Director of teaching and learning American School of Madrid 2015 – present
April Stout is responsible for teaching and learning practices from k-12 at the American School of Madrid. She is responsible of making sure the school is practicing the most relevant and research based education. Her goal is to align ASM’s practices.
How has education changed over the years?
As a teacher you must stay current on what’s going on in education and while thinking there’s always the best that we know works with kids and just gets packaged in a new way there’s also a lot of different things that we need to be up on because the world is changing. Education should change with the world, that’s my job, to keep us research based and in a forward motion.
What does your day look like?
I work with consultants and design professionals learning and researching what I feel teachers need and what they don’t know yet they need. It is my responsibility to make sure that people are learning from each other, coaching teachers and making sure most importantly that our teams are strong. The cornerstone of creativity and Innovation for me is not the individual person as a loan creator and a loan innovator, it is that individual person working alongside the teams and usually nested teams. I work on 20 different teams in a month. The most important part of innovation and creativity is it’s done in concert and with feedback, with multiply ideas from others
What do you think is the biggest challenge as a teacher?
I worked for an NGO called the New Teacher Center and our job was to work all over the United States to train new teachers, particularly those working in the toughest areas. Our goal was to get teachers to be good fast. Teaching is one of the only professions where they expect you to come in, recently graduated, and be a veteran on day one. You really need to, and it’s nearly impossible to do so.
Young inexperienced teachers are sent in with 6 weeks to two years training that includes no practicality. They’re supposed to know what to do with 38-40 Xth graders who have reading gaps and all kinds of difficulties. For these people to stay in the profession is not enough to keep someone in their workplace, they have to have a passion for it and part of that is showing them the agency they have over creativity, innovation and growth. When you get people in the profession who see learning and growth as their core skill you develop incredible educators.
And this is when you succeed. Creativity and Innovation is knowing how to learn so that you generate your own learning. You don’t necessarily always need this expert because you know how to learn from the world and from other people.
What are you creating at ASM?
I’ll tell you what I’m most excited about, as far as the changes. I’ve tried to change things and part of creativity and innovation is that I take risks, sometimes those risks don’t work out and sometimes something I really believe in fails. I’m willing to learn from those failures and teach others how to learn and sometimes let it go and know that it isn’t the right time and it can always come back on the table later. There’s a lot of things I would like to do that I haven’t, but the biggest change is the level of access to professional learning for teachers. I think that every professional on this site, whether or not they will tell you, has access to both an expert person in the field, awesome colleagues to collaborate with, professional books and people who can support them. When I came here eight years ago that was not in place, basically we shut down ASM and we started over. ASM was part of MAIS (Middle Association of International Schools), which in my opinion was atrocious. I felt we were back in 1990.
How was MAIS different from what you were implementing? What do you use to make it different?
MAIS was lectures and conferences. Teachers were being taught at. Not to say conferences aren’t great but in order for learning and creativity to stick it has to be job embedded. There has to be a relation to the students and be easy to apply tomorrow or else teachers are not able to introduce it into their day to day. I think one of the key aspects of professional learning is to seek tangible aspects teachers walk away with. Something that will affect their students immediately.
Another technique we use includes watching each other teach, and watching other people teach our kids. This is purely observational, and after we discuss what we thought was good and what could be better and we deconstruct the class together. We just did a Japanese lesson study that brought structures for collaboration that are beyond sitting in a room in a meeting and are actually experiential.
How do you measure your success?
My objective is always for the teachers to take one single thing away. For instance, we went to a workshop yesterday where we used poetry written by other students. Initially teachers don’t see a connection to their classes but by the end of the workshop through reflection we are able to find a connection together.
We also expect the learnings to be woven into teachers setting goals for themselves in the beginning of the year that aren’t just supervisory, but are learning. This has to be included into the system of supervising and it has to include action research and inquiry as an actual goal. No one who writes a statement like: I’m gonna do X Y or Z is passionate about that, but if we could switch to doing action research and starting to see it as part of our professional growth as far as supervising professional goals I think the teachers could then anchor some of what they were learning and try things out.
I see teachers trying things out all the time that they learn in very small ways, but oftentimes those small ways aren’t seen as actually applying because they want to do exactly like the workshop.
How do you help teachers have continuity?
Conversations, coaching, asking teachers about having them identify one thing they’re going to take away, then following up. Encouraging that to be part of meetings.
We are going to do a learning day for the first time in June. We’re gonna do a big share of things that we have learned.
- Continuously sharing with other people
- Articulating for ourselves
- Working in teams, collaborating.
Getting more access to strategy and coaching is a big goal. I think that people need their colleagues and other people to come and talk to them about what they’re doing and see how it’s going in the classroom.
Who do you get resistance from?
I get resistance every time I walk out of my office. I know that resistance isn’t actually resistance, there’s an emotion of fear to change behind it. It comes across as: get away from me ,don’t ask me one more thing. But that’s not really what it is, it’s just an emotion and it’s a reaction so I don’t really worry much about resistance. I don’t let it stop me. It most often shows up in complaining and gossip, it shows up in human Dynamics. There is a sense of this is being done to me, instead of this is being done for me. Eventually they realise: I could do something different or I could have agency and I would like to be part of the solution. I deal with resistance with compassion while still holding firm. I try to get people to imagine a possibility other than what they are thinking and doing right now. They think it will not work in their classroom, my kids will never change. I ask them, do you think it will help with one child? Let’s try and go from there.
Who have you been inspired by, your mentors?
My biggest Mentor is Elena Aguilar. She runs an organization called Bright Morning in Oakland California. I’ve also worked with Diane Sweeney I’ve worked with Jim Knight.
I’ve been so lucky to work with many people. I am a cherry picker, I will never follow one person, I don’t ever fall for one religion, I will never follow one program. I like to take it and pick and then create something that’s very bespoke for the people and myself or the situation. I think that’s also part of creativity, reflecting, processing and applying what you’re learning in different configurations to a context that is unique. I have to have a toolkit that I use flexibly.
You have implemented many things at ASM, what would you say have been the most effective?
You can implement change on a human level and it goes from the Big Wide thing like how our students are learning according to all different measures of standardized tests and data. But I think hearing people’s stories and having conversations with them and actually pulling out patterns and trends around focus groups and things is what has been most helpful to them.
Every conversation I have with a teacher I have a log ,and I keep patterns in terms of what people are saying to me. I know I am succeeding the less a teacher needs me, the less I am pulled into meetings, when a team starts functioning more and needing me less and less.
I think the thing that has worked the best is the work that I’ve done to train teams to function how to learn together. Also the work I’ve done around emotional intelligence with the teacher leaders, team Dynamics, boundaries and about effective conflict resolution.
I have a rubric for professional learning and a rubric that I use for myself and I self-reflect and ask two or three teammates who were closest with me to give me feedback.
How do you see the future of education?
I see the focus being high level towards how to navigate life and towards helping adults who work with high schoolers to navigate this ever changing world. There’s some skills that are future proof skills: Habit, Grit, Resilience, Relatedness, Self-efficacy, Motivation, Goal setting and Trust.
It’s the most comprehensive and best articulated list of the type of skills that we should be teaching kids. I think we have to teach what’s worth learning and we have to honor contents, role and education and we have to move away from straight up teaching content into teaching these skills.
I think we have some learning gaps across the world and if we know what skills we’re teaching kids we can fill those because, for instance walking is a skill and crawling is a skill within walking and it is not the absence of walking it’s the step to walking. This is why I think we need to be able to go skill-based so that we can be helping kids with all different types of content and we can test some differently and the skills that are so multi really academic and skills that are social emotional like collaboration and perseverance and what about your opinion on terms of
How do you replace the visual arts after 5th grade? Where are kids learning problem solving, collaboration, creativity, innovation?
I mean the Arts are essential. Anything humans ever left behind is art, that’s all we have left.
I would love to redo our CAS Program to be a truly service learning project because I think that’s where you start creativity. Then you can solve problems from all different lenses and also in looking at the social sciences in discipline collaboration and units.
Could you share a list or of people that have inspired you?
Current big thinkers in education
Brene Brown Dare to Lead and Daring Classroom
IIRP Restorative Practices
Cathy Berger Kaye Service Learning
CASEL Social Emotional Learning
How to Navigate Life (book)