Jimmy Duggan is talking to Dottie Hinson in “A League of Their Own” about her decision to leave baseball. She tells Jimmy that playing “… baseball just got too hard”. His answer is about baseball and a whole lot more. “It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. The hard is what makes it great.” We apply this insight to the teaching and learning of children in the 2021-22 school year.
What do we know?
No teacher, school leader, or school board member working today has experienced the type of challenges we all face in opening the 21-22 school year. We have no prior experience to tell us what to do. After more than a school year in various stages of campus closures, remote instruction, daily screen time interactions, and still within a national pandemic, there is an expectation that we can create normalcy in September. To add icing to this dire circumstance, principals and teachers have little to no accurate data regarding student learning in the 2019-20 and 2020-21 school years. Hard is an understatement.
The status of student learning is confusing. Some children were in-person students last spring. Some children were remote learners last spring. Some remote learners dropped in and out of active learning; their reasons were many and varied. Some children were home schooled. Some children enrolled in out-of-community schools that provided in-person learning and now return to their local school. Some children were provided district curriculum in 20-21 and others were provided vendor or on-line curriculum. A classroom in September will be a menagerie.
Statewide assessments in 20-21 were waived. School assessments in 20-21 were hit and miss. Data is not consistent across groups of children. Data is not complete for an individual child.
School faculty and leadership changed. The pandemic chased some out of teaching and greener pastures called others to new school employment.
As a generalization, children with learning challenges received attention and accommodations in 20-21 but not the same level of attention and accommodation required to make the annual progress they needed.
Why is this thus?
The 20-21 school year was about organizational survival. In terms of time on educational issues, we spent more energy and resources in 20-21 arguing about remote versus in-person instruction, masking versus non-masking, inequities in Internet access, and our believing in or not believing in health data and experts than we spent on discussions of clinical teaching and learning.
As evidence, more than 95% of the public communication with our local school board were arguments about remote/in-person, masking and social distancing, and the cancellation or limited scheduling of athletic events. Less that 5% of communication was about quality teaching and children. The delivery of school lunches to children at home was a more heated topic that reading and writing.
As evidence, we locally spent more than one million dollars on pandemic infrastructure, especially HVAC and technology. The good news is that no children or school staff in our local school suffered serious illness and all teachers and children were provided with up-to-date personal devices. Strangely, we spent oodles of money on how to distance ourselves from person-to-person contact when education innately prospers with close human and intellectual activity.
As evidence, as we begin the 21-22 school year, we still are in arguing mode. More school board meeting time and administrative attention is committed to resolving parent issues with masking and the status of the unvaccinated than is devoted to curricular and instructional readiness. Our local Board received more than 100 communications about masking and only two about our K-2 reading programs.
What to do!
Teaching and school leadership in 21-22 will be “hard”. Although we are not out of the pandemic grind and distraction, we cannot lose 21-22 to the pandemic disruption. We are ready for and need a good and productive school year of academics, activities, arts, and athletics. It will not be easy, but the rewards are available.
Instructional expertise is now at a premium. There are fewer teachers available to teach due to the pandemic and a prior lack of enrollment in teacher prep programs. 21-22 is a year for instructional expertise to be prized and a full-court press mounted through professional development to build more expertise. These are clinical instructional and human relations skills. Principals and teachers will be hard-pressed to lead and to accomplish this in-service training on top of necessary daily work, but expert work is required not a wish.
We need to support classroom teachers in “normalizing” curricular instruction. Masks or no masks, in 21-22 our teachers need to assess each child’s readiness for this year’s curricular objectives. And, more importantly, instruct or remediate areas of learning which were missed or less successfully taught last year. 21-22 will be a hard year of work to get children and curricular goals back on track. Constant encouragement and recognition of achievement will be required.
We need to support classroom teachers with conversations about daily assignments not classroom conditions. The conditions will change during the school year. Arguments about masks in August may not be relevant in October or November. Focus on the year not on the day; on the pathway to significant student learning not on the distractions of the moment. It is hard to move beyond the immediacy of conditions we do not like, but this movement is required if 21-22 is to be more than 20-21.
Understand that some instruction may seem like “yesterday’s” or “last year’s”. It is. Back-building learning is necessary bring each child individually up to speed with 21-22 learning goals. Developing student proficiencies over such a wide spread of curricular goals will be hard; it is necessary to prepare children for 22-23.
The Big Duh!
Although Jimmy Duggan was not always an empathetic coach of the Rockford Peaches, he knew the game and that playing championship-level baseball was hard – “… the hard is what makes it great”. The scramble to cause children to learn in 21-22 will be monumental for everyone in school. Each staff member, including maintenance, food service, transportation, and not just instructional faculty, plays a role in transitioning school back to in-person teaching and learning, in-person school athletics, activities, and arts, and being a whole school once again. Some pandemic protocols will remain in place and evolve during the school year as community viral conditions change. The fall of the year will not be like the spring. A graphing of what we need to do in 21-22 is a steep uphill slope; a hard climb. At the top of the graphing, we will look toward 22-23 and a school more like what we knew and want again.
We have hard work to do.