Principal's Letter

Dear Innovation Lab Families,

It is so hard to believe there are only two weeks of school left!  In just ten more school days, we will have finished our first year—and what a year it has been!

The weather is continuing to look beautiful, so many of our Crews made the choice to go outside this morning and enjoy the variety of nature around our building.  Some elected to throw frisbees or balls around on the grassy area in the parking lot.  Others went for a nature walk.  Of particular interest to some was the family of ducks from the pond behind the school. As you can see, the ducks (some of which were still sporting vestiges of their chick down) were willing to come up and get within a few feet of students who were willing to sit quietly and observe.  Watching our students marvel at nature never seems to get old!

There have been several outstanding examples in the past few weeks of our students coming up with ideas to better their world by being of service to others and leveraging the skills they have learned this year to bring those ideas to reality.  Our E-Sports club held a 30-hour continuous livestream event during which they raised $2,500 for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital!  Another group spearheaded a food drive that collected 719 items for the Woodinville Storehouse Food Bank (serving Bothell, Kenmore, and Woodinville).  Amazing work, Ravens!

On the academic front: next week in their Crews, all of our students will give their year-end culminating presentations using their portfolios.  

For our 10th graders this year, we are asking them to give a 3-10 minute presentation marking the halfway point of their High School journey that covers three things:  
1) What does the work in their portfolio says about them as a learner? [Guiding question: Where have you been?]  
2) Reflect on their Assets (strengths, mindsets, networks, etc.), their Ambitions, and how they can Apply their assets to reach those ambitions. [Guiding Question:  What is your direction?]  
3) The results of a “Five Whys” protocol they’ve done to examine their potential plan and crystalize in their mind why they want to pursue that direction.  [Guiding question:  Why is this the right direction for you to pursue your long-term goals?]

For our 9th graders, we are asking them to give a 1-3 minute presentation covering the following: 
1) Present what they feel is the strongest artifact in their portfolio at this point in their High School journey and what they think that artifact says about them as a learner.  (At their option, they could include a second artifact if they really can’t decide on one.)
2) Identify one or more strengths they can build upon in the next year.  
3) Identify any areas for improvement and talk about their plan for addressing them.

While a visual aid is optional for our 9th grade students, it is mandatory for our 10th graders.  We have given each grade level a template of a very plain slide deck that includes the points above which they can customize and use to build a visual aid for their presentation.  

I strongly encourage you to ask your student to take you through their presentation this weekend.  It will give you a fantastic insight into your student and their experiences!  If your student does not have a presentation ready, this is the time to help motivate them to put theirs together. This presentation is the culminating event for Crew this semester, and any student who fails to present at all could be in danger of not passing the class.  

Let’s all pull together and make sure that our students finish the year strong!

That’s all for this week!

Peter Schurke
 

Dear Innovation Lab High School Families,

This has been a very, very good week!

We finally got to welcome students to our building! Superintendent Reid even came by for our first day, to be part of welcoming our students to their building for the very first time. She took lots of pictures and in case you missed it, she sent out this tweet:

Yep…that’s me in the Astronaut/Rocket Jetpack costume. You might say I was kind of “over the moon” to see all the students arriving in person. “One small step for a School Administrator, one giant leap for Innovation Lab High School.” (I’m not above a little public humiliation or a few bad puns to put smiles on students’ faces on the first day!)

I cannot overstate how much the sound of young people’s laughter in the hallways over the past two days has brought little tears of joy to the corners of our eyes!

We organized most of the activities for our first two days with all of our in-person learners around helping them familiarize themselves with the building, reinforcing our safety procedures and helping them to get more comfortable being around each other again—especially after so long apart!

Thursday, our students engaged in a giant scavenger hunt that required the cooperation of our in-person learners and our remote learners to complete the list of tasks. Remote students had to work with their in-person teammates to deduce which staff member’s room they needed to visit. The in-person students then needed to follow all our safety guidelines while navigating to that classroom to find a trivia question posted somewhere in that room and bring the question back to their Crew room and share it with their online partner. The online student then had to Google the answer and fill it in to a form to get the next step in the scavenger hunt. Repeat until all clues are finished. Our in-person students got quite a workout, and learned the location of every classroom in the building.

Students got to visit their odd numbered classes and learn the routines and seating arrangements they’ll use when in that room through the end of the year.

Today, students got to engage in another in-person/online learner activity that encouraged building further community between the two. After that, we got outside for a walk around the campus to look at the opportunities to interact with Nature in our immediate vicinity, and to reflect on what we might be able to accomplish to better our community over the next couple weeks.

In the world of Expeditionary Learning, Better World day is always the first Friday in May. This year that will be in two weeks: on May 7th. We capped off our Crew time this morning, by focusing in on Better World Day. We created rooms with broad topics about which students have previously shown interest and had them move to the room that most closely matched their passion. We then spent some time pondering three things:

1. What within this topic am I passionate about doing to try to make this a better world?
2. What can I realistically accomplish in the next two weeks to start making that change?
3. How can I build an action plan to get started?

We spent some time brainstorming, then broke in to project groups. Some students chose to work individually, while others have teamed up to work together on a topic.

One student in the room where I was during the brainstorming likened this to our previous Expedition. I clarified that whereas our Pandemic Expedition was a marathon (3 months of work!), this is more of a sprint. We will be encouraging the students to apply some of the lessons they learned about Design Thinking from their experience with the Pandemic Expedition. However, we’ll be pressing them to do so on a much more compressed timescale, and with a much more limited scope. We’ll be giving our students some more time to work on their projects over the next two weeks.

Finally, we closed today with the students getting to visit each of their even numbered classes and learn about the processes and procedures in those teachers’ spaces.

Yeah…it’s been a very, very good week!

Play, Create, Iterate!

Peter Schurke
Principal

Dear Innovation Lab High School Families,

This morning, our proposed schedule for returning to hybrid learning was approved by the district.  Because of our small size, we are able to function a little differently from the comprehensive High Schools.  We will be having the entire school remote on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, and bringing all of our in-person learners back to the building on Thursday and Friday.  Have no worries—we have plenty of space to spread our entire (still small) student body out with more than six feet of space between persons!

To make this transition easier for everyone, we will be adopting the following schedule for the rest of the year, streamlining and standardizing our class times across the school week:

	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday
	All Students Online	All Students Online	Online Only	In-person/Online	In-person/Online
7:55 - 8:30	Crew	Crew	Same as Current Schedule:  Clubs, Intervention & Office Hours	Crew	Crew
	passing	passing		passing	passing
8:35 - 9:45	p1	p2		p1	p2
	passing	passing		passing	passing
9:50 - 11:00	p3	p4	8th Per AP Env. Sci 11:05 AM-12:05 PM (Online)	p3	p4
	passing	passing		passing	passing
11:05 - 12:15	p5	p6	ASM 12:45-1:15 PM	p5	p6
12:15 - 1:50	<Long lunch>	<Long lunch>		Bus & Lunch	Bus & Lunch
1:50 - 3:00   (ALL ONLINE)	Clubs, Intervention & Office Hours - Same as previously existing daily 70 minute asynch schedule	Clubs, Intervention & Office Hours - Same as previously existing daily 70 minute asynch schedule. 8th Period AP Env. Sci. (online)	Wednesday     Early Release	Clubs, Intervention & Office Hours - Same as previously existing daily 70 minute asynch schedule	Clubs, Intervention & Office Hours - Same as previously existing daily 70 minute asynch schedule.  8th Period AP Env. Sci. (online)

The building will be open for students to enter starting at 7:45 am. 

• For those families choosing to provide their own transportation, please plan to arrive no earlier than 7:40 am. 
• For those students riding district buses, they will take the bus to their home area High School and then ride a shuttle bus to the ILHS campus.
   

Pending a change in direction from the district, our building will be closed to students after dismissal. 

• Buses will depart the campus at 12:20 pm.  The shuttles will take them to their home area Middle School, and they will ride the bus home from there.
• Those families choosing to provide their own transportation, please plan to pick your student up no later than 12:30 pm.
   

We have left open the possibility that at some point in the future, our school community may vote to request that the district allow us to return to in-person learning four days a week.  But…that is a letter for another day.  Meanwhile, we are very excited that students will finally be inside our building for in-person learning two days per week, starting on Thursday, April 22nd! 

Stay Healthy, Stay Safe, and Go Ravens!

Peter Schurke
Principal