Show #114 International School Kenya

Transcript

Lori Boll: Well, hello, Trina, and welcome to the podcast.

Trina: Hi, Lori. Thanks for having me.

Lori Boll: Well, you’re very welcome. I’m really excited to talk about International School of Kenya and all the work that you’re all doing there on your systems of support for students. So first, just give us a snapshot of ISK.

Trina: Sure. Absolutely. ISK is a school that has approximately 1,100 students and we have approximately 400 staff and faculty. What I think makes us unique—or really wonderful—is we actually have 47 staff members dedicated to student support services and part of that team. That includes our health services, learning support, counseling services, life-centered education, and learning support. So really holistic.

One of the things about our school—if you’ve been on our campus before, you’ll know what’s most striking—is just how green it is. It was on a coffee plantation before. We have over 40 acres of space. And the weather in Nairobi is fantastic right now. It’s gorgeous and sunny. And I didn’t know Nairobi was so green before I came a year and a half ago.

So if you were walking through the school, you would see picnic tables, students out working on those tables. You would see calming corners in the elementary school classrooms. You would see posters up of our Big Five—SEL skills and how they’re embedded—encouraging students to grow those skills. And you see all of that happening in so many flexible spaces. The culture of the school does foster a lot of inclusion and flexible spaces. That struck me right away because you’re greeted by smiles. You hear immediately people say, “Welcome, karibu.”

Lori Boll: Sounds beautiful. So now I need to schedule a visit because it sounds incredible. Of course, before the show we were just talking about travel and how getting on a plane for that long is painful. But I’m in.

Trina: Let me know. I’ll take you on safari.

Lori Boll: Well, you mentioned how the staff and the students and everyone is a community and one that fosters inclusion. Can you tell me about that journey with inclusion over the past several years, even before you came? What were some of those key turning points or commitments that shaped the direction?

Trina: Yeah. As you said, it definitely predates me. So I can’t claim all the successes—or the challenges—because if we’re honest, there are always challenges with any inclusion journey.

What I would say is the groundwork that was laid was really about the mindset and the heart-set for inclusion. You truly have classroom teachers who are welcoming of students of all abilities in their classes and looking for ways to reach all learners. Now we’re working on a lot of Universal Design for Learning and how to remove barriers for students and improving our learning on that in the Tier 1 realm.

But I’d say the milestones I’m aware of are specifically with Life-Centered Education. That’s our program that’s more life-skills and vocational focused. It’s the most highly individualized programming, and it allowed us to broaden the scope of needs that ISK could provide for.

It was envisioned in 2018 and then opened in 2019 in our elementary school. Our middle school and high school program opened in 2021, in the midst of COVID. But they were able to open the campus here for a lot of the time, which was beneficial—not affected by as many lockdowns as other regions of the world. And we’ll actually be opening a dedicated high school Life-Centered Education program next year. So we’ll have a program in our elementary, a program in our middle, and a program in our high school.

That allows it to be developmentally appropriate. And in terms of having this diversity of learners at school, it fosters more of that mindset and shows the strengths that those students bring.

Another part of the journey is that the school has broadened its definition of inclusion to not only be about neurodiversity and learning needs, but also thinking about what belonging means to students in general, and what are all the facets of a student’s identity. Using UDL as a foundation, how do we remove barriers and deliver lessons that allow access and challenge to all learners?

I’m not saying we’re doing it perfectly. But when there’s a student that we’re not hitting it right with yet—or we haven’t figured out what the barrier is—the teachers come to the table, literally and metaphorically, and they’re throwing out problem-solving ideas. You don’t have that active resistance. Sometimes teachers feel like they don’t know what to do next, but there’s an openness to learn, to reach out, and to get better. That’s wonderful to see, and it made my job easier coming in a year and a half ago.

So I’m able to start with that foundation and then fine tune: what are the skills, what are the areas, what is the theory? That has us shifting more into a holistic Multi-Tier System of Support (MTSS). What is our Tier 1? What does Tier 1 mean for UDL? What does it mean with lesson design? How do we create lessons that remove barriers, allow access, allow more voice and choice?

Lori Boll: Wow, that’s great. Big shout out to your predecessor, Heidi Laws. And I know Donna Bracewell started the LCE program in your elementary school back in the day. Great work by them and great work by all of you. And it’s great to have a school and a faculty that are open to stretching this. It’s hard work.

Trina: It can be. And you’re making me think as well—I want to say about our host country, Kenya, as another important part of the journey. We’ve been connecting with other schools and schools that are making that inclusion journey, doing transition support programs, and growing special education services within the broader community. I see Kenyans being very open to that and making their own grassroots movements here too, which is exciting.

And I think back to all those years ago and how few international schools had such programs and how selective admissions could be. Now, when families are going from one school to the next, I find myself being able to be much more confident saying there are a lot more schools now where your child is going to be successful and find support.

Lori Boll: I know. Isn’t that so exciting? It makes me happy inside, and I know it’s only going to grow. As more and more schools see the success of programs like ISK or Bangkok or Manila or Kuala Lumpur, they’re going to see that it’s possible.

Trina: Absolutely. And that’s been a lot of your work too.

Lori Boll: Yeah. In a large school like yours—1,100 students—what structures help ensure coherence and consistency across your divisions?

Trina: I’d say that has a lot to do with our MTSS. We’ve done a lot of work to articulate the referral process. We’ve talked about the stages, the different meetings, and structures—going from a student talk to what we call a Student Study Team meeting, and what happens at those meetings.

We’re bringing more protocols into the meeting and working on bringing data in as well. Teachers have strong intuition, and I don’t want to discount that. We do need to trust our guts to a certain extent. But sometimes we can be biased. We don’t necessarily realize that something that feels like it’s happening all the time is actually only happening at certain points or times of day. So we bring quantitative data and also the stories—the qualitative data—into those meetings so we can make well-informed decisions about what intervention or instruction we’re going to do.

We’re working on more structured interventions for different needs so we can identify the need and then put the appropriate intervention at the right frequency and duration.

We also have structures like a learning support teacher for every grade level. They deliver co-teaching in the classroom that helps with lesson design and supports the classroom teacher. They give push-in support and that benefits all learners.

In middle and high school we have intervention classes that allow different durations and frequencies. We have activity blocks, structured study halls—many different pieces. And we’re working on more coherence of how that looks as students go through, making it more developmentally appropriate. So we’ll still give reading support when a student is older, it just might look different because now we’re fostering more independence.

So the structures and systems include the referral process, the meetings, the data protocols, and within the Student Support Services team we have procedures we fall back on: Where are we? What tier level are we at? When does it become a time to refer? When is it a time that a learning support specialist is utilized? When are we gathering more information, and who would be appropriate professionals to refer out to—like an educational psychologist?

Lori Boll: Okay, so that’s great. You have one learning support teacher per grade level. Does that include all the way through middle school and high school as well?

Trina: Correct. Yes.

Lori Boll: Wow. That’s a great amount of human resources.

Trina: It is. And we’ve added additional counselors too recently—another SEL counselor in our high school, which I’m very happy about. And we’ll be having a behavior specialist in the elementary school added next year.

And the other part I should mention is our meeting structures that encourage all those different roles to enter in and be part of it. We’ve worked really hard to move—from silos to systems. Not only having learning support doing learning support and counseling doing counseling and ELL doing ELL and health doing something over here, but bringing people together. They still wear their hats, but to holistically support a student, we need to collaborate and see the full picture together.

Lori Boll: That’s great. It’s a good thing I can edit.

Trina: Yeah. You’re not feeling well.

Lori Boll: Goodness. Can’t breathe. Okay, ready?

Trina: Take your time. Find your spot.

Lori Boll: It’s just so tight. Well, thank you for sharing about your systems. I think the more our listeners can hear how different schools run their MTSS, the better. It’s been interesting for me to hear how different schools run them. Yours works so well for a large school, and I wonder if it’s possible for a small school or a medium-sized school to have those same types of systems in place. I don’t know if you can answer that, but what do you think?

Trina: I think you start with: who are the key people that need to be involved at various times? The power is in understanding where and when you bring certain people together to collaborate.

If you can protect things like common planning time for teachers, and bring whatever resources you do have to the table, and protect time for a predictable schedule, and foster the idea of bringing data in and utilizing protocols, any school can do that.

Role clarity is important. Sometimes in bigger schools, when roles overlap, it can become confusing. So you might even have to work more on role clarity in a larger school. That being said, in smaller schools, people wear multiple hats. So you can establish who has what part in each process and then look for the structures together.

What I’ve found successful is ensuring that whatever members you do have dedicated to student support services—learning support, ELL, whatever their title—if you can carve out time to foster that team, and have that team work together on what system is going to work based on the structures you already have, and foster a sense of team, that’s where you get momentum and success. And if a leadership team member can be a part of that, it helps too.

Lori Boll: That’s really good. Fantastic advice, actually. And speaking of wearing multiple hats, you also wear multiple hats not just in your school but also in the community. Can you tell us about your work with ISLES as well and what ISLES is?

Trina: Yeah. ISLES is the International School Leaders of Educational Support. It’s a nonprofit organization that was founded—I think in 2019 or 2020. I remember going to Singapore for our founding meeting just as we got news about COVID happening. It was February of 2020. That was the founding time when we set our vision and mission.

We work on leadership advocacy and developing systems for student support services in schools. My role on the board—this is a volunteer organization—is professional learning. I’m the Director of Professional Learning for ISLES. We hold quarterly professional learning events. We go out into conferences as we can. And we have Connect events four times a year. It’s good work.

Our network and membership is expanding. With SENIA we’ve partnered, which has been wonderful. We’re thinking more about how we can have more regional ISLES groups alongside SENIA groups to talk not only about special education and inclusion needs, but systems and leadership that can accompany that.

It’s wonderful when schools can hire someone in a position like mine—Head of Student Support Services—and have them on the admin team, with decision-making power and influence, seeing the big picture. That keeps inclusion central. But it’s not always possible, and it’s not always necessary because you could have a principal or deputy head or someone else keeping inclusion top of mind.

If there are any leaders of educational support out there who are new to the role—or didn’t know there were other people in the role—check out the ISLES Collaborative website, which I’m sure Lori can put in the show notes. Then they can connect with our events.

Lori Boll: I will add that to the show notes for sure.

Trina: Great.

Lori Boll: All right, well, back to ISK. You and I were talking before the call about the importance of collaborating with families of the students you support. I’m curious how your school collaborates with them and the wider community when you’re supporting students with diverse learning needs.

Trina: Parents and families—parents as partners—is so important. They know their child best. They can augment what we’re working on at home. And they’re walking the journey too. Every parent wants their child to be successful, and what that success means can be many different things. Knowing what that means and where it’s rooted is important in meetings. And it’s often not too soon to ask those questions, even in the younger years, because it helps you understand what the parent is hoping for and what is central to them and their family’s values.

Parents of students who may learn differently—or have special needs—are on their own journey of understanding too. In a school environment there’s a lot of stimuli; sometimes things look different than at home. So open, regular communication is important.

Our learning support teachers and professionals establish communication early. They make sure parents know: we’ve got this, we care about your child, we’re going to be partners in this. They invite parents for coffees, broader parent nights, and so on.

When we’re talking about students who have individualized education plans, there are opportunities for more meetings and to get parent input. It’s important we seek their input when setting goals. And listening in the beginning matters. We sometimes want to show what we can do and be the expert, but if we’re not listening first to what the parent can bring, it’s not setting us up for success.

Parents often have experiences at home that can inform what we embed at school. They’re seeking your expertise, but sometimes things won’t go well at school and you need information from them too. They may have strategies to try.

So modeling vulnerability helps: yes, these are things we’re going to try; this has worked before; we’ll come back and see how it worked. But it’s also a journey of trial and error. We’re not working with computer algorithms—we’re working with people. Even if a student has a diagnosis or a label, we can’t just plug and play. Working with people is messy, and day-to-day variability changes.

In terms of partnering with the broader community: it’s meant opportunities to visit other schools in Nairobi. It’s meant partnerships where our students go out to other schools to foster projects and relationships. And even with AISA—the African International Schools Association—there was an exchange program where teachers from the International School of Uganda visited our LCE teachers. We’ve done reciprocal visits too. Those professional exchanges are powerful because it’s one thing to read theory, it’s another to see it alive in practice—and what’s realistic and working.

Lori Boll: Yeah, I think that’s fantastic. The fact that you have other schools in the region—in the city—is great. There are so many schools where they’re the only one. But when you can see how other schools implement practices, it opens up a new world. That’s similar to why we’re doing this podcast—hearing how other schools do things.

And actually, a few years ago, for one of our Unplugged conferences, ISK partnered with two other schools in the region and had a community watch party. So that was exciting too.

Trina: That’s nice. I hope to continue and broaden that partnership. As you know, when you’re newer in a region, it takes a little while. But I’m excited to discover what else is out there in the community. I’ve only scratched the surface.

Lori Boll: Yeah. I apologize for my voice right now to everyone listening. I’ve been burdened with this cold and it’s getting to me, so bear with me as we wrap up.

Trina: You’re doing great, Lori.

Lori Boll: Let’s talk about innovations or practices at ISK. What innovations have had the biggest impact on student access and belonging?

Trina: I would say right now we’re working on Universal Design for Learning, and I think that’s having a big impact as we walk that journey and rethink our lessons. I don’t know if “innovation” is the right word, but shifting the thinking toward not always needing a learning support teacher—the expert—to realizing you have your own expertise is important.

The biggest realization for many teachers is: oh, I do a lot of these things, I just don’t do them with intentionality yet. So how could I do it with intentionality? When I know the objective and the standard, how can I give multiple means of representation to get there—still reaching that standard—while giving different ways students can engage and demonstrate learning? I like the creative thinking that comes out of that.

I’d also say the school’s emphasis on advisory and SEL. Whether it’s Morning Meeting in elementary embedded throughout the day, or advisory sessions in middle and high school, there’s a real commitment to giving time to social emotional learning—connection, learning about yourself, learning about the Big Five—self-management skills, executive functioning skills, the topics that matter to make you an independent learner and navigate the world. That’s strong at the school and powerful.

And the last thing I’ll mention is something I’m excited about within Life-Centered Education. We’re creating more robust pathways for internships, job readiness, and transition programming. We’re looking at how we can use some of the ASDAN modules to build skills and portfolios that demonstrate strengths, and partner with viable community organizations that could host internships.

Our 10th grade already has a work experience program and we have a wonderful coordinator who has built relationships in the community. There are employers open to having students with learning differences in their workplace, and how we can support that.

We’re partnered with STEPS Community to build that model—to help train employers, train our teaching assistants and staff as potential job coaches, build toward internal internships and longer-term experiences. The hope is that means there are other options for students in high school—all students—for those who want a deeper dive into work placement.

When you think about students launching after international school—college, university, living in a dorm, living on their own, holding a part-time job—there are so many skills, including soft skills, that we might not realize they don’t have yet. All students could benefit from learning to budget. I know I could have when I was going into university and got my first credit card.

Lori Boll: Oh yeah—free money.

Trina: It’s not free money.

Lori Boll: That’s great. I love the focus on working with a student from the moment they enter your school doors at age—three?

Trina: Three, yeah.

Lori Boll: All the way through post high school. It’s so important. And that SEL focus—so many teachers feel the crunch of time to fit in content before the end of the year. It sounds like your school has taken a step back and really prioritized SEL—not over content, but ensuring a good balance.

Trina: Yeah, it’s lovely that there’s been that strength. Not to say we don’t have pressure to get through content too. But teachers also learn the skills of modeling in the moment—simple things. Noticing if students aren’t ready and having a quick break, a reset, a mindful moment, and then getting back into heavy content.

Lori Boll: Yeah. As you were talking about LCE and the future, I’m excited to hear more about that another time because it’s so important. And you mentioned STEPS Community and ASDAN, so I’ll definitely link those in the show notes as well because they’re two important organizations when you’re thinking about running an LCE program. Thanks for mentioning that.

All right—last question. We ask this for every Inclusion Spotlight series. How has being part of the SENIA community supported your inclusion work at ISK?

Trina: The SENIA Mighty Network is helpful for our staff and faculty—being able to go in and get the resources available there. It’s a go-to place for people to get resources.

Our staff and faculty have attended SENIA conferences—online and in person—and they always come back energized because the opportunity to connect with other educators doing the work is fabulous. And it’s not just our student support services staff; it’s been classroom teachers too, content-area teachers too, because they see it’s beneficial. So I know they’ll continue to tap into that.

And we’ve been starting to promote the discount for the various SENIA offerings. That’s a nice bonus too—an extra nudge that encourages people to attend PD events.

Lori Boll: Right. Great. That’s nice to hear. And it’s important for people to know that SENIA is a nonprofit. Our goal is not to make money off events, although we do need to remain sustainable. But if we can give discounts along the way to support schools, that’s what we’re here for. Thanks for mentioning that.

Well, Trina, I think that’s all we have time for today. Thank you so much for sharing about your school’s journey and all the wonderful things you’re doing at ISK to support your students. I can’t wait to hear an update about how the internship program works out for your LCE. Keep up the good work.

Trina: Thank you, Lori. It’s always wonderful to connect with you.