacher capacity, adding that there’s a focus on a growth mindset.
“All these principles that staff’s been trained on are built into their Ohio Teacher Evaluation System teacher evaluations, and we have certain things that we’re looking for in practices that are tried and true,” Simko said. “Research-based practices that we’ve integrated into what we do, but also integrated into our observations and evaluations, as well.”
“It’s not cumbersome, it’s something that sounds so simple, but it’s made a real impact,” Simko said.
He said Capturing Kids’ Hearts builds in “common language.”
“Common language is so important — you go to a high school, you have 50 teachers, and kids go from teacher to teacher to teacher to teacher,” Simko said. “It’s important to have some common language in terms of how we talk about things.”
Simko said the school uses monthly themes that staff and students focus on, noting that September was about building community and relationships, because making kids feel wanted and included is important.
October’s theme is “responsibility” because behaviors problems start to flash as the school year progresses, and kids might struggle in certain classes.
Simko said school officials survey staff, adding that they surveyed families and students the previous year to see how the program is doing, because there’s areas where they feel they’re doing a great job and areas where they want to improve.
“For instance, one of the things is very simple — we start every meeting, or at some point during every class, you start with asking kids for good things,” Simko said. “And you start seeing other kids asking other kids what’s good going on in their life.”