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What Have We Learned? Lesson #1 – The World Does Not Stop For A Crisis

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When a team goes into the locker room at half time, it is not just to rest.  With another two quarters to play, someone will ask, “What have we learned from our first half of play?”.  Our school is nearing the semester break, the mid-point of our academic year.  We played the first semester in pandemic mode and face the second semester in a similar mode.  What have we learned in the past 90 days that will help us in the next 90?

Without being too simplistic, too critical, and without pointing fingers, consider this lesson already learned.  And, what we should teach our children from what we learned.

Even though 300,000 US lives have been lost, hospital beds are full, bodies lie in makeshift morgues, and hotspots of infection roam the nation, our national life plows forward.  Our indicator of this truth is that UPS or FedEx will deliver whatever you order to your door.  The business of America is business and America delivers.  Exchange the “man in brown” for a grocery clerk, gas station attendant, meat packer, farmer, home builder, car assembly line worker, or local EMT – life goes on.  Add, school teacher.  The world does not stop for a pandemic. 

In short, public education continues during a pandemic.

What did we expect?  Anything else was naïve.  Ironically, our world came closest to shutting down last March when the infection rate across the nation was almost nil.  School campuses closed.  Retail stores went to curbside pick-up only.  Grocery shelves were bare of cleaning supplies and toilet paper.  Only essential workers were physically at their job sites.  Across the summer and through the fall, our culture pushed hard for life to be open while the number of fatalities skyrocketed.  Go figure. 

Our most unique dichotomy of opened and closed is that bars are open for defiant patrons but school campuses are closed for needy children.  Or, this is not a contradiction.  We are protecting that which we value most, children as our future. 

What do we teach children about this?

Education is essential for life and for our future.  Children have been educated during every national crisis in our history.  During wars, depressions, past epidemics, while our ancestors were on the move across the continent, and all time in between, our nation has been committed to educating its children.  This pandemic only causes us to explore new strategies for educating. 

If the first semester was full of changes, expect no less during the second semester.  2020-21 will be a full year of schooling.

School campuses may close to in-person learning, but schooling does not closedown.  Teachers are teaching from their homes, off-campus tech centers, and from their classrooms.  Children are learning at-home, in neighborhood pods, at new schools open for daily attendance, and sometime in-person.  Schooling has become a pattern of hybrid strategies, but it continues providing children with needed education. 

Expect the second semester to extend the hybrids.  In fact, anticipate using features of remote education for the remainder of your life as a student.

Now, more than ever, it is apparent that it takes a community to educate children.  With school campuses closed, parents and grandparents are staying home to be with their youngest children not just for daycare, but to support daily schooling.  Older children tutor younger siblings.  Community donors are providing school supplies to children in need.  School buses deliver meals, not just lunches, to children at-home.  However, all at-home support systems are experiencing pandemic fatigue.  We currently are experiencing support system failure due to exhaustion, not a lack of desire to help. 

As more parents and grandparents return to employment due to need or because they no longer can be at-home tutors, schools will need to create new options for at-home learners.  Stay tuned for new game plans during the second half of play.

You can make your kitchen table into your classroom desk, art table for drawing and painting and making art projects, music studio for reading and writing music and tapping out a beat, and a table-top studio for social networking with classmates, teachers, friends and family.  Schooling is not a place; it is wherever you are. 

Expect even more table-top experiences in the third and fourth quarters of the school year.  Geographic maps will spread out, timelines will be drawn, science experiments will foam and smell, and writing and math work will cover the area.

Learning is being engaged.  For at-home learners, the first step in engagement is pressing the “on” button.  Once powered-up and connected, engagement is a greeting from your teacher and classmates.  The second step of remote engagement is talking and listening.  Your teacher wants to hear your voice asking questions, responding to questions, making observations, explaining what you think and how you feel, and being you.  Engagement is participation as a student and that is the same as always. 

Expect more frequent personal checking on your learning by each of your teachers, your counselor, and your principal.  Our locker room examination of first half experiences tells us that too many children are drifting.  Drifting is due to your passivity as an engaged learner and our failure to personally talk with each student every day.  Talking is not just “hello” and “good by”, but our asking and you making explanations related to daily learning and personal well-being.  Expect daily talk to become more personal.

Everyone is learning new skill sets.  Teachers and students alike are becoming adept at using cameras, screens, digital platforms, and sharing techniques to engage in daily schooling.  Children, as so-called digital natives, may be most adept at learning new skills. 

Expect your skill sets to shift for learning new skills to using new skills in more sophisticated ways.  Expect more group work in which you are networked in problem-based assignments.  Expect questions and assignments that push your past “yes and no” responses to “tell me more”.  Expect to use your skills in new ways.

School lessons are the same for children in-school and at-home.  Your teachers expect you to learn your annual grade level or subject area curriculum regardless of your location.  As you participate as at-home learners, flop between in-school and at-home due to quarantining, and finally become more permanent as an in-school learner, you will be receiving a continuous instruction in your 2020-21 curriculum. 

Expect assessment to be an increasing part of your second semester.  Your teachers and principals want to know the quantity and quality of what you learned in the first half of the school year.  They need to know what to re-play so that your first half learning was solidly learned.  They need to clarify their game plan for the second semester.  Expect a lot of school testing.

The pandemic is not going away; we are improving our capacity to live with it until it can be prevented from spreading as an epidemic.  We may have COVID at a lesser degree for years to come.  Vaccination and mitigation are essential to our new capacity.  With parent permission, you will be vaccinated.  As a student in-school, you will be mitigated.

Expect that your school will use mitigation – masking, social distancing, small groupings, and limited public access to school during the second semester.  That word, mitigation, that few of us understood prior to COVID will be part of our future school for years to come.

Stay tuned for Lesson #2.

Normal Never Was

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What is an educator to do?

Everyone whose eyes and ears are open in the Time of COVID has a valid perspective.  They remember what normal seemed to be, and in their perception of what now is, want their future to be like their perception of the past.  They do not want to be afraid of an invisible virus made mortal.  They do not want their world to be reduced by quarantine or sheltering or any other mitigation that restricts their living.  They want the economy of their community to return to the opportunity of choices and the prosperity of merit.  They have had enough of the survival culture of the pandemic.  While they cannot resurrect the dead or cure the ill, they want to get on with their living.

Join the herd!  I have not heard a single person in our community want less. 

It has only been nine months since the first pandemic shutdowns in our state.  It seems like longer.  It has been a full, complex, and devastating time.  A candid photo album of this three-quarters of a year shows us that more than COVID has diseased our sense of normal.  No pundit I, but parallel to the pandemic have been rising illnesses in our political, cultural, economic, and spiritual well-being.  Our faith in truth, justice, and the American Way visited the ER multiple times and has not emerged in good health, in fact it is incredibly sick.  Like too many COVID patients shuttled from one hospital to the next looking for someplace with an open bed, our faith in us remains on a gurney.

The egocentric nature of perception creates a mirage of wants that hinders our going forward.  With personal and familial well-being being centerpiece, the landscape needed to support our mirages may be oppositional and even non-negotiable with another’s.  Considering all that has been said and done in these months, the concept of and interest in our commonwealth eludes us.

What is an educator to do?  What stories do we teach to children that assist their growing and knowing about the world they are inheriting from their adults?  No book on today’s school shelf is adequate.

Ironically, to be a teacher through the mid-1900s meant a person graduated from a Normal School, the name given to the school of education in a college or university.  If anyone can get us back to normal, it should be a graduate from Normal.  But, not to be.

An educator’s normal is the curricula and pedagogy of the pre-pandemic.  That is the past many want to be our new present and future.  However, if we are to prepare children to rise out of the pandemic, we must address all the ills of the era and that curricula and pedagogy will not fit the bill.  There is need for an entirely different discussion.  What is the new truth, justice, the American Way that children must learn?  We can teach children to read, write and do their sums, but if doing these does not lead them to knowledge of whatever the American Way is to be, we have failed.

We have work to do.

“Yesterday Is Gone And There’s No Getting It Back”

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I hear Robert Duvall’s voice as Augustus McCrae in Lonesome Dove say, “Yesterday is gone and there’s no getting it back”.  There is no false fact in his words.  We can do things differently going forward, starting right now if we choose, but we cannot redo what was or what was not done in our rear view mirror.  To the point: the education of children during the Time of COVID beginning last March and to this date is part of our history.  Whatever children as students have learned or not learned across these five months of two school years is their yesterday and there’s no getting it back.  The issue is what we will do for their future.

Take Away

The physics of time remain irrefutable – we move forward not backward.  We can attempt to re-interpret our understanding of our past, we can attempt to change the inferred value of what we experienced, and we can attempt to re-knit experiences into a different story, but the realities remain the same.  Learning experiences that did not happen did not happen.

Educators at their best are teachers and often reteachers and correcting teachers  It is a fact in our work that 100% of our students do not learn 100% of what they are taught 100% of the time.  As educators, we constantly are working to teach again, reteach, clean up what was mislearned.  We strive to create a quality of learned knowledge and skill sets when initial teaching and learning are not successful.  RtI programs are designed to improve the percentage of successful students by scaffolding this continuing teaching and learning. 

Compensation is a different beast.  We compensate when we accept the fact that something did not occur, was not achieved, or missed the mark by creating strategies to counteract that reality.  We counteract the reality with a new, parallel status quo.  Or, we apply equal or greater effort in opposition of what occurred in order to rebalance things.  Applied to schooling in the Time of COVID, many children did not learn and are not learning the curriculum they typically would learn if there were no COVID.  In the next months, we will assess and understand the differences between what was expected and what is.  And, as these yesterdays are gone and there is no getting them back, we will compensate.

What do we know?

The COVID Effect to the education of children to date is that a percentage of the learning we expected to accomplish in the close of the 2019-20 and the current 2020-21 school years did not happen and is not happening as intended.  To see the total landscape, some children are exceeding our school-based expectations and some are not.  Our assessment may show that some children flourished either as at-home learners of school instruction or as learners of virtual curricula from non-school providers.  We observe highly motivated AP students digging into their school-based assignments and online AP resources who will score the 5’s on their AP exams this spring.  High personal motivation at any time, COVID or not, is an ingredient for personal success.

We observe Kindergarten children who walk into a K-classroom mid-year where in-school learning have been delayed since September and demonstrate mid-year or better reading skills.  Parental support of school-based K instruction or parent substitution for school-based teaching has been highly successful.  We observe children at all grades and in all subjects who have enjoyed strong parental support for school-based learning, good Internet connection, and exercised personal commitment to their school work and are where they would expect them to be at this point in a school year in terms of their academic learning.

At the same time, we observe children who are the opposite of flourishing.  Causes abound and reasons can be understood.  The reality is that too many children at all grade levels and in all subjects have not learned their intended curricula.  Or, any curricula.  The reality is that some children have separated from our school entirely and will not return.  Some children were clearly idled by lack of school connections – Internet, personal, social – they were idled and stranded.  Their parents may not have sought other options because options were not available or due to time and/or money not obtainable.  The COVID Effect for manny of our continuing children is that across the yesterdays of their schooling, we/they were not successful in causing them to learn.  Yesterday is gone and there’s no getting it back.  Today we begin compensating.

Why is this thus?

We shall not generalize a compensatory strategy.  This is not a philosophical statement, but a descriptor of our reality.  If a school has 500 children enrolled, today we have 500 different educational stories.  Parse this among the 13 grades of a K-12 education and every grade and subject hold children spread across the field of expected learning, including motivated, diligent and supported students and students who were largely disconnected from school.  We cannot generalize a solution or remedy or compensatory strategy to rebalance all children in their school-based learning.  There are and will be groupings of children who demonstrate common needs for whom we can apply a common compensatory strategy.  We need multiple, well-designed compensatory strategies.

We shall not generalize educational outcomes.  There is no time like a crisis to evaluate what is essential for your well-being and future prosperity.  Annual curricula is a daisy chain of scaffolded learnings.  Each link in the daisy chain is essential for next learning.  Some single links blossom into multiple strands of curriculum.  Consider multiplication and division, then fractions, then Algebra.  Every school child knows this daisy chain first hand and many experience the challenges of manipulating fractions on their way to Algebra.  No fractions – no Algebra.  These are essential learning. 

But, is everything in an annual curricula essential.  As we cull 180 days of instruction, the scope of required compensatory education can be reduced.  If we could get yesterday back, we would not need every yesterday to prepare for our future.  Our compensatory strategies must be essential learning.  We will fill in the rest as we can when we can.

Compensatory teaching and learning will be woven into ongoing teaching and learning.  A child in fifth grade needs her compensatory instruction as well as her ongoing fifth grade instruction.  If not, we only trade lost yesterdays for lost todays and she will still behind where she needs to be tomorrow.  Weaving is a good verb for this teaching and learning.  Educators can do this.

Education is roundth not length.  Our yesterdays are not just academic, but contain all the elements of child and student development.  Again, we cannot generalize gain or loss because the COVID Effect treats different children differently.  That said, we need to explore our expectations for child experiences in creativity, artistry, musicianship, craftsmanship, intellectual development, exploration and inquisition, tradesmanship, entrepreneurship, physical and athletic development, collaborative and collegial capacities, and social-emotional development.  We need to know how children have grown in every aspect of a school-based education, not just academics.  A compensatory strategy just became much more difficult.

To do

Understand the learning status and needs of each individual child.  COVID is a universal pandemic but education is a personal endeavor and experience.  While our pandemic strategy moves children en masse from in-school to at-home and back, from in-class to quarantined based upon health data, and does these on a daily basis, we need to treat each child’s compensatory as an individualized and personal story.  The education of each child needs to be brought forward.

Chew what you can bite off.  The work will be in bite-sized chunks.  These are child-sized bites.  If compensation were a vaccine, what was lost could be regained in a moment.  As there is no quick fix, educators must create child-sized mini-curricula that in the aggregate create a child’s up-to-date education.

Get it right.  What a sin it would be if we compound what has been lost with less than our best work now.  Checking for understanding is required at every intersection of old and new learning and new learning upon new learning.  If a child is not solid in their compensatory learning, the entire design fails.

Think effect not time and effort.  A COVID Effect strategy will not be completed in what remains of the 2020-21 school year.  If we work on personalized educational needs, in bites, and ensure quality learning, our work will stretch well into the 2021-22 school year.  If we really are interested in compensating all children for the downside of their COVID Effect, this will be time well spent.

Don’t do what you can’t do.  A non-educator might tell us, “In the future, all children must be able to speak Mandarin”.  Whereas, we might agree with that futuristic educational outcome, it does not fit into the scope of necessary work in the Time of COVID.  Curriculum is always in a state of change, but now is not the time for large scale overhauls.  Tweak what would normally be tweaked and create child competence in the taught curricula.

The big duh!

Educating children remains our culture’s most noble enterprise.  In the Peanuts cartoon, a character asks, “I wonder what teachers make?”.  The other character says, “Teachers make a difference”.

The Time of COVID has clearly laid out the parameters of the magnificent difference teaching needs to make in the lives of children today.

Just a Smile and a Nod

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I stand on the plaza outside our local school the morning elementary children return to their classrooms after five months of COVID closure.  This is our 2020 opening of the schoolhouse day.  With temps right at freezing on the first Monday in December, parents are driving tentatively into the drop-off lane.  Vehicle doors open and small, K-2 children in winter garb carrying school backpacks and lunch bags emerge to be greeted by their principal and a bus-duty teacher.  Everyone has a momentary awkwardness.  In a soft opening, only K-2 children are called to school this Monday.  Children in grades 3-5 will come on Tuesday.  A Kindergarten boy stops in front of the principal and looks up to the man’s smile.  This is a first day ever for Kindergarten children. 

“Let’s get you inside and we will take you to your classroom”, the principal says, bending at the waist to get close but not too close.  Both child and principal are appropriately masked.  On this first day at school, a little personal proximity is well called for.  Yesteryear, there would have been hand holding as they walked into the school.  Not today

Cars, vans, and SUVs line up and children pile out.  Parents get out for parting words and a few kisses on top of stocking caps.  Second graders walk with some confidence toward the open doors, especially after being greeted by name.  This is a first day at school for moms and dads, also, though not their first day of the school year.  All have been at-home helping their children with daily remote instruction.  All have been in close communication with their child’s teacher.  All have been looking forward to this day, personal trepidations aside.

School buses roll onto the campus and drive to a different entrance.  The Pandemic Plan distributes children to a variety of school doors to diminish the number of children entering in groups.  Waves to bus drivers are exchanged.

As parents depart the drop-off lane, each lowers the driver side window to give a smile or a nod.  Some say “Thank you”.  Others mouth it. 

This school has moved slowly and deliberately toward providing parents the option to return their children to in-school classes.  Some parents are choosing to retain their children at-home.  Choices are a good thing.  Our teachers are very well prepared to continue teaching at-home children while they begin teaching in-school children.  School leadership has created an exceptional low-incidence environment for schooling in the Time of COVID.  All the pieces are in place for this transition in how we educate children.

It is a new day for our school.  A smile and nod and a mouthed thank you are more than enough to shake off the worries about today and tomorrow.  Smiling and nodding, I mouth “You are welcome”.

Collegiality and Camaraderie In The Time of COCID

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There have been few times in public education when educators have required professional association more than we are experiencing in the Time of COVID.  While health protocols require us to be socially isolated not only from children but from each other, we have a tremendous need for professional conversation – to share the challenges and solutions of schooling, leadership, teaching and learning, and supporting others in our school.  We need to hear and see the real-life work of our peers, and to uplift each other personally and professionally.  The combination of personal and professional stressors can become an overwhelming burden.  We need the strength of professional association now.

More than anything else, professional association tells an educator “You are not alone!”.

Take Away

The metaphor that we are in a war against COVID is not trite.  It says it all.  It provides the context for behaviors and expectations in which a war is waged.  War is not our normal condition.  We are seldom prepared for it.  War is not a democratic process.  It is imposed by forces outside our consent.  In a war, everything that is usual and customary can be discarded by daily reality or by decree.  Usual practices are replaced with emergency measures.  War requires our acquiescence to arbitrary and unusual rules.  We may rebel against the emergency measures until we or those close to us become war casualties and then our rebellion seems futile.  A pandemic is a wartime culture.

Wartime builds alliances and in the Time of COVID professional associations can be an educator’s best source for multi-alliances.  These alliances are necessary because wartime culture quickly disorients everyone into “we and they” groups and “me, all alone”.  Traditional and distinguishing differences between groups in our schools – teachers, administrators, office staff, custodians, food service, drivers, children, parents and community residents – want to remain although their continuation can paint people into actions and statements which may seem oppositional to each other.  The real and perceived threats of COVID to the personal health, the financial health, the community health, and the professional health of every person becomes the most important issue for each person – personally.  While the war against COVID is waged widely in every community in our nation, its impact is unbelievably personal.  Every person has a valid right to say “COVID or the threat of COVID has affected me/my …”.  No one is unscathed.

Professional association helps us gain perspective by aligning our circumstances and stories with others who work “in our shoes”.  They tell us that, indeed, we are not alone and that others like us are scathed yet continue to do our work toward a non-COVID future.

What do we know?

Professional associations abound for educators.  There are national associations with state affiliations for every educator depending upon professional assignment, subject area specialty, school level, and student disaggregation.  I want to quickly acknowledge the national and state associations and move to the more essential value of local and in-school associations.

A quick Google provides these examples of national associations for educators. There are hundreds more.

  • National Science Teachers Association
  • NEA
  • American Federation of Teachers
  • Council for Exceptional Children
  • International Reading Association
  • American Educational Research Association
  • AASA
  • NASSP
  • NAEP
  • WASB
  • ASCD
  • Phi Delta Kappa
  • National Art Education Association
  • American Association of Physics Teachers
  • Association for Middle Level Education
  • National Council for Teachers of English
  • National Council for Teachers of Mathematics
  • National Council for the Social Studies
  • National Association for Gifted Children
  • ASCD
  • American Association of School Librarians
  • ISTE

Read, watch, listen, and engage.  Our ubiquitous, digitized world allows us to be professionally connected wherever we are.  I, for one, read/watch/listen and write every day.  Most often, I am not able to mass my minutes to do so.  I use the odd 10 to 20 minutes throughout the day to start, stop and finish an article in a journal, podcast, audio clip, YouTube, or post.  My IPad and phone keep me professionally connected.

More importantly for in-school educators!!

It is the in-school, down-the-hall, faculty and staff associations that will carry an educator through the pandemic.   No one in a professional association’s editorial offices knows your working conditions like the person in the classroom, office, or workstation next door to yours.  Professional publications inform, uplift, and motivate.  But, no one outside your campus understands exactly how your Pandemic Plan affects your daily ability to do your professional work and how it affects you – professionally.

Why is this thus?

I am reminded of the binding camaraderie that develops when first-year teachers enter a school or when a first-year educator bonds with an experienced mentor.  The group of first-year teachers find each other and share with each other in ways that transcend friendship.  In their immediacy, it is the sense of a common rookie status to create each person’s professional entity.  Rookies flock together because us they lack the assumptive knowledge that comes with experience.  They build their knowledge by talking and sharing with each other.  In later years, the sense of trust derived from their rookie seasons keeps them close as professionals. 

This binding also takes place when a person new to an assignment aligns with an experienced mentor.  Their connections transcend time.  My mentor of 50 years ago and I still share e-stories.  We have insider knowledge and history that no one else shares.

I observe this camaraderie among teachers, custodians, secretaries, teacher aides, principals, district office staff – it is universal.  It is personally and professionally essential.

Every educator is a rookie in this pandemic.  No one has assumptive knowledge based upon prior pandemic experience and all are seeking mentors.  This pandemic requires educators to build their camaraderie through the personalized and everyday reality of facing and overcoming large and shared problems.  The insider relationships fashioned now will blossom even more in the post-pandemic.

To do

  • Re-establish the strengths of best collegial practices.  Tell others what you are doing, how you feel about your work, and how you are dealing with the pandemic pressures.  The root definition of the term collegial is a shared responsibility among colleagues or peers.  Today, it is a responsibility to share.  Stressful times call for an increase in collegiality not a decrease.  Talk to each other, if not in person through phone calls, text messages, and e-writing.  Colleagues talk with each other.
  • Move from collegial to camaraderie – there is a difference.  Colleagues live in the professional world and comrades live in a more personalized professional world.  The pandemic is making every story very personal.  Mind the difference and use it to your mutual benefit.  You will not be comrades against the world, but comrades against the ways that COVID are causing you to work as educators.  This commonality helps to allay the feelings of separation and working alone.
  • Be strengthened by the affirmation of your peers.  Most Pandemic Plans create closed office and classroom doors with little to no opportunity for physical proximity.  There is no gathering in a common prep area, a lunchroom, or a staff meeting room.  Hallway and parking lot talk are not inappropriate – just not safe.  Take time to share your professional work with others and listen/watch others share with you.  This is no time for silent observation – affirm each other’s work.  The more you affirm others, the more affirmation you will receive.
  • Build trusted and reliable voices.  In our state, teacher unions and local associations helped to build professional connections.  While legislation neutered unions, it was not a death knell to the need for professional collectivism.  Educators may not choose to certify in order bargain as a group, but they can join as a professional voice.  The isolation caused by mitigation protocols that demand isolation can give rise to misunderstandings and misinterpretations.  Trust requires conversation.  Conversation requires a willingness to speak and to listen. Trust your collegial voices.
  • Work in the big picture window.  The first order of schooling is to educate children.  All other discussions support that order.  There really are no “Yes, buts…”.  Accept this and then work out the details. 
  • Build the future.  Schooling in the post-pandemic will not snap back to the pre-pandemic.  New knowledge, skills, and dispositions about education are developing and these will need to be accommodated in post-pandemic education.  Professional voices will be necessary to sculpt this newness into future practices.  If we can bring our collegialism, camaraderie, best and affirmed practices, collective voice, and big picture thinking to these issues, a post-pandemic education will serve our communities and their children well. 

The big duh!

The pandemic will subside due to the alliances of medical resources and the alliances of people committed to living and working through a war on a disease.  The devastating tragedies of death and illness will be mourned for years to come.  Honoring and never downplaying these, today’s children require all educators to stay the distance.  Their future depends upon the quality education we provide during the pandemic.  The quality of our associative work today has a direct bearing on the education of these children.