[MUSIC PLAYING] ALANA TYAU: So we have five core values at Hawai’i Technology Academy– communication, collaboration, creativity, critical thinking, and character. We’ve also developed, as a leadership team and as a school, our guiding principles, which are our hokupa’a, which are meant to work in collaboration with our values to be a way that we can frame the learning and frame the things that we are doing as a school to make sure that we are in alignment across the board.

MATT ZITELLO: How do we really clearly articulate our design approach with our curricular resource creation, but also our design approach at the school level? And I think that happened through conversations, through Center of Love and Justice.

MAYA TERHUNE: When I feel what I feel through the collaborative work and the collaborative heart of Center for Love and Justice, I want that echoed in my classroom. It’s a sense of being rooted in what matters to me and how I feel empowered to do that for others.

ALANA TYAU: What has actually been really powerful in my practice as a school leader has been that idea of symmetry. And so as a school, our presentations of learning process, actually, comes from our executive director all the way to the students. Because I am actively asking for feedback, and then implementing that feedback immediately, it is building a sense of trust.

MARYBETH BALDWIN: The protocols, like the feedback protocols or the different approaches that they use with us, are things that we can use with our students. I’m also a teacher leader, so it’s things I can use with my department.

SHILOH FRANCIS: Collaborating with Center for Love and Justice has, over the past almost five years now, really impacted how I see myself as a teacher, my role as a teacher. I’ve always liked helped students create projects and curate things, but this program has really helped me see how I can incorporate more student voice and choice, how to make learning public, how to really show beautiful work in terms of showcasing and exhibiting work in and for the community, and not just have it be another project that students do.

MATT ZITELLO: Working with Center of Love and Justice helped us to really think about how do we take what our stakeholders, our constituents, are saying and make change and affect change that actually mattered.

ISABELLA: It’s something where the teachers are really paying attention to what we say and how we say it. And they’re really caring for more than just the academic purpose. They’re caring for our purpose and our careers and our feelings and what matters to us.

TRACI SULLIVAN: Have the opportunity also to come at this work through the lens of school leadership. So for me, at this moment, it’s more about what are those levers that we can pull? What are the things that we can do to empower all of the constituents at our school to really embody those things that we say, that we value, those cores, and also our hokupa’a, so that kids can have the best experience?

So not just building lessons in units with teachers, but also making moves for the whole school so that the whole school is moving in the same direction related to how the student experience and how the students are learning at school.

MAYA TERHUNE: Center for Love and Justice has given me purpose and clarity of purpose. It has allowed me to dream and vision, and return to what I know I value, and to trust my identity. And it has given me the tools to impart that on my students.

MATT ZITELLO: But we can only go so far as a leadership team. It has to be a whole collective and really getting energized, excited, which we have in Center of Love and Justice, was, in large part, exciting our teachers around some of these ideas that are mission-driven from Center of Love and Justice, they’re aligned to HTA, we get that excitement. And actually to sit back and listen to the feedback was really amazing, because the conversations that we were having are much richer today than they were three years ago.

So that only makes me think about where will we be three years from now in this iterative process.