“COVID 19 and student learning in the United States: The hurt that could last a lifetime” is the title of an article by McKinsey.org. The authors make a compelling case that changes in COVID 19 educational practices need to happen today in order to lessen the loss of learning by children, the loss of educational productivity by K-12 graduates, and the loss of school-community interactions. The issue, they write, is not to prevent the loss but to lessen the loss that is inevitable.y.org community interaction. The issue, they write, is not to prevent the loss but to lessen the loss.
Take Away
We are all in the COVID 19 pandemic for the long haul. Mitigation, improved treatment, development of promising vaccines, and herd immunity together add up to several years of future life in pandemic-mode. Schooling will be affected by COVID. Traditional classroom teaching and learning will be exception and not the norm. Any prior educational disadvantage will be a greater disadvantage to an equal and equitable education for all children.
That is such a downer paragraph. Although it is true, it is not a reason for pessimism or defeatism. Educators know how to teach to children is pandemic mode. Schools know how to organize flexibly so that, given health data, children can be in-class as often as possible. And, when children are not in-class they can receive the best remote education, including on-line and hand-delivered instruction and learning materials. We can do this.
What do we know?
There is an element of best educational practice that is absent in most school pandemic designs that must be present if we are to lessen the degree of our children’s educational loss.
A supervision of instruction and learning is a constant and proactive force in assuring that school curricula is being taught with fidelity, that teaching is directly connected with student learning, and that all children with exceptional needs prosper from their adapted educational programs. In short, focused administrative supervision of teaching and learning holds schools accountable to the educational outcomes children need to achieve.
Principals and instructional leaders are playing huge and essential roles in organizing schools for teaching and learning in the fall. They are sitting in and contributing to hundreds of meetings with school boards, school committees, community committees, and local health care leaders. They are writing new pandemic rules and regulations and publishing these in online and in distributable handbooks. They are locating and purchasing mitigation supplies, taping classroom floors and hallways for social distancing, erecting see-through barriers in classrooms and offices where distancing is not possible, mapping the bus delivery for school-to-home lunch programs, and determining screening and quarantining procedures for exposed teachers and children who are in school. As a group, they are fully engaged in the logistics of education. These needs will not go away in September – they will be a constant. However, they are not the supervision of curriculum and instruction that teachers and children will need after school starts. The supervision of teaching and learning is more important now than ever before.
Why is this thus?
Instruction in the Time of COVID can be an inadvertent return to black box teaching and learning. When teachers are in their classrooms, each classroom is a one-room school operation. Social isolation protocols say that only essential people – the teacher and students – may be in the classroom. Visits are prohibited. When teachers are on-line, they are in a tunnel of communication with students that is closed from other viewers. When teachers are providing hands-on learning materials to children, the interaction is in a personalized backpack. In each of these scenarios, teaching occurs in a literal black box, difficult to observe and more difficult to supervise.
Unsupervised teaching with all good intentions tends toward the expedient. Work is planned and executed in the immediacy. A rule of statistics is that over time all data trends toward the mean. In the Time of COVID, average is not good enough.
To do
Principals are the engines of school site leadership. They set not only the expectations for educational outcomes to be achieved but uphold the standards of teaching by which those outcomes are achieved. In the Time of COVID, these standards must be accentuated. The longs list of must do jobs must include:
- Hold regularly scheduled faculty meetings. The first step in keeping all teachers connected with each other and with their supervisors is to meet. Virtual meetings meet this goal. Just as teachers say to students in a remote lesson, “I need to see your face.” Teachers seeing teachers faces is connection #1.
- Sit in and observe in-class teaching when children are present. Connection #2 is a principal’s classroom visits. Wash your hands, mask up, keep your distance and get into every classroom. There is no black box teaching when the principal is a regular visitor.
- Sit in and observe in-school teaching to at-home learners. Observe teachers at their work doing remote education. The lesson is the same as if children were in the classroom. Better yet, sit on camera with the teacher. Let children know that you are present in their learning as well as present in the teacher’s teaching.
- Join Zoom meetings. Most teachers will create an automatic “join” for their students to connect with daily classroom teaching. “Join” in and see the classroom from a student’s perspective.
- Require teachers to submit lesson plans for a unit of instruction. The rituals of teaching do not change because of the pandemic. Teachers should submit lesson plans for units of instruction for 2020-21 just as they did for the 2019-20 school year. Principals need to observe and validate that lessons comport with units and units comport with district curriculum – even in a pandemic.
- Observe modified instruction described in IEP and 540 plans. It is too easy for the instruction of exceptional children to become lost in the sea of work. The active participation of a principal is the best assurance that plans made are plans enacted.
- Observe enriched and accelerated instruction described in G-T plans. The needs of students for enriched and accelerated instruction, like students with special education needs, continues in the pandemic. It is too easy for teachers to say “regular education is good enough” for G-T students.
- Review student assessments with teachers. Teachers can access and use the school’s student data system from the classroom and home, so all student assessment scores can be recorded and observed. Absent score reports alert a principal to a child who may have difficulty engaging or lacking home support. A child who drops out of school during the pandemic may do so invisibly. A principal who checks the regularity of submitted assignments and tests and quizzes can catch a potential drop out before the child wanders too far to return. Reviewing student assessments with teachers has the added benefit of quality control. In a black box, assessments provide the necessary checks of understanding that physical proximity and observation can provide. A review also assures that assessments include higher order thinking questions.
- Check backpacks used for the delivery of instruction to at-home students. Children at home who do not have any of adequate Internet access rely upon the daily delivery/pick up of school assignments. Checking backpacks is quantitative and qualitative assurance that already disadvantaged children are getting what they need to achieve their annual curricular goals.
- Complete the scheduled teacher effectiveness protocols. The state statutes mandating schedules for teacher effectiveness evaluation are not suspended during the pandemic. Principal work in implementing the district’s evaluation system must continue albeit in ways modified by the pandemic.
- Hold all scheduled IEP meetings and staffings. Principals and instructional leaders work for the needs of exceptional children in IEP and accommodation staffings. Once the IEP or plan is written and approved, these leaders assure that plans are implemented with fidelity, appropriate assessments are conducted, and progress data is shared with the IEP team, including parents. The fact that meetings may need to be remote does not alter the need for meetings.
- Constantly communicate the district’s plan that all children will be provided their annual grade level and subject area course curriculum. Against the published beliefs that the current generation of children will be irreversibly harmed by their loss of learning due to the pandemic, principals are the front line of assurance that all children are being taught for the purpose of achieving their annual curricular goals. The assurance needs to be realistic in pointing to slides in achievement data and equally realistic in the school efforts to ameliorate the temporariness of those slides.
- Constantly communicate the district’s plan that at the end of the 2020-21 school year all children will be academically ready for the 2021-11 school year. School districts have various personnel who make public announcements. From the superintendent to public relations, people of different roles make comments. However, school principals historically are the most centered and accurate reporters of a school’s work during times of emergency. Principals have direct communication with school parents and community members and, to paraphrase a generalization about politics, all important school news is local.
The big duh
In the Time of COVID, a school principal is the “go to person” for almost every issue regarding her school. However, all COVID-tasks are not of equal importance nor of the same priority. When teaching and learning begins this fall, the job of instructional leader and supervisor must be at the top of each principal’s daily to do list.