Starting A School Year Is One Thing; Teaching An Entire School Year Is Another

The months of July and August were committed to dialogues about how to start the 2020-21 school year in the Time of COVID.  Every informed and uninformed person weighed in on whether children should be in-school or at-home.  Arguments were made and few were won as counter arguments roared back.  The first day of the school year became a “line in the sand” and school boards everywhere made the hard decision: children in-school for five days per week, children in hybrids of in-school and at-home schedules, or children at-home for five days per week.  Decision made – get on with it!

Take Away

A summer of argument, debate, consideration and decision-making led to a local plan for opening school.  Parents made decisions regarding school choice.  Some parents cheered the local board’s decision, depending upon preference and decision.  Children in-school or children at-home.

Some parents decided that a local school could not guarantee a child’s safety and chose home schooling.  Some of these parents formed local home-schooling pods where a handful of children could “school” together. 

Some parents chose to enroll their children in another school district, usually a school district that would provide five days per week in-school instruction.  Among these, some parents could not be home due to employment and could not supervise at-home learning and needed children to be in-school.  Some homes do not have Internet or adequate Internet and parents chose in-school rather than paper and pencil instruction.  Some parents were just angry with local decision-makers and chose a different school district as sign of their displeasure.

The first calendared day of school is a local decision.  Whether in August or on September 1 or on the Tuesday after Labor Day, children began their school year.  (A few school districts are delaying their first day until mid- or late-September due to labor decisions.).  And, so the 2020-21 school year began.

Not so fast!  It is one thing to begin the school year in a pandemic and it is totally another thing to teach children for an entire school year during a pandemic.

What do we know?

Military analysts tell us that “…Once the fighting starts, all battle plans are scrapped and each new battle situation requires new thinking.  The war goes on with real time battle planning in the immediacy of the moment”. 

Once the school year starts, every school needs multiple plans for continuing the teaching of children for the entirety of the school year.  No start-of-the-year plan will last 180 school days.  In-school teaching and in-school learning.  In-school teaching and at-home learning.  At-home teaching and at-home learning.  Backpack (pencil and paper) assignments for children without Internet or with inadequate Internet access.      Opening day plans will give way to the new plans in the immediacy of the educational moment.

Why is this thus?

In our state in the first week of school, teachers and children in numerous schools that began with in-school learning showed COVID symptoms and received positive tests after the first days of instruction.  In one school, the principal and assistant principal both had positive tests.  Contact tracing showed children and faculty were exposed to initial persons with positive tests.  Schools or parts of schools closed for periods of quarantining.  Several schools did not have enough “non-exposed” teachers to remain open for in-school learning.  Positive tests affected schools that began the year with children in-school and as well as children in-hybrid.  Positive tests did not occur in every school that opened, but it occurred in enough schools to raise this question:  What will we do when positive tests occur here? What’s the next plan?

Prior to opening, a few schools required parents to choose between in-school or at-home learning – a decision for the entire school year.  Their administrations determined the highest number of children that could be distanced from each other in school classrooms and that set the in-school choice capacity.  Interestingly, parents who chose at-home cannot migrate to in-school regardless of the local health data. 

In most schools, there is a recognition of the parents’ right to migrate their children from in-school to at-home and from at-home to in-school.  Health conditions will change and parents need flexibility in doing what they believe is best for their children.

Our local school began on the Tuesday after Labor Day.  We started all children with at-home learning.  This scheme allowed our teachers and students to use the technologies we added to every classroom for teachers to match at-home learning with in-school learning.  Remote education is delivered with new in-classroom cameras, digital whiteboards, teacher laptops, and student digital devices.  We expanded our platforms.  Our pandemic education plan says that all teachers and students need to be prepared for remote education – it will be required.  On the first Monday of the new school year, children will have the option for in-school or at-home learning.  Children can migrate from at-home to in-school after giving school one-week to adjust school bus routes.  The bottom line of our pandemic plan is that all children will be taught our school’s 2020-21 curriculum regardless of where they learn.

To do

Every school needs multiple pandemic education plans that will accommodate these conditions.

  • Everybody at-home – at-home teaching and at-home learning.  Classrooms may be closed due to a high level of community spread, widespread infection/exposure in the school, or too many faculty compromised with infection/exposure to continue in-school teaching.  Teachers and children will be at-home.
  • Some in-school teaching and some at-home teaching and some children learning in-school and some children learning at-home.  Due to a small number of classrooms with  infection and exposure, some but not all teachers can teach in-school and some children can learn in-school, but all teachers and children.
  • Teaching in-school and children learning at-home.  Due to high community spread, classrooms are closed to children but not to teachers.  This is the most common scenario with high levels community spread but with schools that are properly sanitized.
  • Teaching in-school and all children invited to learn in-school; some may not choose in-school.  Due to very low community spread, no teachers and no children or staff infected or exposed, in-school teaching and in-school learning are an option for parents.  Some parents still may choose at-home learning.
  • Teaching in-school and children learning in in-school hybrids.  Due to very low community spread, no teachers and no children or staff infected or exposed, in-school teaching and in-school learning are an option for parents, although not all at the same time due to the school’s limited capacity for social distancing.  Some parents still may choose at-home learning.
  • Homeschooled children migrating to in-school learning.  When health conditions improve, some resident parents who chose homeschooling will want to migrate to in-school learning.
  • At-home children without Internet or inadequate Internet migrating to in-school learning.  As soon as they can, most parents of children with no Internet or inadequate Internet will migrate their children to in-school learning.  They will be hard-pressed in school districts that do not allow migration this school year.
  • At-home children without Internet or inadequate Internet choosing pods for homeschooling.  If classrooms do not open in-school learning for these children, their parents may organize homeschooling pods with other parents.  One parent in the group will serve as the pod teacher.  This will be their one room school in the Time of COVID.

The big duh!

Having multiple plans ready to go means that schooling, although interrupted by health data and human conditions, will not stop.  Teaching and learning can shift from one delivery scenario to another and back again or to a third and yet a fourth scenario as real-time “battle plans” change.  A school without multiple plans will falter and teaching and learning will start, stop, start and stop.  And, 2020-21 will not be the school year it could have been.

Teaching in the Time of COVID – One Of Our Finest Hours

In the movie Apollo 13, NASA engineers faced a horrendous and unanticipated crisis – how to return a severely damaged space capsule with three astronauts safely to earth.  While one NASA leader declared it a worst disaster, another proclaimed that their response to this crisis will be “… our finest hour”.  Educators are called to make teaching and learning in the Time of COVID one of education’s finest hours.

Causing learning is about moving educational needles.  The needle is a proverbial measure of change from what one knew or could do before learning compared with what one knows and can do after learning.  Good teaching positively causes learning needles to move positively.  In the Time of COVID we need to be more constructive and attentive in how we move each child’s learning needle.  Schooling, whether in-person or at-home, must move all needles this school year.  This will be an Apollo 13-like endeavor and worthy of being called a “a finest hour”.

Take Away

Like Apollo 13, we are working in life and death times.  183,000-plus deaths in our nation and counting tells us that how we conduct school for children and staff can endanger the lives of people.  This is a horrendous and unanticipated crisis.  There is no single response regarding in-school and at-home learning but 130,930 responses – one for each of the individual school districts in the United States.

Some of our challenges in this crisis include the following.

  • Lack of a close teacher-child relationship in teaching and learning.  A teacher-child connection in school is a close relationship in all the right ways.  Teachers are invested in a child’s personality and annual education.  Children are innately attached to their teacher as a significant and caring adult.  An everyday smile, back and forth, is all it takes for a teacher and child to want to do their best for each other.  The loss of this relationship means we must find other ways to create this essential connection.
  • Children without Internet or poor Internet lose interest.  We are in yet another division of the haves and have nots in our society.  Children with adequate Internet connection can engage in real time with their teachers.  Children without Internet or a weak and inconsistent connection cannot engage in real time with their teachers.  Real time connection matters.  Seeing real faces everyday, even on a screen, matters.  When a screen cannot connect in the morning or it constantly loses its connection, it is easy for a child to walk away from the screen and lose a day of learning.  Days of no connection can grow into weeks.
  • Paper and pencil children feel disconnected.  A second class of studenthood is inadvertently created when we acknowledge children who have no Internet connection and often no adult at home during the school day and provide them with paper and pencil daily assignments.  With every good intention, we create, deliver, collect and evaluate backpacked lessons.  However, these children cannot see real faces anyday and this multiplies their loss of teaching and learning intimacy. 
  • It is a contentious time.  Not only is there animus between those who perceive a high personal risk for the virus and those who reject their risk, advocates for expedient and cautious school openings, and “vaxxers” and “anti-vaxxers”, there is constant irritation between school and parents who must work, do not have available child care, and cannot be home to supervise at-home learning children.  Parents, like children, with no Internet options feel like outsiders to Zooming schools.

What do we know?

Some things a school can address; some things it cannot.  Human attitudes are what they are and often they are irrational and resistant to change.  A person who believes in the wisdom of science-based information as well as a person who does not will hold to their convictions in spite of proof to the contrary.  Schools should not engage in non-educational attitudinal struggles.  It is a no-winner.

Lack of proximity makes teaching and learning more difficult but not impossible.  Distanced teaching and learning is a hurdle more than an obstacle.  And, it is not a new hurdle.  Rural and sparsely populated areas historically have found ways to leap distances.  Tele-teaching has its own skills sets that effectively have caused students to learn over time.  We need to learn from educators in states like North Dakota, Montana and Wyoming who have conquered distanced learning.

“I care about your learning” is teaching magic.  The key to teacher-child relations is that the teacher cares about the child’s learning.  That feeling of care is potent and irreplaceable.  Whether face-to-face or distanced, when a child has a teacher who demonstrates caring about her learning, they are connected.  Children will go to great lengths to meet the teaching demands of a caring teacher. 

Show me – personally.  No matter if the adult is a teacher, coach, director, mentor or guide, when the adult asks a child to “show me”, learning becomes focused on personal results.  In the Time of COVID, all teaching and learning must include “show me” moments.  Show me your math work, your writing, how to play that note, how to draw that apple, how to say it in Spanish, how to mill it on a lathe.  Show me personally what you have learned moves the learning needle.

We will talk again tomorrow.  Every new learning needs the promise of tomorrow.  Tomorrow, we will pick up where we ended today.  Tomorrow, we will learn something new.  Tomorrow, we will be together again.  Tomorrow promises continuity as well as new starts.  “Tomorrow, we …” brings people back to the task of teaching and learning.

These things we know and knowing them allows us to proceed.

Why is this thus?

This can be our finest hour, because educators have the talent and the will to meet the challenges of COVID.

Doom-sayers predict that children today will have significant and long-standing educational deficits.  The concept of a “summer slide” turned into a “spring and summer slide” in 2020.  The prediction is a generational loss.  Educators love challenges.  This is a challenge that best teaching practices in the Time of COVID can meet.  If Apollo 13 can be brought safely to earth, we can cause our children to gain the educational outcomes they need and deserve.  I have not yet met a teacher who is throwing in the towel of COVID defeat.

Schools are communities of always changing members invested in educating children.  We are constantly restocking our faculty and resources as the community.  Many school districts are investing in more and new staff and faculty to meet the challenge of educating all children.  Difficult times require new and fresh resources. The talent we need will be present.

There has been no better time for the best of best educational practices.  As school leaders lean upon science-based health data they can lean upon science-based pedagogy.  These practices are not necessarily discipline-bound.  Science-based reading practices fit PK-12 reading of language arts, social studies, math, science, social studies, art, and world language materials.  Sound lesson planning designs fit every unit and daily lesson.  The challenge can be met with best teaching practices practiced by every teacher.

To do

Every child every day.  No matter if teaching and learning is in-person or school-to-home, each teacher has to connect with every child every day.  Authors of yesteryear wrote about children who sat in classrooms day after day without engaging with a teacher.  The child was present yet invisible.  Today, every child must be engaged everyday with two simple questions:  What you are learning?  How do you feel about your learning? Asking and answering begins daily engagement.

Personal phone calls – talk.  At-home and non-Internet children need a teacher’s phone call every day.  If I cannot see you, I can talk with you.  The sound of a teacher’s voice calling “me” continues the intimacy between teacher and student.  The absence of that voice makes a child wonder “does my teacher still care?”  It is easy to make a call – make it.

Show me personally.  Show me virtually.  There must be a “show time” in every lesson.

Faster feedback turn around.  When children are spread between in-school and at-home, it is easy for response rates to straggle.  Because of the lack of proximity, straggling can be contagious.  The time between a child turning in a virtual assignment and getting feedback on that work is essential for keeping all children engaged.  It is imperative that the feedback loop be quickened in order to keep all children in the loop.  Do not tolerate straggling.  Do not become a reason for straggling.

More virtual collaboration.  At-home learners need not be isolated from each other.  If teachers can Zoom into their homes, children can Zoom into each other’s homes.  Set up chat rooms for children to collaborate on their school work.  If critics tells us that the children are losing the value of socializing at school, create socializing away from school.  Kids game with each other, so create opportunities for them to learn with each other.

Keep all appointments.  I am told that we can adjust appointments on our calendars, just don’t “mess with my appointment with my hair stylist or barber.  Those appointments are sacred.”  Appointed times for school need to be just as sacred.  Every appointment missed moves the due date for work completed backwards.  Every backward movement means that children will not learn in the 2020-21 school year what they should learn.

The big duh!

Every educational endeavor is a leap of faith –  we really don’t know how children use the things we taught and they learned until some in the future.  We look at the Class of 2010 and observe how their education shaped life a decade after graduation.  We will not know the effects of teaching and learning in the Time of COVID until time has passed.  We need to land our Apollo 13 – our COVID-affected students – so that their future can become what they need it to be

Hypocrisy: Know Its Bounds

“My hypocrisy knows no bounds.”  The line from the movie Tombstone fit the character of Doc Holliday, who, as portrayed in the movie, walked on both sides of the line of law and order.  Sometimes a memorable line from a movie gives us something to consider.  In this case, Doc’s perception of his own hypocrisies tells us how to understand the possibility our own.  Our line should be “…my hypocrisy knows its bounds”.

Take Away

Health conditions, swirling arguments, and deeply held wants in the Time of COVID make it difficult to form some decisions.  Is it safe for children and teachers to be in school classrooms?  Is it safe for children to engage in school athletics and activities?  Recommendations by the CDC and DHS are changing – some changes being medical and others political.  Professional organizations, like pediatricians, mental health workers, teacher unions, and state athletic associations weigh in with position statements.  Parental voices are both silent and loud.  The intention of all is to influence school-based decisions.  What to do?

What do we know?

Conditions and Information will continue to change.  An argument made today may fail if infection and death rates surge and the same argument may swell if those data diminish.  New treatments provide promise, but the true goal is an efficacious vaccine and widespread vaccination.

What works in one community may not work in another.  In a neighboring state high school football and soccer seasons are under way while in this state there is admonishment to delay fall contact sports to spring.

Different people hold to different levels of risk.  Death due to COVID as a very low percentage of those infected suggests that all community activity can be justified.  Death is permanent – you can re-schedule school and games but you cannot reschedule a lost life.  Take your pick of statement – you may be correct in the end.  Or, you may be corrected.

What to do?  Hello, Doc Holliday.  Don’t be a hypocrite.  Find your high ground and keep to the strictures of that position.  Be consistent to your beliefs.  But, also understand that oppositional beliefs are present and in our representative form of government your beliefs may not become the local policies.

Why is this thus?

Decisions about school are public decisions and the public expects to participate in school decision-making.  Participation is built into school board practices and procedures by state statute and local policy.  School board work is our nation’s most grass root level of local government.  Mail, e-mail, texts, phone calls, personal conversations, and turnouts at school board meetings, in-person and remote, are expected by elected board members.  In isolated circumstances, even targeted calling out and protest directed at the person befall a board member.  Participatory decision-making sometimes is uncomfortable ground, especially in critical times.

Some confuse participatory decision-making with majority rule.  They are not the same.  While the public deserves to and must be heard, their opinions need not form the final decision.  Additionally, decision makers need to keep a perspective between loud voices and the greater community.  Often, repetitively vocal citizens appear to speak for a greater number than they are.  Two dozen constant voices do not speak for a community of 10,000.

To do

The the greatest extent possible, a School Board will know the bounds of its hypocrisies by doing the following.

  • Listen to everyone constantly and consistently.  Every speaker, writer, and e-mailer deserve the courtesy of the Board’s attention.
  • Do not allow personalities to color arguments.  Consider the argument regardless of the speaker’s personality.  It is too easy to find irritability in what you know about the speaker, but don’t.  Listen to the merits of each argument without prejudice.
  • Some are more or less articulate than others.  Do not mentally correct their grammar, listen to their ideas.  A speaker does not have to speak in complete and coherent sentences to make a speech.
  • Do not personalize.  Although all outcomes are personal, make the decision-making process impersonal.  Self-interest is at the heart of most communication to the School Board.  If you know this to be true, do not be surprised or put off when you hear it.  Treat it for what it is.
  • To greatest degree possible, base decisions on facts.  One man’s facts may be another man’s fiction, but there are building blocks in reliable and valid data.  When you find it, use it.
  • Set parameters and be flexible within those parameters.  Good decisions for large group behavior are not pinpoints but set parameters that allow for a variety of acceptable behaviors within stated boundaries.  Boards need to set their boundaries and give school administration and staff the opportunity to develop options within those boundaries.
  • If the basis for your final decision is proven wrong, be prepared to make a more current and corrected decision.  Change is a constant.  You may be faulted for a decision that does not work out; you will be damned for sticking to a decision after you know it does not work.
  • Don’t be a hypocrite.  Do the proper work.  Find your high ground.  Declare the decision and enact the decision.  And, monitor how your decision works.

The big duh

We watch our favorite sports team and understand and accept that how the team’s game plan changes.  A football team, for example, plans for its competition weeks in advance.  Hence, we expect a game plan and team practicing of that game plan.  However, when the game is underway, we watch our quarterback call an audible play.  He sees conditions across the line of scrimmage that the game plan did not anticipate.  He calls an audible and changes the play on the spot.

COVID is a humongous audible play.  All the players are adjusting rapidly to life in a pandemic that was not in the game plan.  School boards are quarterbacks considering the facts across the line of scrimmage in the state and community and they are calling audibles as the facts and conditions and guidance evolve.

Listen.  Rely on facts.  Provide clear details in each audible.  Be consistent in enacting decisions.  Allow for flexibility within the parameters of your decision.  Do not accept hypocrisy.

Lessons That Keep On Teaching

“I taught the lesson.  It was a good lesson.  I trust that my students learned from it.”  This is a teacher’s common refrain at the end of a school day.  Sometimes, the word “hope” substitutes for “trust”.  Most lessons are moments in time and reteaching a lesson does not quite approximate its originality.  But, what if students did not learn from the lesson?  Or, what if some students did learn and others did not?  What if it was a well constructed lesson, but some students were distracted or others were absent due to illness? 

Take Away

There will be a few good take aways from the Time of COVID.  One of these will be the opportunity to record in-school lessons for at-home learners became the necessity to record all lessons and these records are forming a library of a teacher’s continuous instruction.  A lesson no longer is a moment that is gone but is a moment that can be viewed and reviewed by students.  And, by the teacher.

What do we know?

Practice does not make learning perfect.  It does not make anything perfect.  Practice, or the act of repeating a statement of knowledge or a skill or of repeating a string of ideas, only makes learning persistent.  The more we practice something, the more likely we are to repeat its demonstration in the same way over time.  In fact, what we practice may not be correct and it may not mirror the instruction we are trying to learn

A question.  What if a child was absent, physically or mentally, when the lesson was taught?  Will the child ever be taught the same lesson as children who were present? 

Another question.  What if the initial learning was not quite correct?  What if the facts do not align into a true statement?  What if the skill to draw a straight line constantly creates a curved line?  Practice will only make our repeating of an untruth and our drawing of a curved line more likely.

Examining or re-examining the initial lesson in which the facts or skills were taught can fill in missing instruction.  It also can correct our imperfection learning.

There always are two personas in every lesson – the teacher and the student.  Each persona has an essential role in every successful instructional lesson.  We often think of the student, the recipient of the lesson, first.  However, recorded lessons have an equal value for the teacher.  How many times has a teacher wondered at the end of a lesson or school day, “Did I say or do or answer that correctly?”.  Or, “Could I have said, done or answered that better than I did?”.  Normally there is no way to know.  We do not get do overs.  However, a recorded lesson allows a teacher to take a “mulligan” and make another effort at something that could be improved.

Why is this thus?

Prior to COVID, zooming is what Mazda said happens when we drive a Mazda Miata.  “Zoom!  Zoom!”  Or, zooming is what a young child says when rolling a car across the kitchen floor. 

In the Time of COVID, teachers are zoomers.  (Another trademarked label that has become a common language verb and noun.)  With the help of district tech specialists, classrooms in schools and kitchen tables in teachers’ homes have become broadcast studios.  The ubiquitous built-in camera on a laptop or Chromebook or IPad portrays the teacher in real time and children in their homes see and communicate with their teacher in real time.  Synchronous zooming is next best to being in the classroom.

As important as zooming is for synchronous teaching, it is even more important for asynchronous learning.  A child can view the teacher teaching, hear the initial explanations, see the initial modeling, mimic the initial practicing, and chime in on the initial checking for understanding when viewing a recorded zoom lesson.  This is not reteaching or teaching again.  It is the real thing.

More importantly, a child can see and hear a lesson repeatedly.  Consider a math lesson demonstrating how to divide fractions.  How many children fumble with the idea of inverting the second fraction and multiplying?  “I don’t get it!”  However, if the lesson is viewable again and again by the child, the mechanics of inverting and multiplying can become standard practice for a child.

Consider technical vocabulary.  “How do I pronounce that word?”  A child can hear the teacher say the word again and again.  She can see how the teacher forms the word with her mouth.

Consider how to shape a mound of clay on a potter’s wheel.  “How do I move my hands to raise the clay vertically?”  A child can simulate that action even though the child is not sitting at a wheel.

Consider a science lab.  “What step did I miss?”  A child can check their lab work and verify that all steps were properly executed and recorded.  Or not.

Consider the dissection of an argument or discussion of an essay.  “That is logical!”  A child can cut and past a better and more logical argument.

The Khan Academy understands the value of repeated video lessons.  We can learn from Khan.

To do

In our local school and as instructional modifications due to the pandemic, the equipment for zooming is installed in every classroom.  A camera on a moveable stand.  A large, portable screen for seeing the zoomed students at-home while seeing children in the classroom, if health data allows.  Connections are in place between the teacher’s graphic display board and the zoom screen.  Every child sees the same display.  And, connections between the student’s devices at-home and the teacher’s laptop or display board so that the teacher and student are in real time communcation.  These are now standard teaching technology in every classroom in our schools.

Now what?

  • Make every lesson a recorded lesson.  And, keep all recorded lessons in the school’s cloud for future viewing.
  • Make every recorded lesson available to all students, not just those who were absent.  Every child in the class must have access to the cloud to see any recorded lesson.
  • Encourage students to look at a succession of lessons to review prior knowledge and post-lesson applications.  It is one thing to maintain a cloud library; it is another to assist children to access those lessons.  Persistent encouragement will create a new student habit.
  • Make every lesson available to all students for review prior to tests and assessments.  Traditionally, children have their personal notes or those of collaborating students to review for tests.  Encourage children to also review the original lessons as they review.  There should be no mystery in what children should know on a test – it was all in the lessons they were taught.
  • Use recorded lessons in teacher lesson studies.  A lesson study can be made by an individual teacher of her own lessons or it can be a collaborative and collegial activity for groups of teachers.  Lesson studies open the discussion of improvement of individual lessons and enter units of lessons the more teachers practice a non-evaluative of their teaching.

There always is the wondering if a recorded library of lessons can replace a teacher in the classroom.  It cannot.  Good teaching is essential for good learning.

The big duh!

The COVID pandemic is causing schools, teachers and students to struggle in untold ways.  For every struggle there will be a resolution and many resolutions create new and innovative practices that improve teaching and learning.  Recording all lessons, making the library of recorded lessons available to all children, purposefully using the library to make complete learning for all children, and using the library for a professional review of teaching will be one of the good Take Aways from the Time of COVID.

A Need for Principal Leadership and Supervision of Instruction in the Time of COVID

“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.

https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/public-and-social-sector/our-insights/covid-19-and-student-learning-in-the-united-states-the-hurt-could-last-a-lifetime#

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.