Admonished over time to keep the “big picture” in front of us, that panoramic view has become nigh unto impossible for school leadership in the pandemic. The urgency of crises, plural, demands that each disaggregated, independent small picture must become its own focal point. When time, effort, and resources are focused on discrete, immediate, and compelling problems, it is hard to see the wide landscape. In the second year of the pandemic, it is past time to swivel our necks and look broadly at our schools.
A 360-degree viewpoint has become an educated and informed perspective for school leaders. It was not always so. Educational surveying as an organizational feedback tool took root in the early 1950s, although the root was slow to grow. Most often surveys were targeted and focused. Problems were identified, then taken “head on” with a questionnaire given in a linear fashion. This is the problem and these are the people directly associated with the problem. As computer technologies advanced, surveying and data collection became easier. The 1990s advent of the Internet and access to greater populations opened thinking to multi-source responses to surveying and the idea was labeled as 360-degree sourcing.
School leaders are trusted to look at all constituencies related to a problem. A school problem may display itself across a grade, across grade levels, across schools, with some students or all students, and with some school programs but not all. A 360 degree look assured that all information was sought and considered.
Then comes the pandemic. It is not that leaders abandoned their problem-solving training; crisis thinking drove us to microscopic visions and tighter constituencies. Last March, the pandemic was a blitzkrieg of problems demanding answers spontaneously and problem-solving skills were replaced with crisis solving skills. Protect from the virus was the crushing issue. School campuses closed to in-person teaching and learning, the walls went up, all vision was focused and tunneled.
Inadvertently, leadership focused instruction on the maintenance of reading, ELA, and math – the big three of state assessments – and all other subjects drifted. If a school could sustain child proficiency in the three “basics”, the state report card would not tumble too far. And, a child who is proficient in these three will be best prepared for a post-pandemic education. Though this seemed best at the time, the loss of 360 looking has taken a toll in the education of all children.
Music programs were virtually hibernated. School bands and choirs were not allowed to meet en masse and forced to manage with virtual or individual lessons. Really tough sledding for directors and children. Ensemble work was barred for instruments that children blew through and for projected choral singing. Ironically, these programs are traditionally out front in the school’s public relations. Communities take pride in their school bands and choirs and in the pandemic and during the pandemic – nada!
Distancing protocols played havoc with science labs, all small group work, tech shop work – virtually everything in school that put children and teachers in close proximity to each other was verboten. Art classrooms closed and children were left with crayons and pencils and paper at home. No ceramics or sculpting. No metal work or jewelry. Art studios went virtual as bases for teachers to demonstrate art to at-home learners.
Locker rooms were closed to physical education and athletics. Contact sports of all kinds were looked upon with a jaundiced eye. If it were not for the strength of parent and community booster demands, athletics entirely would have been abandoned for the duration. And, herein lies the rub. Booster groups for athletics got their games but booster groups for bands and orchestras did not. Any bias here in the pandemic?
Auditoriums and theaters closed. The school play, musical, and concerts were a patchwork of video at best, but usually not all.
Some schools jumped back to in-school learning options this past fall. Hybrid models taught children in-school and at-home simultaneously, but with caveats for small groups and distancing. Academic work found its way, but art, music, PE, tech, and all large group instruction remained on hold. For schools sustaining at-home learners, instruction was predominantly academic with lip service to all else.
Early on we understood that student IEPs do not recognize the limitations of a pandemic. We made necessary adjustments to our COVID thinking to meet the requirements of an IEP, but did not make anything similar to meet the learning needs and interests of children without exceptionality. These children received a thin stream of academic and sparse arts and PE instruction.
Our pandemic consideration of schooling became very siloed. Mandates for viral protection shaped teaching and learning. While many teachers became technical magicians using multi-screens to teach children in-school and at-home, classroom protocols forced each teacher to be a one-room schoolhouse for her grade level or subject area. Arts, activities, and athletics were virtually shuttered in their respective silos.
Much like digging out from a tornado, we are beginning to look full circle at our school environment and the effect of the viral storm. A 360 look-around tells us the landscape in March 2021 is nothing like the landscape in March 2020. From a student learning perspective, the view is rather stark. And, the view is not much different from a teacher perspective. The trees of reading, ELA and math still stand, but the forests of arts, activity, and athletic education were knocked down.
We have work to do
We need to return children to the richness of a Four “A” School where Academics, Activities, Arts, and Athletics thrive. While we cannot run back to the past, we need to walk quickly. All the ingenuity that went into remote education must be focused on returning children to instruction and opportunities they have missed. This is not a mission of compensatory education, but a mission of restorative visions and programming.
We have a quarter of the school year left in SY 2020-21. The pandemic conditions of the first quarter of the school year do not exist during the fourth quarter. There is no reason for us to maintain all of September’s restrictions in April, May, and June. A catch word last March was nimbleness. We wanted nimble school decisions that would safeguard schools from a virus we were just learning about. Nimbleness was needed to sustain learning even with closed school campuses. Now we need nimbleness in emerging our schools from closed to open campuses.
It begins with words and quickly moves to actions. Use a 360 vision that assesses the status of every school program and its current status in pandemic education. Re-establish the rationale for your original pandemic plan; it was what it was. Recognize changes in the pandemic environment in terms of infection and hospital rates in your locale; they are what they are. Create a plan for parents who choose to return their children to in-school instruction; it will be what it will be.
Think broadly. Academics. Activities. Arts. Athletics. A parent option to return children to in-school is not limited to one “A”, but should be open to all “A’s”.
Our springtime nimbleness will be demonstrated by how we open a school campus while still remaining vigilant about new strains of the virus, paying attention to data, listening the science of epidemiology, and looking closely at the children of our school. A constant 360-degree view will show us what we need to know. At this time, we know how to close a school campus. We are learning how to open a school campus.