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Would I want me to be my teacher?

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Mirrors sometime present both the best and the worst of ourselves. Standing before the glass we see ourselves as we are. Mirrors do not lie. At the same time, we see ourselves as we want others to see us. It is that dual impression that we must address. Are we who we think we are and is that who we present to others?

Let children be your mirror.

Years ago, I knelt beside a second-grade child to check how she was doing with math fact flash cards. Her face scrunched up in thinking as she quietly talked herself through the cards. I counted eight successful automatic responses to eight flash cards. She was nailing her math facts and then she nailed me. When I gave her a thumbs up for her math, she smiled then frowned and said, “Your breath smells like bad coffee.” Immediately I went from happy educator to crestfallen odor-monger. Her impression and my impression of me did not jive and I knew that hers was the only one that counts. That day I quit drinking coffee at school. I also began making a closer inspection of how the children I taught perceived their teacher.

I began by questioning the values I thought I brought to the classroom every day. I listed 15 statements of what I believe about good instruction that causes learning. These are six I held up to my mirror asking, “would I want to be my teacher?”

  • The purpose of instruction is learning. Is my instruction explicitly connected to the learning outcomes children need? The mirror says sometimes I enjoy the teaching act too much thinking the spotlight is on me. I need to assure that the spotlight is on learning children. If children are not learning, I am not teaching. Children need to see themselves as the most important people in my classroom.
  • Instruction causes every child to learn. How do I know that every child successfully learns the targeted objectives of each lesson? Truth – The mirror says this is a problem. The calendar and clock are not my friends. There is so much curriculum and so little time. I need to assure that all children learn the lessons taught even if I do not teach every unit or lesson this school year. I need to see evidence of learning before I move to the next lesson. Children need to see themselves as successful learners so often they believe it even though some lessons require more work to be learned successfully. Their frustration is my cue to teach better.
  • The learning environment supports student learning. Am I appropriately adjusting the environment to support different instructional strategies and outcomes? The mirror says I need to change the environment when I move from direct to inquiry- or problem-based instruction. Sometimes children need to face me and sometimes they need to face each other. It takes effort to arrange a classroom purposefully or move the class elsewhere in the school or outdoors. Effort that causes learning is effort well spent. Children need to learn to learn in multiple environments and that is my responsibility.
  • Because children learn at different rates and degree, learning is on their clock not mine. Does the curricular calendar drive me or guide me? The mirror says I call on the first hands to go up and end a lesson when most children are done with the assignment. I need to optimize wait time after asking a question, ask a clarifying question if a response is not clear to me, and individualize tier two instruction when first tier did not cause a child to learn. Learning takes the time it takes, and I will commit the time necessary.
  • Engagement is not optional although all children may not be equally engaged at the same time or in the same ways. How do I flex instruction to connect with all children? How well do I accept non-engagement when non-engagement for that child at that time is okay? How thorough am I in checking for involvement as the lesson unfolds? The mirror I do insist that children be on task and devote time to individualizing time with children who are not. Intellectually I know some children seem to learn innately, and others need to grind through the lesson to learn. I probably quick-time the grinders. I need to confirm that each is engaged in ways that leads to their individualized learning, let the grinders grind, and give the quick completers enrichment and extended learning opportunities
  • If best practice is best, why accept or do anything else. Duh! I don’t need the mirror for this one.

Once I started checking my assumptions, I confirmed some practices but needed to adjust others so that I was constantly moving toward best practices. However, my teaching soul can take only so much introspection before it wants to say “Ouch” and loses its critical focus. On another day I questioned other practices. Doing a professional introspection several times each school year keeps me from becoming stale and just teaching the same lessons repeatedly. At the end of ten years, I want my students to have a teacher who strengthened his teaching over ten years not a first-year teacher who repeated being a first-year teacher ten times.

After several rounds of introspection, I changed the question from “would I want me to be my teacher” to “would I want me to be my daughter’s teacher.” That really ramped up the critical review.

Back to the beginning. I never again knelt next to a certain young lady without a fresh wintergreen lifesaver in my mouth.

Integrity Matters:  Teach the Uncomfortable to Cause Deep Learning

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It is easy as a retired educator to bull my neck and growl at the social/cultural/political powers that demand schools teach their self-interested and slanted content and opinions.  I no longer have skin in the game or employment to protect.  I also have the advantage of location; Wisconsin is not Florida or Texas, thankfully, where legislators mandate curriculum, ban books, and threaten teachers who would teach differently.  Yet the fumes of bias drift all over our nation and cause educators to blink.  Can we teach uncomfortable topics to children today?  The answer is we must if we are to cause children to achieve deeper learning and understanding of their world.  Teaching anything in the realm of the uncomfortable is always couched within the guardrails of teacher professionalism for knowing what, when, and to what degree to teach any curriculum.  Our integrity as teachers requires us to teach the uncomfortable.

Why is this critical to educators today?

First, school governance has become the new focal interest for activism.  Partisan and ultra-partisan activism is embedded in our Congress and statehouses.  Bills reflecting the activist agenda are queued up for partisan majority approval.  Like an army of ants looking for new grass, activism in many areas of our nation is moving into school board meetings with demands of what and what not to teach.  They are proving a democratic truth that school boards are the real grass roots of politics and community action and approval.  School board meetings and their agendas are public and accessible.  A second truth is activism loves controversy.

Conflating ‘CRT’ and Equity: School Board Members’ Perspectives from the Front Line

https://www.tc.columbia.edu/articles/2024/february/can-school-boards-survive-the-parents-rights-movement

Second, the pandemic created tension between school boards and parents and the local community.  Disparate perspectives regarding school closure, masking, and vaccination requirements caused many communities to have animated and heated agreements and disagreements with their school board.  It was a two-sided argument with information and emotion on both sides.  Board rooms are used to contending with controversy.

Third, life in 2024 is confronted with facts and unfacts, truths and lies, and propaganda from all fronts.  Educators at all levels face the challenge of teaching children how to discern truth from untruth, bias in every perspective, and how to arrive at informed and defendable understandings.

https://www.ascd.org/blogs/confronting-the-uncomfortable-strategies-to-teach-enslavement

To post hole on a current hot issue, the Israeli/Hamas war brings one, two, and three above to the forefront of teaching decisions.  It is such a rich and problematic issue.  Children need to learn about the Holocaust, Zionism, the creation of Israel from a Palestinian homeland, the many conflicts between Israel and Arab/Islamic nations, human rights regardless of nationality or faith, Constitutional rights to speech and protest, and how colleges, universities, and cities respond to protesting demonstrations.  And the confusion of conflating religious beliefs with national/governmental actions.  To repeat, this is a rich and problematic issue.  It is a critical and teachable moment for teachers and children and for the profession of teaching.

Integrity

The Wisconsin Teacher Standards include “Professional Learning and Ethical Practice”.  Specifically, “the teacher uses evidence to continuously evaluate the teacher’s practice, including the effects of the teacher’s choices and actions on pupils, their families, other educators, and the community”.

https://dpi.wi.gov/education-workforce/prepare/educator-preparation-programs/wi-educator-preparation-standards

To teach with integrity today, educators need to consider how they will address this teachable moment against their understanding of the Ethical Practice standard.  There are many professional decisions tobe made for each teachable moment.

An example of teaching the uncomfortable.

In 1992 we took all students in the Whitefish Bay High School (WI) to see the motion picture, Malcolm X.  In 1993, we took all students to see Schindler’s List.  As the high school principal, I worked with our parent support groups to understand how each movie was a teachable moment for children in our Milwaukee suburb with a significant Jewish population and a significant inclusion of non-resident Black students from Milwaukee in our student body.  With parent support I worked with our faculty to gain approval and instructional designs for creating teachable moments outside our annual curriculum. 

Each movie provided an opportunity for pre-teaching, movie attendance, and post-teaching.  We provided parents with the option for their children to not see either movie and had meaningful, parallel curriculum for their study so they could participate in the pre- and post-instruction of what it meant to be Black in America in the context of Malcolm X and to understand the genocide of Nazi Germany against Europe’s Jewish population. 

The decision to do this was compelling but not necessary in the teaching of our usual curriculum.  It became compelling and necessary as we considered how to best teach our children about two issues, racism and ethnic/religious genocide, that pervade our national and world history.  Our ethical responsibility supported a decision to teach the uncomfortable.  I look back on our faculty and parents with great pride and with admiration for our superintendent and school board who supported our teaching the uncomfortable.  We took our students to the opening week showing of each movie and caused an indelible learning episode in their school lives.

Carpe’ teaching the uncomfortable.

School boards provide their teachers with a vetted and approved annual curriculum.  The decision to disrupt children’s learning of this standards-based instruction must be taken very seriously.  Taking an entire school to the movies is a big leap.  Teaching the uncomfortable is strategic.  It is not everyday schooling.  However, there is plenty of room within the approved standards of our social studies and ELA curriculum for inspecting the uncomfortable and contemporary issues of daily life and news.  Any discussion of campus protests over the Israel/Hamas war opens children to background, historical instruction, analysis of religious and national entities, and policies that support national treaties and human welfare.

Any discussion of economics opens children to background and historical instruction on the equity of all Americans’ access to property, employment, and financial security in their American Dream.

Any discussion of local school policies regarding gender and student access to school facilities and team sports opens children to a discussion of diversity.

Any discussion of nation, state, and local community opens children to a discussion of migration, population trends, ethnic and cultural diversity, and a changing, multi-cultural America.

An ethical position to teach the uncomfortable is high ground.

Children need a solid education in grade level and course curriculum.  Teaching the uncomfortable are strategic decisions designed to capture teachable moments.  It is not everyday work.  Some teachers are uncomfortable with the uncomfortable.  For the educator who is comfortable, there is room for many educators on the high ground of teaching the uncomfortable.  Grab it and teach!

Gone:  Three-sport Athletes and Bench Jockeys

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The Dodo Bird is our classic example of an extinct species.  Now add the traditional three-sport high school athlete and the bench jockey.  These well-defined categories in both boys and girls high school athletics are nearing extinction.  Their death knell is not due to predation or climate change or a meteor slamming earth.  They are on their way into the history book of school athletics due to specialization, elitism, and family self-interest.  Today’s athletic bench is reserved for boys and girls who specialize in one sport, are driven to be elite athletes, and have access to personal training, camps, and significant travel expenses.  Say it ain’t so, Joe, but it is.

Three-sport athletes were the backbone of athletic programs.

A three-sport athlete in the last century participated consecutively in fall, winter, and spring/summer sports.  Historically, and before Title 9, a three-sport athlete was a male who played football, basketball, and baseball.  Variants included cross country, wrestling, swimming, and track.  Each sport had a concise season and schedule of practices and games.  When one season ended another began and their game schedules never conflicted.  The most talented athletes were awarded twelve athletic letters, and their letter jackets were miniature and portable trophy cases.  Kids grew up seeing themselves on the high school teams and many made it happen.

Title 9 provided parallel opportunities for girls to be three-sport athletes.  Their variants include volleyball, gymnastics, basketball, softball, track, and soccer.  And today we add girls wrestling. 

Three-sport athletes were the backbone of a high school’s athletic teams.  Their athleticism and natural gifts allowed them to be starters at each of the school’s developmental level teams if not immediately on the varsity team.  Three-sport varsity athletes carried the Big Man/Woman On Campus moniker for generations.

Most three-sport athletes were not stars.  In fact, this high percentage were yeoman athletes and bench jockeys who played both for their love of the sport and a personal desire to be on their various teams.  Team membership, even just sitting the bench, was a big deal.

Winning became all that mattered.

In the 1990s our high school’s athletic leadership constructed a competitive scenario answering the question, “what is the optimal combination of athletes for a championship team”.  We considered three categories of athletes, boys and girls, and used basketball as our scenario sport.  A gifted athlete had five skill sets.  They were skilled ball handlers, shot with consistent accuracy, jumped high, had real foot speed, and were always aware of everyone on the court.  A highly competitive athlete had three or four of the five skill sets.  A good athlete had two or three of the five skill sets.

Given this scenario, if a basketball team had four gifted athletes and one highly competitive athlete, we believed a team was on track to a conference championship and WIAA play offs.  If a team had three gifted and two highly competitive athletes, they were championship contenders.  If a team had one gifted athlete, two highly competitive athletes, and two good athletes, they could make a good showing on game night. 

The scenario was premised on averages and the natural abilities of athletes. This scenario worked for decades.  Our school parlayed this scenario into state championships and multiple trips to the state tournament.  It worked until making a good show and being contenders were not good enough for parents of athletes.  The scenario, based on the skill sets athletes naturally brought to the team, worked until the obsession to win overrode the usual distribution of gifted, highly competitive, and good athletes.

The edge.

Gifted athletes are just that, naturally gifted.  Coaching and training do not create total giftedness.  However, for highly competitive athletes, foot speed, hand/eye coordination, and perceptiveness can be honed with coaching and training.  Ball handling and shooting skills also can be improved with coaching.  Specific skill sets can be improved.  The obsession to improve the skill sets of highly competitive athletes became the death knell for three-sport and bench jockey athletes.

The championship scenario changed when multi-sport athletes committed to the edge of improving their skills in just one sport and and became year-round athletes in that sport only. 

The championship scenario changed with commercial coaching and training.  Lay coaches grow athletic skills sets, but professional or commercial coaching and training add a new and higher level of skill set development.  A niche industry developed in specific sport training centers, clinics, and practice facilities. 

The championship scenario changes when a one-sport athlete competes on a regional or national level not just within the local community or athletic conference.  They are exposed to a higher level of competition amongst other highly competitive athletes who hold the same goal – personal improvement.  Elite training and competition are gifted and talented education in sports.

These three changes create the edge.  Each creates an advantage for a single or select group of athletes that grows their ungifted skill sets to an extremely highly competitive level.  With these advantages schools that traditionally not been champion contenders became champions or competed annually for championship trophies.

The final key to creating a greater number of highly competitive athletes is parental commitment of time and money.  Time and money are the engines that gives children access to professional training, camps, and clinics, to compete in regional and national events, and to sustain commitment over time.  There is a very real “keeping up with the Joneses” when it comes to family time and financial commitment.  “If my child is not getting superior coaching, clinics, and camps and is not traveling for competition, all the Jones children who do will have an advantage over my child.” 

Achieving the edge advantage begets elitism and in the arena of high school sports elite athletes get play time and recognition and non-elite athletes do not.  College coaches attend more camps and clinics and regional and national competitions than go to high school games because camps and clinics is where the elite athletes showcase themselves against other elite athletes.

The Dodo Birds are crowded off the bench.

Truly gifted athletes still can compete in multiple sports and be recognized.  They are the top 1-2% of all school athletes.  We see them annually ranked as Five Star Athletes on rosters of the nation’s high school athletes.  University and college teams subsequently are ranked by the number of Five Star Athletes they sign.  The non-gifted athlete who dreams of playing in college or professionally must commit to a single sport and with personal grit and family support grind through camps and clinics and regional showcasing.  

The only remaining multiple sport athlete is the kid who just wants to play and to be on the team.  But, for this kid, the bench is getting crowded.  Most school teams work with a given number of players on the team roster.  Post-season playoffs limit the roster, so rosters for the preceding season begin to reflect playoff rosters.  Bench seats are institutionally limited.

Further, the more single-sport athletes on a team who are committed to the edge, the fewer spots on the bench for the multiple-sport athlete and perennial bench jockeys.  It is a matter of numbers.  School coaches know that using a cut policy creates student and parent problems, but they also know that keeping a child who will never play on the bench creates a deeper problem.  Hence, bench seats are limited to competitive players and the higher percentage of competitive players are single-sport, edge players.

The athletic pyramid is getting steeper.

All athletes empty their athletic locker sooner or later.  They know or are told that their competitive athletic time has come to an end.  The statistical distribution of this “knowing” resembles a pyramid.  A great number of kids drop out of sports at the natural break points of elementary to middle school and middle school to high school and high school to college.  These are invisible departures; they just don’t show up for the next season. 

Other athletes depart when the increased competition pinches them off from bench seats and playing time.  It is an equation of time and resources versus perceived reward.  The diminishing reward of play time and team membership no longer motivates a child to continue with the grind of competing with edge athletes.  Regardless of what children are told about the intangible benefits of sports participation, they know their own realities in the changing world of elite athletes.

The edge advantages of single-sport athletes have made the dimensions of the pyramid grow very steep.  Fewer children either have meaningful access to school teams or game play time.  There are fewer multiple-sport athletes and fewer kids who are able to hang around the game sitting on the bench.

There are no roosting places on the steep pyramid for Dodo birds.

Change is inevitable; extinction is hard to bear.

Being Taught By an Unprepared Teacher Is a Mathematical Certainty

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The shortage of qualified teachers in our schools is real and if it has not touched children in your school yet it will.  I remember Andrews, the naval architect in the movie Titanic, saying to Captain Smith, “Titanic will founder (sink).  It is a mathematical certainty, Sir”.  He was not believed.  The Titanic was supposed to be unsinkable!  So, it is with less than prepared teachers in classrooms.  A school’s statement of “a quality teacher in every classroom” has the same credibility as believing the Titanic could not sink.  Your children will be taught by unprepared teachers; it is a mathematical certainty.

A shortage of teachers had been a long time coming, but it always was coming.  It always was a story of numbers.  Today there are more teaching jobs posted than candidates and the gap in this trend is widening not narrowing.  Principals in the 80s and 90s could unabashedly expect between 50 and 100 applications for a posted teaching position.  In 2022 too many postings for teaching positions did not stir a single application. 

Four reasons are engineering our shortage of classroom teachers.

  1. Starting a career in education is economically difficult to impossible.  The disparity between the cost of a college degree and teacher certification and a teacher’s salary during the first ten years of employment turn people away from becoming teachers.  Too many teachers are burdened with college debt and their salaries are inadequate for meeting today’s cost of living and debt payments.  Debt is driving teachers from the classroom and preventing others from a career in teaching.
  2. Public confidence in public education was dramatically damaged by the pandemic.  The work of classroom teachers was not the issue.  It was the political battleground of school closings, required quarantining, masking and vaccination, and the failure of remote and home-based learning that constantly grew parental hostility to public schools.
  3. The continuing inequality issues inherent in education have not changed.  As a correct generalization, children in wealthier communities and well-financed schools receive a better education and educational experience than children in impoverished and under-financed schools.  Everything from student-teacher ratios to midday snacks to enrichment field trips hinges on financing.  It is hard to recruit teachers to teach in under-supported schools.  These schools are plagued by a lack of prepared teachers.
  4. More teachers are retiring and resigning than are graduating from teacher preparation programs of any design.  Interestingly, we have enough people with a teaching license to place a prepared teacher in every classroom.  We do not have enough licensed teachers who want to teach.

State legislators are responding to constituent school districts declarations of teacher shortages by modifying statutory requirements for a teaching license.  To meet legislative direction, state departments of public instruction are creating a “buffet” of alternative strategies for awarding a teaching license.  Sadly, the buffet is becoming more of a snack bar.  These “buffet” options:

  • Incrementally reduce the requirement of a baccalaureate degree in education as the benchmark for a teaching degree.  Teacher licensing based upon a BA degree requires a candidate to have completed a broader array of course work in English, mathematics, science, and the social sciences.  This background education provides teachers with contextual information that more completely teaches children the “why and wherefores of answers” and not just if an answer is correct or incorrect.  Reducing background academic knowledge reduces the quality of instruction and learning.  Without adequate background knowledge teachers are unprepared.
  • Focus on how to teach and not how to teach children.  For example, a Career and Technical Education (CTE) certification program allows a candidate with a BA in a technical field and more than three years working experience in that field to complete a minimum number of instructional courses to qualify for a teaching license.  Too often classroom management, child psychology, testing and assessment, and teaching children with educational challenges are not included in CTE preparation.  Teachers who do not understand children are unprepared.
  • Eliminate student teaching.  The American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence (ABCTE) offers a teaching license based upon virtual course work and exams.  No student teaching is required; if you can pass tests, you can teach.  ABCTE says so.  The practicum of student teaching is how unexperienced teachers become prepared.  Without student teaching, children are guinea pigs for unprepared teachers.
  • Keep reducing teacher preparation to place an adult in the classroom.  Legislation is pending to allow a person with an associate degree and experience as a Teacher Aide to be eligible for teacher training.  Legislation is also pending to allow a person with a high school education to work as a substitute teacher.  This returns us to 1900 when an 8th grade graduate could teach elementary school and high school grad could teach secondary school.  It is the Cadillac of unpreparedness.

There is some hope for the future as school boards increase teacher compensation.  There is some hope as the federal government attempts to reduce student debt.  There is some hope as schools return to the look of pre-pandemic stability.  There is some hope that public confidence in public schools will return to a positive value. 

But trends, like the Titanic, do not change course easily.  A course correction for the Titanic or a public institution takes time to affect and during that time more harm is inflicted.  While it was a mathematical certainty the Titanic would sink due to a rip in its hull, the employment of unprepared teachers need not sink public education.  If we value public education, the trend toward the employment of unprepared teachers will reverse itself.  But it will take time, if we value public education.

“Yesterday Is Gone And There’s No Getting It Back”

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I hear Robert Duvall’s voice as Augustus McCrae in Lonesome Dove say, “Yesterday is gone and there’s no getting it back”.  There is no false fact in his words.  We can do things differently going forward, starting right now if we choose, but we cannot redo what was or what was not done in our rear view mirror.  To the point: the education of children during the Time of COVID beginning last March and to this date is part of our history.  Whatever children as students have learned or not learned across these five months of two school years is their yesterday and there’s no getting it back.  The issue is what we will do for their future.

Take Away

The physics of time remain irrefutable – we move forward not backward.  We can attempt to re-interpret our understanding of our past, we can attempt to change the inferred value of what we experienced, and we can attempt to re-knit experiences into a different story, but the realities remain the same.  Learning experiences that did not happen did not happen.

Educators at their best are teachers and often reteachers and correcting teachers  It is a fact in our work that 100% of our students do not learn 100% of what they are taught 100% of the time.  As educators, we constantly are working to teach again, reteach, clean up what was mislearned.  We strive to create a quality of learned knowledge and skill sets when initial teaching and learning are not successful.  RtI programs are designed to improve the percentage of successful students by scaffolding this continuing teaching and learning. 

Compensation is a different beast.  We compensate when we accept the fact that something did not occur, was not achieved, or missed the mark by creating strategies to counteract that reality.  We counteract the reality with a new, parallel status quo.  Or, we apply equal or greater effort in opposition of what occurred in order to rebalance things.  Applied to schooling in the Time of COVID, many children did not learn and are not learning the curriculum they typically would learn if there were no COVID.  In the next months, we will assess and understand the differences between what was expected and what is.  And, as these yesterdays are gone and there is no getting them back, we will compensate.

What do we know?

The COVID Effect to the education of children to date is that a percentage of the learning we expected to accomplish in the close of the 2019-20 and the current 2020-21 school years did not happen and is not happening as intended.  To see the total landscape, some children are exceeding our school-based expectations and some are not.  Our assessment may show that some children flourished either as at-home learners of school instruction or as learners of virtual curricula from non-school providers.  We observe highly motivated AP students digging into their school-based assignments and online AP resources who will score the 5’s on their AP exams this spring.  High personal motivation at any time, COVID or not, is an ingredient for personal success.

We observe Kindergarten children who walk into a K-classroom mid-year where in-school learning have been delayed since September and demonstrate mid-year or better reading skills.  Parental support of school-based K instruction or parent substitution for school-based teaching has been highly successful.  We observe children at all grades and in all subjects who have enjoyed strong parental support for school-based learning, good Internet connection, and exercised personal commitment to their school work and are where they would expect them to be at this point in a school year in terms of their academic learning.

At the same time, we observe children who are the opposite of flourishing.  Causes abound and reasons can be understood.  The reality is that too many children at all grade levels and in all subjects have not learned their intended curricula.  Or, any curricula.  The reality is that some children have separated from our school entirely and will not return.  Some children were clearly idled by lack of school connections – Internet, personal, social – they were idled and stranded.  Their parents may not have sought other options because options were not available or due to time and/or money not obtainable.  The COVID Effect for manny of our continuing children is that across the yesterdays of their schooling, we/they were not successful in causing them to learn.  Yesterday is gone and there’s no getting it back.  Today we begin compensating.

Why is this thus?

We shall not generalize a compensatory strategy.  This is not a philosophical statement, but a descriptor of our reality.  If a school has 500 children enrolled, today we have 500 different educational stories.  Parse this among the 13 grades of a K-12 education and every grade and subject hold children spread across the field of expected learning, including motivated, diligent and supported students and students who were largely disconnected from school.  We cannot generalize a solution or remedy or compensatory strategy to rebalance all children in their school-based learning.  There are and will be groupings of children who demonstrate common needs for whom we can apply a common compensatory strategy.  We need multiple, well-designed compensatory strategies.

We shall not generalize educational outcomes.  There is no time like a crisis to evaluate what is essential for your well-being and future prosperity.  Annual curricula is a daisy chain of scaffolded learnings.  Each link in the daisy chain is essential for next learning.  Some single links blossom into multiple strands of curriculum.  Consider multiplication and division, then fractions, then Algebra.  Every school child knows this daisy chain first hand and many experience the challenges of manipulating fractions on their way to Algebra.  No fractions – no Algebra.  These are essential learning. 

But, is everything in an annual curricula essential.  As we cull 180 days of instruction, the scope of required compensatory education can be reduced.  If we could get yesterday back, we would not need every yesterday to prepare for our future.  Our compensatory strategies must be essential learning.  We will fill in the rest as we can when we can.

Compensatory teaching and learning will be woven into ongoing teaching and learning.  A child in fifth grade needs her compensatory instruction as well as her ongoing fifth grade instruction.  If not, we only trade lost yesterdays for lost todays and she will still behind where she needs to be tomorrow.  Weaving is a good verb for this teaching and learning.  Educators can do this.

Education is roundth not length.  Our yesterdays are not just academic, but contain all the elements of child and student development.  Again, we cannot generalize gain or loss because the COVID Effect treats different children differently.  That said, we need to explore our expectations for child experiences in creativity, artistry, musicianship, craftsmanship, intellectual development, exploration and inquisition, tradesmanship, entrepreneurship, physical and athletic development, collaborative and collegial capacities, and social-emotional development.  We need to know how children have grown in every aspect of a school-based education, not just academics.  A compensatory strategy just became much more difficult.

To do

Understand the learning status and needs of each individual child.  COVID is a universal pandemic but education is a personal endeavor and experience.  While our pandemic strategy moves children en masse from in-school to at-home and back, from in-class to quarantined based upon health data, and does these on a daily basis, we need to treat each child’s compensatory as an individualized and personal story.  The education of each child needs to be brought forward.

Chew what you can bite off.  The work will be in bite-sized chunks.  These are child-sized bites.  If compensation were a vaccine, what was lost could be regained in a moment.  As there is no quick fix, educators must create child-sized mini-curricula that in the aggregate create a child’s up-to-date education.

Get it right.  What a sin it would be if we compound what has been lost with less than our best work now.  Checking for understanding is required at every intersection of old and new learning and new learning upon new learning.  If a child is not solid in their compensatory learning, the entire design fails.

Think effect not time and effort.  A COVID Effect strategy will not be completed in what remains of the 2020-21 school year.  If we work on personalized educational needs, in bites, and ensure quality learning, our work will stretch well into the 2021-22 school year.  If we really are interested in compensating all children for the downside of their COVID Effect, this will be time well spent.

Don’t do what you can’t do.  A non-educator might tell us, “In the future, all children must be able to speak Mandarin”.  Whereas, we might agree with that futuristic educational outcome, it does not fit into the scope of necessary work in the Time of COVID.  Curriculum is always in a state of change, but now is not the time for large scale overhauls.  Tweak what would normally be tweaked and create child competence in the taught curricula.

The big duh!

Educating children remains our culture’s most noble enterprise.  In the Peanuts cartoon, a character asks, “I wonder what teachers make?”.  The other character says, “Teachers make a difference”.

The Time of COVID has clearly laid out the parameters of the magnificent difference teaching needs to make in the lives of children today.