Category Archives: Blog

Where In The World Is My Teacher? He Is A Waldo

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“Where in the world is my teacher?”  School closure and remote education have opened the door for a new breed of teacher, a Waldo.  Waldo, like the personage in the children’s puzzle book depicted within a group of people in different places around the world, is a teacher who can physically be anywhere in the world and work daily as a teacher for your school.  Note – a teacher for your school not in your school.  If Waldo holds a valid teaching license for your state, Waldo can be a remote teacher for your school.  The answer to the question, “where in the world is my teacher”, is this – physical location does not matter. 

The 2020-21 school year will present a buffet of schooling scenarios in any given school district.  In-person schooling will return children to classrooms with protocols for distancing, masking, and hand washing.  School-based remote home schooling will meet the needs of parents who do not believe in-person schooling to be safe for their children.  A families economic and technology status will play into this decision, also.  And, an array of hybrid scenarios involving in-person and remote education will be implemented for schools unable to provide safe, distanced education in their classrooms.  Finally, ever present is the likelihood that COVID may cause a school to close classrooms or schoolhouses and engage their programs for remote education.

From a teacher employment perspective, 2020-21 will require the hiring of more teachers.  Without debate, money will be a problem.  State allocations to schools will be dinged by COVID’s depletion of recent and future state revenues.  Federal monies already approved will be bolstered with more monies to meet the political imperatives.  Local taxation limits will be massaged.  Money will be found, because the real and perceived need for children to be schooled this fall is great.  Period!

Our Wisconsin county contains five school districts.  It is very safe to say that any county resident holding a valid WI teacher license and wanting to teach is or will be employed this fall.  And, we still will be short of licensed teachers.  It also is safe to say that the given economics of Wisconsin and our region do not make relocating for employment a realistic option for job seekers.  Reasonably priced housing in our county is scarce and even low interest rates for housing loans does not change that fact.  We will not be able to attract enough teachers to move to our school districts to fill our teaching needs.

Hello, Waldo!  We will advertise for non-resident employment.  Any teacher holding a valid Wisconsin teaching license for the positions we post will be considered for employment as a remote teacher.  A candidate can live anywhere.  The only stipulation is that the teacher’s location has and can sustain adequate Internet connectivity.  We will provide modems, laptops, additional screens, cameras, and other technologies to make the remote teacher synchronous with our school, students, and parents.

A Waldo will teach the school’s curriculum using lesson plans devised by our in-person teachers.  As an example, an in-person first grade teacher will use the district’s curriculum guides to create unit and lesson plans for in-person students.  We want all first grade children to receive the same high quality instruction regardless of their physical location.  These units and lessons comply with state disciplinary standards and provide the academic progression for children to advance grade level to grade level and through secondary subject sequences.  Although standardization historically has been frowned upon, in the time of COVID and the need for school scenarios, standardization will be a requirement of instructional supervision.

Waldo will be provided lessons in reading, ELA, math, science and social studies.  Elementary Waldos also will be provided lessons in art, music, and physical education.  A remote education will be an identical twin to an in-person education.  Secondary Waldos will teach subjects within their licensure.  We will need specialist Waldos.  Waldo also will be provided with student assessments and access to the school’s pupil records to ensure that students and parents can accurately follow a child’s academic progress.  Waldo, like an in-person teacher, will communicate with students and parents regarding a child’s schoolwork. 

The question of accountability arises for Waldos.  Out of sight leads to less in mind.  To remove this problem, school principals will supervise Waldo just as they supervise in-person teachers.  Principals will observe Waldo’s daily interactions with in-person teachers, students and parents.  Principals will observe Waldo’s synchronicity to ensure that Waldo is approximating in-person teacher and student exchanges.  Principals will observe Waldo’s pupil recordkeeping.  Remote teaching is not interstellar – it is clicked connection away.

In every aspect, except physical location and responsibility for unit, lesson, and assessment design, Waldo will act as an in-person teacher in the schools.  Our socially distanced and safe faculty meetings will include all Waldos.  Literally, Waldo is just down the hall and around the corner.

The future will be affected by the present.  When COVID becomes history, the evolution of teaching and learning may find advantages in using remote teaching talent, talent that is not physically in the schoolhouse.  Waldo may not just be anywhere, Waldo will be everywhere.

School Opening Decisions At The Right Pay Grade

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Public schools serve the public and are governed by lay school boards as mandated in state constitutions.  In every state, public education is one of the longest standing and most viably evolved state institutions.  In an era when our political, social, economic and cultural institutions are so challenged as to be ineffective, I marvel at the resilient integrity of public education.  Acknowledging this, it is interesting and informative to observe how national, state, and local leaders who are not at the local “school board pay grade” try to affect schooling in the time of COVID.

Notwithstanding the fact that some large, urban school district school boards reflect partisan elections and some have mayoral control, 95-plus percent of school boards in our nation are populated with civic-minded, education-committed members whose primary function is to provide policy guidance and financial authorization for the school district.  As the most grass root of public services, board members know and are known within their school district communities.  Their “pay grade” is nominal and their community appreciation and recognition is underspoken.  In a word, school board work is the epitome of local government making decisions that directly represent and affect a local community.

In the time of COVID, the status of children in or out of school has risen to the highest voices in the nation and state.  The fact that public education is our nation’s largest child care provider means that when children are in school parents are available for work and when children are not in school parents are conflicted between caring for children at home and being available for work.  School closure due to COVID affects employment, wage earning, consumer spending, and economies on all levels.  The crux of the problem, however, is that economy is political.  Hence, political voices want to influence, if not command, that children return to school so that parents can return to work so that the economy can be improved so that politics can resume its inordinate place in our society.

The distance between national and state voices and children in local school classrooms is almost interstellar.  Talk and commandments with the broadest of brushes by big time officeholders are incognizant of their effects upon local schools.  In reverse, every local child has a name that is known in her school.  She matters.  Her education and welfare matter.  The trajectory of an individual child’s school experience is the meat of school board committee work and board policy discussions.  Prior to and in the time of COVID, local school board members are laser focused on how their decisions impact the education, health and safety of children with names.

In our state headlines, a US Senator declares that all children must be in school in September.  Politics at play.  Our President declares that all schools must open in the fall.  Politics at play.  Our state legislators are wary of mandating that all schools will open in September while opining that they should.  Our local representatives portray plans that will open school in ways that align with their partisanship.  Politics at play.  Local business leaders send letters to their school board members urging that all children should be in school in September.  Economical politics at play.  Parents are stuck on the question – what is best for my child.  That is the right decision to be made.

The right “pay grade” for deciding the status of schools in the time of COVID is the local school board.  They are locally-knowledgeable and locally-responsible and their decisions affect children with names.

Local governance is as local governance does, to paraphrase Forest Gump. 

Occupandi temporis dociles!

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Teachable moments come and go.  We know them for what they are – that convergence of event, time, place, and people when a window for learning opens.  Some are BAM! in your face and demand your attention for teaching and learning.  Others flash so quickly that before we can capture the compelling concepts they are gone in the rapid fire of our national and personal attention spans.  COVID, tragically, has grabbed the world and is not letting go.  However, COVID presents a treasury of teachable moments.  So, BAM!  Seize the teachable moment or in Latin, occupandi temporis dociles!

If educators were not swamped in stay-at-home remote education and struggling with technology, the loss of personal contact with children, and how to teach in their pajamas, our educational journals would be overflowing with new curricula.  What is essential knowledge in a world crisis?  What are required skills when working remotely from others?  What dispositions and values are changing when personal contact and physical proximity are not possible?  What political, social, cultural, economic outcomes are more important than community and world health?  Every subject is a trove of compelling topics: art to zoology.  The moment is ripe and the content is rich.

Emergency generated emergent teachable moments.  No teachers were prepared for school closures and remote education.  No students were prepped for this version of home schooling.  No parents were trained to be surrogate teachers for their children.  Bam!  These were not present in our three-quarter school year, September into March, and overnight they became our world for March, April May and June.  Emergency caused educators to create an entirely unanticipated delivery of instruction.  To add to its complexity, instruction needed to be personalized from a distance, differentiated to each child’s needs, academically challenging, and in compliance with district standards. 

Out of this morass came a multitude of complaints that remote education doesn’t work and children across the nation will lose up to year of academic progress.  Yet, within this morass there were unbelievable gems of teaching and instructional delivery.  These are the teachable moments that we need to explore, understand and use to expand our pedagogy for future education.

I continuously talk with teachers who clearly demonstrate that they taught all the essential curricula of their grade level and subject area course in March, April, May and early June.  They

  • Found systems for learning management.  Many school districts already had learning management systems (LMS) in their technologies, but because all teaching and learning was in-person, the LMS was not widely utilized.  These platforms allow teachers to post and maintain schedules of assignments, post printed text, prepared media, demonstration podcasts, lecture/presentation podcasts, and assessments.  LMS are tied into district assessment and grading protocols.  Districts that did not have an LMS found a need for one.
  • Disassembled the given curricula into its critical attributes.  A usual class period of instruction contains many minutes of getting settled in the classroom, general conversation, materials distribution and collection, sit time and transition time into what comes next.  These are not present in remote education.  A lesson is purified into the critical attributes of “do this”.  Read.  Look at and examine.  Consider and analyze.  Write.  Edit and rewrite.  Draw.  Paint.  Play on your instrument.  Practice.  Practice.  Practice. Complete an assessment.  Zoom with your teacher and classmates.  The assemblage of critical attributes of curriculum creates a map of teaching and learning that is very clear when we remove the classroom environment and all the non-curricular doings of school.  Many teachers identified a clarified curricular map they will carry forward into in-person teaching and learning.
  • Chunked daily teaching into the bits that children could learn at home.  Teachers relearned that a child’s attention span is 10 to 15 minutes in length.  In a usual class period, reviewing prior learning blends into a presentation of new learning that blends into practicing of new learning that blends into a first checking of student learning.  Remote learning without a teacher present allows a child to shut down when she doesn’t understand what to do next, becomes distracted, becomes bored, or simply doesn’t get it.  The classroom teacher is not present to bring her attention back to the learning.  Hence, chunking student learning into 10 to 15 minutes with a clear stop or end point plans for a child’s focused and then unfocused reality.  Teachers always have known about chunking, but remote education made chunking a requirement for teaching not just something to consider.
  • Texted, e-mailed, phone called, and Zoomed.  While children worked asynchronously with their teacher, children also needed synchronous communication with their teacher.  In a usual classroom a teacher looks across the classroom to see a hand rise, a troubled face, a distracted body, and a frustrated mind.  Remoting does not allow this immediate communication between student and teacher and necessitates technology.  Teachers who immersed themselves in remote teaching are available constantly to a child who needs assistance.  Text me.  Call me.  E-mail me.  I will get back to you immediately or I will get back to you on this pre-planned schedule.  Until I get back to you, stop this assignment and do something else.  Or stop schoolwork altogether.  We need to talk.
  • Learned to use Zoom, Webex Meet, Google Meet, FaceTime and other real time video applications that allowed teachers and children to see and hear each other synchronously.  Overnight, teachers learned new technology applications and became users or found students who already were users and piggybacked on their students’ expertise.

In our local school district, we are taking the time for teacher talk.  What did you learn from your remote teaching and learning experience?  We are not interested in the daily challenges, because they were common to most teachers.  Instead, we are focusing on what teachers learned about teaching practices, specific teaching methods that worked remotely, and a time and task analysis that will inform better teaching and learning in the future.

Occupandi temporis dociles!

Mommy, Daddy. What Did You Do During the Pandemic of 2020?

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It’s time to write some history!

Children of the Baby Boom unknowingly were given unrecognized gifts by parents and grandparents and older friends and neighbors.  Being one, I remember.  We heard stories of the Depression and World War Two from people who were there.  We heard stories of the hard times and scarcity of the 1930s when work was hard to find and supper was measured in spoonfuls.  We were told their thoughts and fears on December 7, 1941, the day Pearl Harbor was attacked and the United States was committed to war.  They cried telling stories of family members and friends who died in uniform.  They explained about our family fall out shelter in the basement with its blocked windows and stacks of canned meats and vegetables water canteens.  We were gifted with first-hand accounts from people whose words made history meaningful to next generations.

In the summer of COVID, educational and social writers encourage summer school or an early start of school in the fall as a strategy for recouping lost teaching and learning due to remote education this past spring.  At the same time, polls show that 2/3s of families are hesitant to send children back to school because they believe virus remains a real danger.  Our question:  what do we do as educators between these two important positions?

A good rule of thumb when you seem to be uncertain of the direction you should go is to stop, stand still, and observe all around you.  Let the world find you.

In the gap between a remoted spring and an unknown fall, let’s write history.  We can assist children who are living through a unique world event to memorialize their experiences for family and friends decades from now.   We have the skills to help them to tell their story of Life in the Time of Covid.  We have the opportunity to create gifts that will help children in the future to know what their parents and grandparents did in the Pandemic of 2020.

This is a wonderful summer project with educational outcomes.  Stories From the Time of COVID can be recorded by children of all ages.  Stories can be in written word, personal artwork, photographs, song and playwriting, recorded voices and any combination of the same.  There is no right or wrong or passing or failing in storytelling, just the telling of stories.  This is personalized learning at its best.  It is a learning project every child can accomplish.

One of the best ways to understand the COVID pandemic has been to read the stories of those who lived through the Spanish Flu pandemic 100 years ago.  Or a war.  Or the Civil Rights years.  Or through a time of great turmoil.  The personal stories and photos of their times help us to understand the historical phenomenon of a pandemic, its devastation of death, what people did to survive, and the after effects of their ordeal.  Children today can read about children then and compare and contrast their own experiences.

I encourage teachers to make this suggestion to their students:  This was my life during the Pandemic of 2020.  This is not a required assignment.  It will not be graded.  However, it will be important and it will be cherished.  Someday in the future, the stories of how children and young adults lived during this pandemic will be helpful to children and young adults them as they face their own challenges. 

In a summer without structured, large group activities for children of all ages, a suggestion from a teacher may help a summering student find an important outlet for time, talent and energy. 

Then, take your own advice and write your personal story:  This is what I did during the Pandemic of 2020.

Summering After Remoting: Now to Next

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Schooling for the 2019-20 school year is closing several months after the schoolhouses closed.  The shuttering of schoolhouses and the end of this instructional year are two events that will be marked on our calendars and not fade into history quickly.  Most important is our recognition that closing a schoolhouse and closing a school year are not synonymous.  Schoolhouses closed in late March and schooling continued until June.  If this were June of any prior year, children would exit school doors after a last day of their school year, teachers would box up classroom materials, and schoolhouses would be darkened for the summer.  Someone would be yelling “School’s out.  School’s out.  Teacher’s let the monkeys out.”  In those days, schoolhouses, schooling, and a school year had clear markers.  Not so much today.

A side note worth considering.  Schools and governors chose the safety of closing schools instead of staying in school and remote education instead of in-person, large group education.  These were health and safety decisions not based on educational or economy-based rationales.

According to NWEA, an educational assessment, professional development, and research vendor in Oregon, posting in the NY Times, “New research suggests that by September, most students will have fallen behind where they would have been if they had stayed in classrooms. . . . Racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps will most likely widen.” 

NWEA believes that the usual and traditional summer slide of student academic performance indicators, June compared with September, will be greater next fall than in prior years due to schoolhouse closures in the spring of 2020.  Other commentators agree with NWEA’s opinion that the loss will be greatest for students of color and poverty.  Most everyone agrees and understands that remote education this spring was not the equivalent of normal in-person teaching and learning.  The big question now is, “what do we do about it?”.

Some responses are knee jerks.  Others are contemplative.  And, a few are progressive.  Knee jerk reactionaries want to open schools in late July or August to add back weeks of learning time lost this past spring.  They want to open schools regardless of health and safety and complete the 2019-20 school year as if it were still the month of March.  For those who believe that schooling is time in school,  that nothing was learned during remote education, and schooling is a cut and paste enterprise, this works.  It is a traditionalist’s approach to making things whole.  Once whole again in school time, the future looks like the past.

The contemplatives look backward and rethink the decisions of governors and school boards to close schoolhouses in the ramp up period of the pandemic.  “If only …” thinking tells them “we cannot know how COID would have affected the health of children, their families and communities, because we closed schoolhouses.  But, we do know the educational and economic impacts of closure and they are not pretty.  Perhaps if we had not closed schools, educational loss and economic disasters would not have been as great”.  The unknown effects of COVID on the health of children due to closure is weighed against the known losses in educational performance and across-the-board economic losses.  This causes contemplatives to want to open schoolhouses to recoup our educational and economic losses.  “We gave a lot in to sustain healthy children.  Perhaps school closures were not necessary.  Now, it is time to balance things out.” 

Some facts.  Educational data will show disparate results in student learning resulting from remote education.  Some disparity arises from the differences in school and home resources.  Certainly, some schools and homes were better positioned to support remote education than others.  Certainly, some communities have better Internet connectivity than other communities.  And, certainly some teachers and students were better able to transfer rigorous teaching and learning from in-person and in-classroom to home-based strategies.  I know teachers whose daily, remote instruction caused children to sustain their academic growth and approximate student’s in-class academic growth.  I also know teachers whose daily instruction did not. There will be differences in outcomes.

What do do?

  • Get the data.  When in-school schooling resumes, assess. Use the same learning assessments that were used in September 2019 and January 2020 to understand the educational performances of all children.  Add in data from assessments taken in September 2020.  We need side-by-side comparisons.  Look at each child’s beginning of year and mid-year indicators.  What is the difference between anticipated educational gains and real educational status? 
  • Schooling in May always is differentiated from schooling in September through April.  May is ramp-up for high school AP testing and it is ramp down for almost everyone else.  How does comparative data from past ramp down years relate to data from remote education?
  • Summer slide is an annual phenomenon.  Educators have forever shaken their heads about the loss of performance indicators from June to September.  How does the data from remote education plus slide differ from in-class plus slide differ?
  • Should the compensation for differences in what the data shows us be time-based or effort-based?  We know that education “percolates”.  Children need time and opportunity for learning to gel and make sense.  Instruction over time also builds learning strength and adds depth to knowledge and skills.  Some compensation will require time on task. 
  • Learning time also is personal.  Some children require more time on task to master new learning than other children require.  We need to disaggregate the data so that children receive the compensation they need.  We would error greatly in requiring all children to receive identical compensatory instruction they may not need or others not to get the instruction they need.
  • We also know that instruction has critical attributes that lead to essential learning and enrichment values that may not be essential.  Compensation should ensure that all children achieve essential educational outcomes.
  • Urgency is relative.  There are content knowledge and skills that are urgent because they are necessary for children to engage in what comes “next” in school.  Learning is additive.  The mastery of early learning outcomes allows children to learn later outcomes.  Other knowledge and skills are cumulative and urgency is not a matter of concern.  Children will learn these over time.  We need to deal with the urgent but not be overwhelmed by the not-so-urgent.
  • The issues of health and safety in the time of COVID are not going away quickly.  While we want all children to return to school to resume schooling and repair any educational loss and our parents and community adults to be available for work to repair local, state and national economies, we also want everyone to be healthy and safe.  Consequently, re-opening school must follow our best knowledge and facts about the continuing pandemic.  It is more than probable that social distancing, masking, screened access, and hand washing will be requirements in a re-opened school.
  • Re-opening school will cost more money than a typical fall opening of school.  The issues of compensatory instructional time and new instructional designs combined with compliance with health and safety guidelines will add new costs to a traditional September opening of school.  When all is said and done, these facts may the real driver of the decisions a school board makes regarding September 2020.

Next will arrive in its own time.  We need to understand exactly what will be our next.