Christian Rollino

It is a joy for me to both teach and serve as faculty at Pacific Oaks College. During this time of dramatic changes in both our school and the world around us, I have found myself both proud and more committed than ever to the mission of PO. I believe strongly that a Pacific Oaks education needs to be firmly rooted in the fundamentals of research, analysis, and understanding of the people and events that have shaped our world and engagement on what are our responses and responsibilities in society.

To this end my goal as at teacher would be to establish a unified vision of what skills and knowledge a PO graduate needs to be both College ready, but more importantly to be an informed and engaged member of society. To fulfill this vision I would identify the necessary incremental steps and skills to move students forward in a clearly defined direction - taking different paths but moving forward to the same goal. This is vertical alignment, and it is necessary to keep our students on track and teachers accountable to one another. Specific skills that are necessary need to be identified and evaluated through each grade level - Mastery may not come for years, but we need to know that we are moving the student in the right direction at each step in their Pacific Oaks education.

Along with vertical alignment across grades is the need to overlap skills with other departments and content areas. I have had success with collaboration with both English and Science teachers, creating shared projects or concurrent content that allows for parallel use of skills and knowledge. As the US History teacher I have already identified key CCSS skills for 11th Grade and initiated (halted due to COVID-19) conversation across the grade level in how each of our classes can incorporate and address these key standards. While skills/requirements may change over years this collaborative approach will always be useful for both teachers and students. In addition I have been able to match CCSS skills to specific RA strategies and can assist other teachers to see that RA methods as well as their existing practices can meet CCSS skills, and also help teachers develop lessons and assessments to meet those skills.

Perhaps my greatest strength is creativity in creating lessons and utilizing content in new ways for multiple purposes. I enjoy connecting other content areas to Social Studies and can easily envision ways to connect Math and Science to Humanities. My role as team lead at Pacific Oaks has taught me much about resolving conflict and coming to consensus as a leader. I have had to facilitate these types of multiple discipline projects for Intersession, Earth Carnival and other projects at Pacific Oaks. My goal as a Department Chair would be to expand upon that difficult work of inter-department collaboration and use the lessons of Intersession to inform all of the educational experiences at Pacific Oaks toward a unified goal of informed and engaged students.

I have learned that Pacific Oaks is a very unique place, for both teachers and students. But it must be maintained and fortified by each student, teacher, parent and partner who comes to our campus.