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Building Cultural Competency: Essential Skills ...
Building Cultural Competency: Essential Skills for a Complex World
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Middle Schoolers Design Clients' Dream Homes

Middle school students met with clients (many of whom were international and based in China), scheduled their own meetings, and consulted with clients to build their dream sustainable homes. Students then executed these plans by designing and building models of these dream homes - all while learning more about sustainable housing design. This project exemplifies how students learn through authentic interdisciplinary bilingual projects.

Middle Schoolers Design Clients' Dream Homes

Teachers

Celebrating the Joyful Moments in Preschool (小朋友的笑话）

Preschool is filled with a million moments of learning, bonding, and most importantly joy. Children approach the world so differently than we do as adults and the things they observe, do, and say help us see the world in a different light. As we approach the holiday season, we wanted to share just a few of the many preschool moments that brighten our days and bring smiles to our faces.

Bringing Preschool to Life

Everyone has their own story. Teachers, like most people, bring those stories – stories that grow out of our passions, our interests, our cultural background, and our personalities – into the workplace. These stories inform how we see the world and how we approach our work. Although teaching is what we do as a profession, it is not all that we are, and it’s those extra dimensions that make each classroom so special. 

Our Growing Home: PKS Preschool Over the Past Decade

In 2009, a year after PKS opened its doors, I felt so lucky to join a tiny but cozy two room preschool in the Presidio with 25-30 students.  Ten years later, a lot has changed, but watching the school (and my first students) grow and transform has been amazing. Although the school may not look the same on the outside, what makes PKS such a special place still remains: our community and sense of family. 

What Authentic Learning Looks like in the Classroom

One of the greatest joys and challenges of teaching in a progressive school is the ever evolving curriculum. Although the topics for the Units of Exploration are set, the course of study each year is driven by the ideas and questions of each year’s unique group of students; based on their interests we rethink and reshape the projects to provide meaningful, authentic learning experiences.

Thinking Outside our Classrooms: A Day of Peer Learning

One of our main goals at PKS is to foster a lifelong passion for learning and exploration, not only among our students but also among our parents, faculty, and staff. A few weeks ago, however, the pedagogical team wanted to try something innovative and engaging to provide our faculty and staff with a different type of professional development (PD) opportunity; something we call “Pinterest Live” or “Old School Pinterest.”

Our Preschool Faculty - Leaders and Learners

One of the key things that makes PKS such a special place are our teachers. They are warm, caring, and love to learn alongside their students. PKS supports our teachers and encourages them to attend conferences and seminars that will help them grow as educators. We are also proud that, even while we maintain a growth mindset and continue learning, our teachers have tremendous expertise and are well-regarded by educators from the progressive early childhood education field.


Sharing Best Practices in Immersion Education

PKS was invited to Washington, DC as part of a symposium on immersion education. Seven of our faculty members visited four schools, deepening their knowledge of best practices while sharing some of their own unique insights. Our expertise on how to integrate Mandarin immersion within a progressive framework was noted as "the only model out there combining data-based immersion practices with rigorous PBL." 

Happy (Chinese) New Year! 新年快乐！

Our community celebration welcoming the Year of the Dog was PKS's largest-ever Chinese New Year event, with almost 900 people in attendance. Organized over the course of several months by a parent-led committee chaired by Monica Savini, the event featured art, activities, food, fun, and at the center of it all, the joyous performances of each PKS class on stage in the beautifully restored venue adjacent to our campus, Saint Joseph's, where we were hosted by proprietor Ken Fulk.