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Commonweal in the Time of COVID

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The Time of COVID causes us to ask a variety of essential questions regarding who decides who should do what.  Mask up.  Socially distance.  Wash hands frequently.  These are three personal behaviors that have been at the heart of mitigative behavior during this pandemic.  The decision to do any of these ultimately is left to the individual.  Do I do these because I should or because I am told to?  What does the commonweal require of me?

Opened or closed businesses?  To gather or not to gather?  State and local governments provide guidance and issue mandates without unanimity of purpose or design regarding these two questions.  In general, the business of WI is business and businesses are open for business.  School?  854,959 children were enrolled in WI schools in March, 2020, when COVID threatened our state and nation.  Immediately, the Department of Health Services enacted our Governor’s order to close all schools for the remainder of the school term.  Teaching and learning became virtual for all. Immediately, the issue became partisan debate of who decides who should do what.  Since then, political rancor has left the question of in-person or remote education up to local school district debate.  In almost every issue of personal and organizational behavior during the Time of COVID, the essential question is “what does the commonweal require?”.

Commonweal is a 14th century term for the happiness, health and safety of all of the people of a community.  The archaic term is used to describe goals and programs intended for the common good of people.  The constitutions of Kentucky, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania describe their states as commonwealths.  The word, commonweal, is appropriate in considering personal and organizational behaviors in the Time of COVID, especially regarding schools.

I find three citations in the WI Statutes that relate to the question of pandemic, schools and commonweal.  And, who decides who should do what.

WI Statutes 119.18 (6) School Board Powers – School Calendar tells us “The board may determine the school calendar and vacation periods for each school year for the regular day schools, summer schools, social centers, and playgrounds.  The board may close any school or dismiss any class in the event of an emergency, fire or other casualty, quarantine, or epidemic”.

WI Statutes 252.02 (03) Communicable Diseases tells us “The department (DHS) may close schools and forbid public gatherings in schools, churches, and other places to control outbreaks and epidemics”.  Further, WI Statutes 252.03(2) says “…a local health officer may forbid public gatherings deemed necessary to control outbreak or epidemic”. 

It is clear that in the Time of COVID, education is a continuing and uninterrupted program for the commonweal.  The WI DPI issued guidelines for the continuing education of all children during the pandemic and waivers that relieve boards of education from specific, mandated requirements, such as annual statewide assessments.  Absolutely, no allowances have been made for stopping education during the pandemic.  Teaching and learning for all children must proceed.

The issue is who and where.  Can school boards gather teachers and children at the schoolhouse for daily instruction?  Who decides?

119.18(6) considers a school closure within the context of adjusting the school calendar of instruction.  Days of instruction may be set aside for holidays and other observances.  Days may be set aside for seasonal vacations.  Days of instruction may be set aside in response to an emergency, such as fire or other casualty, as in water or electrical outage or weather damage.  The calendar is adjusted to accommodate these closings.  Days may be set aside for quarantines, as in an outbreak of measles or other childhood illness.  The calendar is adjusted to accommodate closings for these reasons.  In this statute, the Board is authorized to adjust the school calendar not close schools.

Epidemic?  I wonder what the writers considered in inserting this word.  There has been ample time since the Spanish flu pandemic and the polio epidemics to clarify the term.  Ebola, swine and avian flu epidemics touched the world but not Wisconsin.  Is epidemic rhetoric or specific?  Does the statute require the board to adjust the calendar of instruction to accommodate an epidemic?  All other closures are short-term or matters of displacement to another place where in-person instruction can continue.  Did the writers anticipate six months to a full school year, perhaps multiple years, to be a calendar disruption?  Or, is another statute appropriate; one that addresses the endangerment of epidemic disease upon community health not epidemic upon the school year calendar?

252.02(03) and 252.03(2) consider a school closure in the context of communicable disease.  The concept is that the gathering of community, children, teachers, and all staff, in a schoolhouse during a health emergency, such as an epidemic, is unsafe for the public health.  School could be a spreader event.   

Of interest, our Governor immediately closed all WI schools last March for the remainder of the 2019-20 school term.  He declared the spread of COVID to be a state health emergency.  Subsequently, the governor’s declaration was challenged by partisanship and his power to declare a statewide emergency was curtailed by the WI Supreme Court.  And, that was the last action taken by public health in the Time of COVID.  All communication from the WI Department of Health Services since is worded as community and personal guidance and recommendation and purposefully exempts schools.  WI statutes regarding schools and public health in the TIME of COVID have been neutered.

That leaves local school boards alone to decide the commonweal not from the perspective of public health but from their authority to amend the school calendar in the event of an epidemic.  School boards will tell who to do what.

Not to demean a school board, but we are lay persons elected and empowered to govern local schools on behalf of our constituent community.  Although a person with a medical or public health background may be elected to the school board, 99.9% are generalist residents with a commitment to local public education.  A school board’s commonweal is schooling not public health.  The powers and duties of a school board are described in WI Stat 118.01 and public health is not mentioned.  Yet, here we are.  Lay boards in 421 Wisconsin school districts are making 421 independent decisions of the commonweal for their respective school community’s public health.

Some children are receiving in-person instruction in-school.  Some children are receiving instruction at-home from in-school teachers.  Some children are in-school one, two or three days each week and home the rest.  Some children who receive in-school instruction are quarantined when a classmate, teacher or bus driver experiences a positive COVID test.  Fourteen days at-home and then back to school, perhaps until the next positive test. 

Lay school boards are doing yeomen’s work in sustaining a continuing education for all children during a statewide public health crisis.  School boards say who will do what according to WI Stat 119.18(6) School Calendar.  This is the condition of our commonweal in the Time of COVID.

Quality Indicators of Remote Education: Curricular Integrity and Accountability

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Curricular integrity matters, especially in the Time of COVID.  Before and after this pandemic, PK-12 instruction in our schools was and will be based upon district-approved courses of study.  Adherence to the adopted curricula assures that instruction is standards-based, developmental, and contains necessary modifications making it accessible by all children.  Instruction during the pandemic is not a bridge over the disruption of schooling, but must be a clear roadway through the disruption that connects all children with the requirements of their pre- and post-pandemic educational needs.  All children need to be receiving their district’s approved curricula now regardless of instructional delivery.

Let there be no doubt that March and April, 2020, put almost all school districts into an emergency mode.  With statewide, local or school board orders to close campuses to daily school attendance and shift to virtual and remote education, the issue of what to deliver was secondary to the issues of how to deliver.  The first concern was how to connect school-based instruction with at-home children.  To abuse the term, virtually all teachers were virtual instructors and all children were virtual students.  We learned the mechanics of synchronous and asynchronous teaching and learning.  Curriculum was then attached to these new delivery systems.  And, in the early school months of the pandemic, connecting children to education, any education, satisfied our immediate needs.

I hear from parents in our local school district that they believe the remote lessons their children were provided last spring were better than the lessons children are receiving this fall.  Further questioning clarifies that those early lessons were perceived as more fun and entertaining, easier to engage in, and took less time and effort to complete.  Children were on-screen for less time and happier with their on-screen time last spring as compared to this fall.  When asked if the lessons that were more pleasing were clearly connected to their child’s ongoing lessons from September through February, it was clear that most were not although some were close in nature. 

I also hear that lessons this school year are clearly connected to the school’s curriculum.  They are similar to the lessons children in elementary grades and secondary courses received when they were in classrooms at school.  These lessons use the school’s curricular resources and are connected to the school’s assessments of learning.  This is curricular integrity.

Why is curricular integrity important?  A child really has one school year per grade level and one semester or year per secondary course.  A spiraling curriculum and academic development does resurface content, skills and dispositions that were taught earlier, but every re-emergence is an elaboration of complexity and sophistication.  The spiral assumes that grade level learning has been accomplished. 

Additionally, time and expectations do not stand still for the pandemic.  This year’s fifth grade students will pass to middle school, eighth grade students to high school, and this year’s seniors will graduate.  This will happen without an asterisk indicating that their academic progress was less than otherwise due to the pandemic. 

Our schools owe it to our children to maintain curricular integrity so that their learning is of a quality that meets the needs and demands of their respective futures. 

Quality Indicators of Remote Education: Mastery of Time

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Online teaching is not difficult; it is different.  Once we understand and learn to work with the differences, remote education becomes another scenario among many for teaching all children.  Educators are educable, don’t you know.

When we approach in-school teaching of at-home children, our first focus is on the technology involved.  Cameras and screens.  Many small faces on a device’s screen.  No children physically present in the classroom.  Each of these is true.  But, technology is a false front of difference.  Our laptops, chrome books, IPads, display boards, cameras and screens also are present in classrooms filled with children. 

Time, not the remoteness of children or the new arrays of technology, is the critical difference between in-person and remote teaching and learning.  It is consideration of and use of time that we must master in order to become effective remote educators.  Once this is done, remote education is only an alternative teaching strategy.

As remote educators, we are relearning these characteristics of instructional time.

Time is a package.  A lesson in most public school classrooms occurs within an envelope of minutes.  In a secondary classroom, a math lesson occurs within the minutes of a class period.  In an elementary classroom, ELA, reading, math, science and social studies each have an identified amount of minutes in the school day.  When ELA time is up, the lesson moves to the next subject.  A unit of instruction requires a number of lessons and, as each lesson requires time, so units span weeks of time. 

Time is finite.  The minute hand on the clock moves marks the beginning and ending of instructional time.  When the clock says the class is to begin it begins and when the clock says the class is over, the class is over.  Schooling is ordered by the clock and the number of finite minutes allocated for instruction .

Time is visible.  On a regular school day, school bells or tones sound to begin time for teaching and learning and their ELA materials and take out their math materials.  Children understand this – they watch the clock and know how the flow of a lesson and time work.  Any classroom observer sees children each day who know there are only so many minutes in a lesson in which a teacher may call on them to speak or answer a question or perform.  Outside of those minutes they are anonymous in the classroom.  They know that the first minutes of class are settling in time and the last minutes of class are packing it in time.  Children see time differently than teachers see time.

Instructional time must be optimized within known attention spans.  Studies tell us we can generalize a child’s attention span to be 3 to 5 minutes per the child’s age.  A Kindergarten child can pay attention for approximately 15 to 25 minutes before they begin to drift.  Children with learning disadvantages may have lower attention spans.  A 3rd grade child can pay attention for 24 to 40 minutes.  Effective lessons must be crafted within these attention spans – connection with prior learning, initial instruction, modeling, guided practice, checking for understanding. 

https://blog.brainbalancecenters.com/normal-attention-span-expectations-by-age

Attentive focus also is dependent upon whether or not a child finds the topic of her attention to be meaningful and personalized.  As soon as she determines that what she is hearing, seeing or doing is not, she drifts away from paying attention. 

At-home learners are vulnerable to losing attention due to factors outside the teacher’s domain or control.  We are not aware of what else is happening in the child’s home, what is off-screen, or the child’s state of readiness to learn prior to connecting online.  This heightens the need for compact, compelling, meaningful and personally-connecting instruction.

Time must be front-end loaded.  Teaching at-home learners is a “get what you can when you can” proposition.  For this reason, instruction needs to be front-end loaded.  Within the finite envelope and while you have a child’s attention, provide necessary initial instruction.  The longer into the lesson a teacher waits to deliver necessary instruction, the less likely it is that a child will engage.

Time for student work is off-screen time.  The most egregious complaint of children and parents regarding remote education arises when a teacher requires a child to be on-screen for hours at a time.  Don’t do this.  When the lesson moves to independent practice time, disconnect from screen time.  Let children do their reading, writing, and math assignments off-line.  Let children connect with other children as part of their time not part of their on-line time with a teacher.  The more a teacher allows children to work off-screen, the more children will engage with a teacher during instructional time.

Time lost is not equally regained.  When a child perceives that on-line schooling is a waste of time and begins to disengage, the time it takes to get the child to re-engage is never regained.  A child who sits passively watching an in-school teacher lecture for a full class period quickly hits the off-screen button. On-screen lecturing is a major cause of secondary student disengagement.  And, it takes far more time to re-engage a child than it would have taken to sustain engagement from the beginning.  In remote education, lost time really is lost time.

Time is accountability and accountability creates persistence.  Teachers who understand the relationship of time, high quality lessons, and personalized relationships demonstrate everyday that children who are engaged in these well-crafted, on-line lessons stay engaged.  Children respond to teachers who hold them accountable as learners BECAUSE the teachers are accountable for a quality use of time.  These child persist and are succeeding as at-home learners. 

These are not necessarily new or earth-shaking revelations about how to effectively use school time.  They are, however, incontrovertible truths – violate them at your peril.

Quality Indicators of Remote Ed – Personal and Daily Connections With Every Child

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Remote, distanced, virtual, hybrid – none of these are our public school tradition. Yet, for many teachers and children today, these are their pathways to a continuing education in the Time of COVID. Let’s consider how these strange yet necessary pathways can work to cause all children to learn.

We need to begin a discussion of best remote education practices with this proclamation. Some teachers will excel as remote and online teachers and some teachers will fail. This does not defame those who are uncomfortable, ineffective or inefficient as distanced educators. Our faculties are selected and hired to work in direct contact with children. Personal relationships are essential to causing learning. Remote education’s screen time is a game changer. The lack of daily, person-to-person presence disrupts if not completely baffles many teachers. This does not mean that ineffective remote teaching cannot be improved. Where there is willingness there is a way. Where there is a “must” there is a “can do”.

Personal and daily exchanges between a teacher and each of the teacher’s students are essential if we are to overcome the distancing required of remote education. The key words are “daily” and “personal”. Best practice is a personal exchange between teacher and child every day. It takes time. It takes planning. It takes commitment. Personal contacts are irreplaceable. A day with a personal talk between a teacher and child is the best prevention of student disengagement, because disengagement is the educational disease of COVID.

Personal exchanges are “you matter” moments. The greatest loss in distanced education is the personal connection between teacher and child. We need work-arounds that re-establish personal conversations.

• A daily one-to-one screen chat or a personal telephone call is a classroom lifeline to a child at home. And, this is not just for a young, elementary child only – it also is true for seniors in high school. After initial instruction for a lesson has been given to all children, shut off the broadcast and let children work independently. Children do not need the distraction of what other children are doing and not doing. Use this time to make one-to-one screen chats or telephone calls to one child at a time.

• Personal means personal. This talk time is only about the child and the child’s school work. You my inquire about health and safety and how the family is doing. And, then you need to get to the school work.

“Tell me how you will start this assignment.”
“Let’s talk about this sentence in your writing.”
“Tell me about…”
“How did you feel when…?”
“Tell me more …”

The conversation only needs to last several minutes. Enough for the teacher to assures to the student that her teacher is committed to her learning every day.

• Personal contact is student-centered. The conversation is not about the teacher or teaching. This call is not about any other student. It is all about the called child and that child’s learning. Do not introduce other school or class issues. If you have five minutes, make all five about “this child”.

• Link consecutive calls. “Yesterday we talked about … let’s go on from there.” Linked calls provide continuity for a child. They expand the lesson from the moment into learning over time. “Yesterday you said … What are you thinking about that today?” “Tell me about what you did in reworking that math problem.”

• Do this every day. Make it your #1 priority. Make a daily contact with each child your COVID Resolution. This is more than possible because it is so utterly necessary. Like so many preventative measures, the total amount of time required for daily contacts will be far less than the time and effort to re-engage a disengaged child.

• Personal is the sound of your voice. Get off screen and use a telephone. Not a text. Not an e-mail. Your voice talking to the child’s voice. Teachers frequently forget that the sound of voices, their voice in particular, is distinct and unique. A teacher’s voice has special meaning for a child. Many adults still recall the sound of a particular teacher’s voice, her speaking mannerisms, and with that sound the words she spoke. Make your voice heard by your students by speaking to each one individually.

• Make a record of your daily contacts. One purpose of the record is to ensure that all children are being contacted with regularity. A second purpose is to provide you with the reinforcement that comes from committing to and doing a necessary task. A long and continuous list of made connections easier to sustain than restarting an on again and off again pattern.

• Principals will pay attention. One element of your principal’s assessment of your work as a teacher of distanced children is how well you maintain contact with each child. Your commitment to personal and daily contacts and your record of these assists your principal to validate the effectiveness of your remote teaching.

There will be a day when all children will join their teachers in their school classrooms. Teaching and learning will return with highly personalized, daily conversations between teacher and child. The distancing caused by the pandemic need only be an inconvenience not an obstacle to the continuity of personal and daily connections.

A commitment to personal and daily contacts now during remote education will make a day when everyone is back in school a gathering of people who know each other well – not a meeting of people who saw each other only as distant and impersonal faces on screens.

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.