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Pandemic + Concurrent Teaching + Exhaustion and Fatigue = Change the School Calendar

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Our five-pound bag no longer fits the six pounds we are packing into it.  If we are not going to adjust the load, we must adjust how the load is carried.  The proverbial five-pound bag does not help us to achieve the same outcomes today as it did in days past.  Change the school calendar.  There’s a leap!  Bags.  Calendar.  For school people, bags and calendar are the same thing.  The school calendar is how we carry our educational loads.   

The “givens” of public education this school year are formidable.  All children need to be educated.  Schools need to be open so parents can work.  Parents require choice as to whether a child will be an in-school or an at-home learner.  School houses require strong mitigation protocols.  Due to positive tests, staff and students are required to quarantine on notice.  Children need to be socially connected with their peers.  There is a fear that children will become a “lost” generation of undereducated, socially crippled people.  And, this is just October.  There are six-plus months to go.

Each of the above issues is important.  Educate.  Keep safe.  School and local economies.  Support for the education of every child.

Let’s parse out the equation.

Pandemic.  The COVID pandemic is not abating.  Human behavior is too fickle and our commitment to a course of action too short-lived to effectively mitigate family and community viral spread.  We are going to be living, working and schooling under pandemic conditions until vaccines provide prophylactic protection.

Concurrent Teaching.  How we educate children is an interplay of in-person and remote teaching and learning.  How schools do this displays as a dizzying patchwork of independent decisions across a state.   Each local school board is forced to create its own, independent scenario and rationale for how it will educate children.

Teaching in-school to children in-school.  Teaching in-school to children at-home.  Teaching from at-home to children in-school.  Teaching from at-home to children at-home.  Teachers are experiencing each of these scenarios and many others with variation.  In general, the direction all these is headed toward teaching in-school to children both in-school and at-home.  Concurrent teaching.  Most likely, this will be the preferred scenario, when COVID testing allows, for the duration of the pandemic.

Exhaustion.  We were not prepared for concurrent teaching.  Teaching to and managing children in-class and at-home concurrently is like teaching the same lesson to children in two different classrooms at the same.  The constant back and forth, classroom to screen to classroom, is mentally, emotionally, and physically like teaching two school days in one.  Hence, the reference to six pounds into a five-pound bag.  Concurrent teaching, however, will be the preferred because it answers most of the “givens”.   But, not without its own price.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/educators-teaching-online-person-same-time-feel-burned-out-n1243296?fbclid=IwAR0He2Q_qdFK475RvrVAa0hXm4loerdeFHLtb7KOHRy7tM9yA5z_066mYTc

Fatigue.  There is a new word regarding the human condition related to teaching and learning and supporting school children in the Time of COVID.  Fatigue.  Teachers are fatigued by the daily arguments regarding in-person and remote education.  They are fatigued with worry over who the virus will touch next.  They are fatigued from either working in a worrisome school with minimal mitigation or being sheltered at home without collegial contact and support.  It is fatiguing to teach a lesson in three separate presentations simultaneously – in-person, on-line, and in delivered packets.

Parents are overwhelmed into fatigue.  Few are prepared to be tutors for their children now at-home learners.  Fewer still have an inkling about teaching, although they may have expressed personal opinions about teachers in non-pandemic times.  It is hard to teach your own children.  It is hard trying to remember how to do school assignments from your youth decades ago.  Parent fatigue is noticed by shouts of “I quit!”.

Children are fatigued.  It is one thing for a child to choose to sit for hours playing video games or engage in social media.  It is quite another for a child to be tied to a computer screen for daily schooling.  The former is exciting and the latter is grueling.  Tech savvy children quickly know to turn off their screens saying “… my Internet is failing”.  Child fatigue is noticed by their disengagement. 

Overall fatigue leads to overall diminishing of teaching and learning.  The educational killer in this equation is student disengagement.

School Calendar.  The calendar of school days remains the same bag it has been for more than a century.  The bag is approximately 180 school days spread across ten months and rolled out as consecutive weeks of teaching and learning, give or take the holidays.

Interestingly, most attempts to change the shape or composition of the school bag have met with passive to extreme resistance whenever change is raised.  Days have been spliced and whittled, but the general shape of a school year for today’s children is exactly like it was for their great-grandparents.

As a swimmer, I pushed to find how many laps I could swim with one breath.  The first lap was not difficult, but, nearing the completion of the second, holding my breath made my head hurt.  Often, I gasped just after the second flip turn.  Time for air!

Schooling needs air now and again to combat the fatigue of how we are forced to teach and learn during a pandemic.  Thinking we can maintain a “head down in the water” drive for weeks and months on end more than makes our collective heads hurt.  Oh, and a weekend is not enough air.

It is time for a new bag. 

Consider the inconsiderable.  Intersperse real breaks within the school year so that teachers, children, and parents all have a time to breathe.  Intersperse a week of no schooling every four weeks.  Consider what it would feel like to have a scheduled and purposeful release from teaching and learning these days when schooling is so fatiguing.  How would we feel today, if for example, at the end of September, everyone had taken a one-week breath?  Afterward, re-oxygenated, teachers, children and parents would have returned to the work of schooling.  How would we feel today, if, four weeks later in mid-October, everyone had taken another deep breath?  Now, at the end of October would we be talking about the overwhelming sense of fatigue that is diminishing teaching and learning and make parents wild-eyed?  Would schooling be suffering from the same disengagement?  It reminds us of Einstein’s own equation of what doing the same things over and over with an expectation of different results yields.  Leave us not define our own insanity.

A four week on and one week off is a pandemic response.  It may not be appropriate after the pandemic.  It may not be a new, permanent school calendar.  However, when the calendar we are using knowingly contradicts the facts of our conditions, the pandemic, we need to consider how we bag our commitments to teaching and learning and parental support of how we educate their children.

Consider a new bag.

Piloting Schools in the Time of COVID

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Course changes are required.  An airplane takes off from Chicago, sets a course toward San Francisco, flies for hours over the Midwest, plains, western plateaus, mountain ranges, and then lands at San Francisco.  Easy peasy.  Not so much.  From take-off to touch down, the pilots of the plane make numerous corrections in the compass course, the elevation, and speed as the plane flies.  If there were no corrections, this flight would end somewhere on the west coast but not at San Francisco.  So many things happen between Point A and Point B that course corrections are always required.

So it is with piloting schools in the Time of COVID.  School leadership is required to make course corrections in order for children, staff, curriculum, learning environments, and families to arrive safely and educated at a Point B somewhere in our future.  In the Time of COVID, the two courses of school leadership – safety of all and education of all children – require well-thought out flight plans and then close monitoring and constant sensitivity to needed course corrections.

That brings us to this moment in time.

School leaders have set many different pandemic education plans in motion.  At one end of the pandemic plan continuum are schools that completely opened a campus for teachers and children and in-person schooling as usual.  At the other end are schools that assigned teachers to teach from home and children to learn at home and closed the campus to all.  And, in-between are an untold number of variations. 

Schooling requires plans for health and safety and plans for continued teaching and learning.  Time, place and function wound these two courses of action together into a helix design of who would teach how and from where and who would learn how and from where.  The design reflected the leaders’ understandings of medical science, educational delivery systems, and community resolve for each of the two courses – keep children safe and educate my child.

In March 2020, no school leader anticipated the depth and breadth of the pandemic or that five school months later their school would still be on a pandemic flight plan.  In March, we shuttered schools when there were few or no positive cases of the virus in our schools or local communities and made our way through April and May toward the end of that school year.  In August/September, we launched a new school year when there were tens to hundreds of positive cases in our school and community environment.  Now, in later October, we are maintaining our course plans through the facts of thousands of local positive cases and nationally more than 224,000 virus-related deaths. 

As good school pilots, we check our instrumentation constantly.  Although our county is rated as very high in viral activity, there have been very few local children or school staff infected with the virus.  That metric within a metric becomes an important focal point.  Our course mission of keeping children and school staff safe is being met by the current course of action.

We check a second instrument – quality of teaching and learning – and we find a very erratic array of data displaying the current status of how well we are schooling children.  The data is teacher and child dependent.  Some instruction by some teachers is of the highest quality and children are engaged and achieving.  Student learning data indicates that some children are achieving and even surpassing our educational expectations. Some instruction by more teachers began with quality but over five months of stressed delivery is no longer causing learning in the acceptable achieving range.  And, some children, a growing percentage, are checking out.  Hybrid or remote education without continuous contact with teachers, school activities, and classmates leads children at home to push the “off” button and disengage.

Reminder.  Our point B is the quality of school health AND the quality of student learning.  It is time for corrections in course.  The issue before us is how to keep children and staff in a low incidence virus environment while bringing children and staff together in-school for teaching and learning. 

Of course, parents will retain the option of remote education for their children if they choose not to return their children to school.

First course correction —  Open school for in-person learning to one grade level in K-2, one grade level in 3-5, one grade level in 6-8, and one grade level in 9-12 on Monday.  All children in other grade levels remain in remote education.  On Tuesday, rotate the next grade level to in-person learning.  On Tuesday, grades 2, 7 and 10 will be in-school.  On Wednesday, grades 3, 11 and 11 + 12 will be in school.  On Thursday, start the rotation again so that one day in three, all children have the option of in-school learning. 

During the rotation, a teacher teaches simultaneously to children in-class and at-home or only at-home depending upon the grades being rotated.

Maintain this rotation for two weeks to monitor the effects of in-school teaching and learning on school health.  Maintain all school protocols – everyone is masked except when eating or drinking, social distancing in classrooms and hallways, and constant hand sanitation and schoolhouse disinfecting. 

After two weeks, if low incidence of infection is sustained, shift the rotation of in-school learning to alternating days for alternating grade levels.  Half of the children will be in-school every day for the next two weeks.  If low incidence of infection is sustained, open to campus to in-school learning for all children every day.

So, what is a low incidence of infection?  It is not zero infections, although the current remote education course has caused zero in-school spread of the virus.  The current county positive test rate is more than 20% of all tests each day.  The school board’s initial target was less than 3% and that should be the new course, in-school low incidence indicator. 

Second course correction — Children will have the option of in-school learning as long as the in-school infection rate is below 3%.  If a child has a positive test, the child and child’s class(es) will return to remote education for fourteen calendar days.  If the in-school infection rate rises above 3% of the student body, all children will return to remote education for fourteen calendar days.  And, if a teacher has a positive test, the teacher and teacher’s classes will return to remote education.  After quarantining, teachers and children may return for in-school learning.

Possible course correction — Course correcting always allows for a return to the initial course heading.  If required, all teachers and children may return to at-home teaching and learning.

Arriving at Point B for a school, even in healthy years, is a matter of monitoring and adjusting how well school policies are causing children to safely attain the school’s quality educational indicators.  Those usual adjustments do not draw much attention.  In the Time of COVID, every course correction is contentious depending upon a person’s initial preference – protect the health of children and teachers or protect the educational options for all children.  Getting to Point B in these times requires course corrections across each of these targets and then more corrections until we all arrive at Point B.

Non-Academic Skill Sets Required for Remote Learning

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Remote education for teachers and learners quickly became a totally different ball game, an educational scenario that neither had engaged in before.  After our emergency experience last spring and our planned deliver this fall, are we prioritizing the right skill sets and dispositions for student success in a remote education?

What gets measured gets taught!  This generalized rule of thumb guides many teachers as they lay out their annual curricular goals for children.  This explains why reading, language arts, and mathematics demand so much instructional attention.  They are the focus of high stakes tests, statewide assessments, international comparisons, and ratings of school performance.  Tested curricula rules!  Not now.

COVID presents us with new challenges that are outside the 3 Rs.  Remote education is a test unto itself and success as a remote learner or teacher is not tied to reading, writing and arithmetic.  Instead, self-motivation, self-regulation, ability to work independently, and concentration and focus are the requirements for success for at-home children doing school work.  Consider this – if what matters most gets taught, how well are we teaching children how to be successful as remote learners?

Take Away

We cannot assume that children are pre-prepared for remote learning.  A child’s brain is constantly learning, it cannot help itself and that is what makes teaching children so wonderful.   Kids are natural learners.  However, the brain is a non-discriminating learner – it soaks up everything.  Education provides children with a channeling and scaffolding of instruction that prepares children to learn and then provides children their learning.

For example, when children enter PK or K classes, much attention is given to learning readiness and the skills, behaviors and dispositions that young children new to classrooms need to learn to be successful in the environment of a school.  Kindergarten teachers do wonderful work in building necessary school skill sets.  Once prepared with these, children take off in their elementary grade learning.

A second example is how teachers use pre-writing activities to focus a child’s thinking upon a writing assignment, consideration of possible topics, and application what children already know about creative or expository writing before a word goes onto paper or screen.  Getting into a writer’s thinking process makes for better writing.

A third example lies tech ed.  Before a child ever touches a tool in a workshop, the teacher demonstrates safe and appropriate uses of the tool.  A student must demonstrate “safety first” before allowed to use a tool on a tech project.  No safety, no going forward. 

Using this understanding of preparation for learning, causes us to consider how we have prepared children for the challenges of remote education.  Which skill sets and dispositions have we prepared to assure children can be successful as at-home learners?  Not many and almost all in the technology realm.

What do we know?

There are critical attributes of a successful remote learner.  We can naively think that a successful student in-school will be a successful at-home learner, but this is not a valid assumption.  Children who tacitly meet teacher directions and complete assignments neatly within classroom parameters are not equally prepared to be successful outside the classroom where teacher controls are absent or far less apparent. 

On the positive side of the ledger, there are attributes of a successful remote learner that schools do teach.  These lie in the area of “soft skills” that entered school curricula in recent decades.  Schools teach collaboration, problem-solving, team work, consensus-building, small group roles and responsibilities, and the use of communication technologies.  We can see these skill sets within the remote or virtual assignments children are given as at-home learners.

Yet, skills and dispositions which are seldom taught in school are causing many children extreme anxiety and real problems that keep them from being successful at-home learners.  These include:

  • self-motivation,
  • self-directed study,
  • time management,
  • focus,
  • self-restraint,
  • assistance seeking, and
  • patience. 

These skills and disposition certainly are not in the 3 Rs and not in the batteries of school assessments and, as they are not tested/important, they are not universally taught.  More to the point, when children are in school, teachers and classroom protocols dictate the parameters of these skills and dispositions.  Teachers motivate children, provide directions and then clarify directions, manage student work on the classroom clock, enforce classroom behavior rules, provide relatively quick and direct assistance when needed, and calmly require an element patience as the school day unfolds.  None of this available to the at-home learner.

It is essential to add at this point that parents, almost always mothers, who are at home with at-home learners are not prepared as teachers to assert any of the above skills and dispositions required for a child to be a successful remote student.  Parents are not prepared to be supervisors of at-home learners let alone teachers of their at-home learning children.

Why is this thus?

Repeat – these skills and dispositions are not tested and thusly not prioritized.

Second, in the competitive realm of school, we allow students to seek their own level of achievement based upon these skills and disposition.  If we disaggregated end of the year data by the filter of motivation, time management, and focus, we would quickly see that these cause and effect relationships.  Children with these traits fly to the top of our data list and children without fall to the bottom.

Can they be taught?  Yes.  Can they be strengthened?  Another yes.

A current pedagogical theme is the gradual release of responsibility (GRR).  The Wisconsin DPI provides a framework for shifting the responsibility for learning from the teacher to the student.  The department sees this as an essential and natural shift in the focus of who is motivating and directing student learning that can be applied to all learners.    

Fisher and Frey have incorporated GRR into the development of student reading capacity over time. 

https://dpi.wi.gov/ela/instruction/framework

https://dpi.wi.gov/sites/default/files/imce/ela/resources/Fisher_and_Frey_-_Homework.pdf

To do

Adapt GRR to the skills of self-motivation, self-direction, time management, focus, self-restraint, assistance seeking, and patience.  Each is a mini-unit that begins with teacher instruction, teach modeling, guided practice, checking for understanding, and then release into independent practice.

For example – Examination of what motivates a student unveils that each child may respond to generalized and personal motivational.  Identifying and creating a self-awareness in children of the common motivators that all children in the class respond to sets a “button” a teacher or a individual child can push.  More importantly, identifying the unique personal motivators that a child responds to creates an individualized button that a child can use.

Aligning task completion and success as a reinforcement of both buttons builds a child’s sense of self-determination.  A child can choose when to push their self-motivation button, create the anticipation of focused work, and the sense of self-satisfaction with completed and successful tasks.

Each component on the list can be its own mini-curriculum.  Because they are inter-related, each will be addressed no matter where attention to this begins.

The important things are:

  1. Do not assume children are motivated.  Provide initial motivations and use GRR to build self-motivation.
  2. Do not assume that children can self-direct.  Provide clear direction at the beginning of a lesson, check that children have the parameters of the task, and GRR children toward their own sense of assignment direction.
  3. Do not assume that children can manage their own time when they are on their own.  Build a daily schedule that orders their work.  Be exact and be demanding and then GRR them to managing small amounts of time that gradually increase.

And, so it goes.  When in school, a teacher sets the tone and dimension for the completion of school assignments.  At home, out of direct contact with their teacher, children need to be taught how to do set the tone and dimension for the completion of their school assignments.  This is an important as the 3 Rs.  In fact, the longer children remain as at-home learners, the more important purposeful instruction, review, and application of these “self” skills and dispositions become.

The Big Duh

A school’s success, more importantly, a child’s success in the Time of COVID will not be related to direct instruction.  Success will be correlated with how well children learn when the Zoom camera is turned off.

A Reading Reformation

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Reading instruction is undergoing a revival and reformation. You may scratch your head at this statement and look 360 degrees in your world for evidence of its truth. It is a true statement and here is what you should know.

A generation of teachers who are 10 to 25 years in the profession are realizing that they do not possess the needed skills sets to teach reading. College-based teacher preparation programs in the 90s and first two decades of this century under-taught an understanding of reading and the technical instruction of reading. They taught about reading and literacy in general. Teachers today are reassessing what they know, or don’t know, about the teaching of reading and engaging in needed professional development.

Check it out. If you are a younger teacher, inspect your transcript for coursework in reading instruction. You will find few, if any courses, labeled “Instruction of Reading” and if there is one course there is not two or three. You will find units within the courses you completed that reference reading skill building and literacy, but a lack of strong preparation in the evidence-based teaching of reading.School districts analyze the reading achievements and annual growth of children in their classrooms, gasp at the poor results, and go through the throes of trying new reading programs. Educational leaders are understanding that changing an adopted reading series is not the answer. The answer is developing more powerful teachers of reading and this begins with each teacher’s understanding of the science of reading. Leaders on the bleeding edge of reading reform will see the statistical and real reading development their children need and later on other leaders will follow.

Reading gap analysis shows us today that reading skills for many children are obstructed by aspects of dyslexia. Their lesser reading skills are not caused by a disinterest in reading but by neurological impediments. This one word, dyslexia, is causing teacher preparation programs to completely rethink and reconstruct how they teach teachers to teach reading. And, that is the first major change – teachers need to be taught how to teach reading. Reading cannot be taught by someone who can read as their singular skill set. A reading teacher skillfully uses the science of reading development to cause children to learn to read.

Reading advocates are mobilized. A decade ago there were soccer moms who collectively harnessed their interests to gain our attention. Today, moms are organizing to cause political and educational decision makers to understand that reading is fundamental to our democracy and that we can cause every citizen to be an effective reader. They and we cannot accept the current status quo – some children graduate from school as non-readers.

This movement is differs from the work of state reading associations. Our state association is a proponent of reading, just as they stand for apple pie and the nation’s flag. But, their traditional platform is about reading not the assurance that every child can read effectively. Interestingly, the state association is large in the lobbying and influencing to state legislation which means that legislators are slow to turn from their annual receipt of the associations donation of apple pie to the real problem – apple pie does not teach children to read.

There is a science to reading. We accept the science within the technologies we use without thought. We just turn it on. Reading is not a skill we just turn on. There is a science to the teaching of reading. Causing all children to be effective readers requires every thought and resource we can bring to the challenge.

Since the 60s, I have been a fan of the late Harry Chapin, singer, song writer, and champion for feeding the world. His foundation continues long after his death living his credo to align with “important causes and never be afraid to do the right thing”. Harry would have carried a banner for “Every Child – A Reader”. It is an essential and righteous cause and we cannot be afraid of doing the right things today to make every child a reader.

Check out these sites to learn more.

https://www.decodingdyslexiawi.org/

Facebook – The Science of Reading – What I Should Have Learned in College 

https://institute.aimpa.org/resources/pathways-to-practice

http://www.buzzsprout.com/612361/1866496-about-science-of-reading-the-podcast

https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2018/09/10/hard-words-why-american-kids-arent-being-taught-to-read

https://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/teaching_now/2019/03/what_teachers_should_know_about_the_science_of_reading_video_and_transcript.html

If Not Taught At School, Then Where?

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Is school responsible for teaching children to understand and practice basic human values?  Values like honesty, personal integrity, respect for others, and civility; you can add or subtract what you believe are basic values.  Isn’t this the role of a child’s parents?  Of the child’s church leaders?  Traditionally, it was, but in the absence of these values-teachers we are left with this:  if not at school, then where will children learn and practice basic human values?

Teachers I talk with, ask “Is the teaching of values really a part of my teaching assignment?”  My answer is “Yes.”  A standard curricular assignment entails the instruction of content knowledge, skills necessary to acquire and understand content knowledge, problem-solving skills for using knowledge, and skills to reach supported conclusions, and, here it is, the personal dispositions necessary to be a successful learner and user of the curriculum.  Personal dispositions are laced with basic human values.

We all expect children in school to demonstrate a set of educational and social values.  I will use the word “expect” in this context.  An expectation begins with the teacher describing the positive characteristics of what a child should do and be.  “Keep your hands to yourself.  While listening to this story, don’t grab or hand-play with others.”  “Look at your classmates when they are talking.  Listen quietly.  If you want to add to what they say or ask a question, raise your hand.”  “When doing these math problems, please do your own work.  Don’t copy down what your classmate is writing.”  Teachers explain what children should do and then expect children to do it.

In PK and primary grades, teachers demonstrate expectations.  They model sitting attentively, raising hands, and engaging in the assignment without distracting others.  In intermediate grades teachers use verbal reminders.  In secondary grades, teachers expect these behaviors.

Daily instruction is subliminally loaded with values.  We expect children to be honest without writing the word “honest” in the specific lesson plan.  Children will submit their own work; they will not cheat.  Children will speak honestly; they will not lie.  Children will use and maintain their own learning materials; they will not steal from other children.  It is hard to imagine a classroom without honesty.

We expect children to act with integrity, at least an integrity corresponding to their age.  We understand that Kindergarten children are five years old and when confronted with responsibility may want to squirm and lay blame for their shortcomings onto others.  However, we consistently confront children with expectations that each child owns their personal behaviors with praise for appropriate acts and corrections for inappropriate acts.  It is hard to imagine a classroom without personal student integrity.

And, the list of basic school values grows as children are involved in school athletics, activities and arts programs.  Sportsmanship, being part of a team or troupe, accepting critical review, and putting personal performances on display all require children to exercise value systems. Discussion, modeling, and expectation of these are part and parcel to a school’s extensive curricula.

Outside the classroom, teachers help children to learn and practice civil behavior in the hallways, rest rooms, cafeteria and playground.  Many children and naturally competitive while others are submissive.  In order for all to participate positively in playground games, we teach children how to play “fairly”, how to stand in lunch lines and wait to be served, and how to walk in a crowd in the hallways.

To support school and academic values, we develop and enforce policies with penalties for serious infractions.  Fight, steal or bring or use specified contraband at school and you will be disciplined.  Plagiarize or hide notes for a test in your pocket and you will be penalized.  If we did not teach, practice and expect these values to guide students, we should not enforce punitive policies when the values are violated.

One of the relevant 21st century skill sets school teach is that children will learn to work together and demonstrate the values of cooperation and collaboration.  We teach children the roles necessary for good group work and the skill sets of each role.  We teach children how these roles interact, the value of each person’s contribution to the group, and the way that consensus-building creates results that the group can support.  Group work is all about basic human values.  Political and business leaders expect that school graduates are well versed in these values.

At the end of a conversation with teachers about these school-based dispositions, I often ask and say, “Does your well-run classroom happen by accident?  No.  Children are successful learners because you and your colleagues taught each child how to act as a learner so that he or she can succeed as a learner.  You are a teacher of values.”