To kick off the start of the new year and semester, I had the opportunity to participate on a speaker panel at the Hawaii Education Association’s annual summit held on Wednesday, January 8, 2025, 9:30 am – 130 pm at the downtown YWCA. The Hawaii Education Association (HEA) chose to focus this year’s educator summit on topics critical to the current moment: teacher recruitment and retention.

Hanahau‘oli School continues to strengthen its role as a leader in the progressive education movement by increasing its capacity as a “living laboratory,” which facilitates the “scientific” study of teaching and educational excellence. In partnership with the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, College of Education, the living laboratory at Hanahau‘oli builds on the school’s already established Professional Development School (PDS) model (Goodlad, 1984) to promote the “simultaneous renewal of schools” and the “education of educators.” This partnership creates a school culture characterized by inquiry, systemic exploration, creativity, and data-driven discovery for the purpose of learning more about ourselves, one another, our place (environment), and the art of teaching (design, instruction and assessment). The living laboratory at Hanahau‘oli helps to increase the school and university’s prominence as sought after destinations for educators, researchers, scholars, and innovators who want to collaborate on educational improvement and the creation of a better future society. 

Hawaiʻi is a truly unique and special place. Those fortunate enough to live here have a kuleana (responsibility) to care for the ʻāina (land), to support their kaiāulu (community), and to respect the host culture and Native Hawaiian people. But how does one truly learn about this special place, its culture, and its people? While signs, flyers, and public service announcements offer some insight, these touchpoints often remain superficial. To cultivate a deeper understanding and appreciation, it is essential to implement culture-based and place-based education in our schools.

This September, the Hanahau‘oli community was introduced to the school’s 2023-2024 Artist-in-Residence, Howard Wolff. The Artist-in-Residence initiative benefits the school community from the daily interactions between the artist, students, teachers, and staff, as well as from the body of work produced by the artist at the residency’s conclusion. Howard Wolff is a longtime friend of the school and parent of Ari (’03). He brings his background in architecture and his talents as a photographer to Hanahau‘oli to accomplish two of his goals: Capture joyous work in action and help all members of the school community learn how to see … with or without a camera.

On May 13, 2023 Baylee Lorenne graduated from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, College of Education, Bachelor of Education in Secondary Education (BEd-Secondary) Kahalewaihoʻonaʻauao Program. This was one of the final steps in her journey to become a certified secondary social studies teacher in the State of Hawai‘i. As a part of her culminating experiences in the program, Baylee was asked to share lessons learned from her first year of teaching with both her peers and the new group of teacher candidates who had just entered the program. The following is an excerpt from her public presentation. As a new report from the state Department of Education (2023) highlights the ongoing difficulties of addressing Hawaii's teacher shortage, this blog provides insight into the experiences of young people as they step into one of the most challenging and rewarding professions.

Administrators are always seeking the perfect faculty meeting – one in which the time needed for professional development balances with the knowledge gained by faculty members. Founded over 100 years ago, Hanahauʻoli School is continually working on new ways to strengthen our professional community of learning and stimulate faculty’s thinking about progressive teaching and learning. This past school year was no different, and it resulted in a new initiative, E Kilo Kākou. Designed to provide faculty with the opportunity to visit and thoughtfully observe every classroom and specialist space in the school, it helped us achieve our goal of having increased time to observe and learn more about each other and our programs.

Traveling more than 150,000 miles and visiting more than 20 different progressive schools, the faculty and staff at Hanahauʻoli used the 2019-2020 school year to bring back new ideas.  Inspired by the school’s 100th year anniversary in 2018, Lia Woo (‘88), the new Head of School, was hoping the visits would inspire change and growth for the future. “After studying our school’s history, mission and beliefs, I wanted the faculty to look outward and learn from other progressive schools. By engaging in collaborative, experiential learning, faculty not only practiced their teacher-researcher skills but also helped inform future strategic priorities.”

In the previous blog I shared how I honed in on the following problem of practice while teaching handwriting (or letter formation) within my early elementary classroom: The handwriting program I was providing was not very effective for teaching letter formation to the children who needed it most. I noticed this problem most when children were engaged in independent practice, using worksheets and workbooks that were intended to reinforce skills and habits that I had taught through a variety of other letter formation activities in my classroom (see Part 1 of this blog series). This was a problem I had seen before, within my first grade classroom at a different independent progressive school. However, during my semester teaching in a K-1 classroom at Hanahau‘oli School, I honed in on these specific observations:

Teaching is an incredibly complex and dynamic endeavor. Teachers must navigate a complicated web of critical relationships on a daily basis and work together to guide learners through a changing landscape that includes aspects of multiple fields of knowledge. A teacher’s work is influenced by small and large–personal and societal–shifts in the outside world that inevitably make their way into the classroom, sometimes explicitly, other times on the soles of their students’ shoes. Teaching is both an art and a messy science, one that cannot be realistically limited to a single variable.

John Goodlad is a giant in the history of the progressive education movement. He lived with strong moral convictions and had the incredible ability to turn his ideas into action. A devotee of John Dewey, Goodlad envisioned schools “where accomplished teachers could lead their peers, where students are not grouped by age, and where the ability to discuss and assess ideas matter more than test scores” (Woo, 2014). Author of the highly influential book, A Place Called School (1984), Goodlad documented the now classic eight-year study of 38 schools in 13 communities,

In Remaking Gathering: Entering the Mess, Crossing the Thresholds, author Priya Parker shares about the “art of gathering.” She explains, “gathering matters because it is through each other that we figure out what we believe.” Given the number of ways human gatherings have changed over the course of the pandemic, she contends that the current moment has the potential to transform the ways we spend our time together – at work, at home, in our communities, and beyond. She elaborates, “this time of regathering”--as many transition from online large-group community meetings to in person events-- “offers a threshold we can decide to cross with imagination, purpose, and joy.” This message resonated with me as I recently joined Hanahau‘oli School faculty in our first in-person faculty meeting since March 2020.

Founded in 1918, Hanahau‘oli School is a one-hundred-year-old testament to the American progressive education movement. Originally conceptualized by Sophie Judd Cooke and Gudrun Thorne Thompson from the Francis Parker School in Chicago, Hanahau‘oli—which means joyful work school…

Education in the post COVID-19 pandemic period has the potential to dramatically shift societies globally and create lasting positive change: increased climate consciousness, a more ethical integration of technology within the human experience, increased care for the social emotional well-being of individuals and communities, and more socially just forms of democratic governance. In the words of progressive era philosopher John Dewey (1916), “as societ[ies] become more enlightened, [they] realize that [they are] responsible not to transmit and conserve the whole of [their] existing achievements, but only such as make for a better future society. The school is its chief agency for the accomplishment of this end” (p. 20). Now is the time for educators and society at-large to reflect on what we want to take with us from pre COVID-19 life, what pandemic era innovations we want to carry forward, and what aspects of collective living no longer serve us.