There have been few times in public education when educators have required professional association more than we are experiencing in the Time of COVID.  While health protocols require us to be socially isolated not only from children but from each other, we have a tremendous need for professional conversation – to share the challenges and solutions of schooling, leadership, teaching and learning, and supporting others in our school.  We need to hear and see the real-life work of our peers, and to uplift each other personally and professionally.  The combination of personal and professional stressors can become an overwhelming burden.  We need the strength of professional association now.

More than anything else, professional association tells an educator “You are not alone!”.

Take Away

The metaphor that we are in a war against COVID is not trite.  It says it all.  It provides the context for behaviors and expectations in which a war is waged.  War is not our normal condition.  We are seldom prepared for it.  War is not a democratic process.  It is imposed by forces outside our consent.  In a war, everything that is usual and customary can be discarded by daily reality or by decree.  Usual practices are replaced with emergency measures.  War requires our acquiescence to arbitrary and unusual rules.  We may rebel against the emergency measures until we or those close to us become war casualties and then our rebellion seems futile.  A pandemic is a wartime culture.

Wartime builds alliances and in the Time of COVID professional associations can be an educator’s best source for multi-alliances.  These alliances are necessary because wartime culture quickly disorients everyone into “we and they” groups and “me, all alone”.  Traditional and distinguishing differences between groups in our schools – teachers, administrators, office staff, custodians, food service, drivers, children, parents and community residents – want to remain although their continuation can paint people into actions and statements which may seem oppositional to each other.  The real and perceived threats of COVID to the personal health, the financial health, the community health, and the professional health of every person becomes the most important issue for each person – personally.  While the war against COVID is waged widely in every community in our nation, its impact is unbelievably personal.  Every person has a valid right to say “COVID or the threat of COVID has affected me/my …”.  No one is unscathed.

Professional association helps us gain perspective by aligning our circumstances and stories with others who work “in our shoes”.  They tell us that, indeed, we are not alone and that others like us are scathed yet continue to do our work toward a non-COVID future.

What do we know?

Professional associations abound for educators.  There are national associations with state affiliations for every educator depending upon professional assignment, subject area specialty, school level, and student disaggregation.  I want to quickly acknowledge the national and state associations and move to the more essential value of local and in-school associations.

A quick Google provides these examples of national associations for educators. There are hundreds more.

• National Science Teachers Association
• NEA
• American Federation of Teachers
• Council for Exceptional Children
• International Reading Association
• American Educational Research Association
• AASA
• NASSP
• NAEP
• WASB
• ASCD
• Phi Delta Kappa
• National Art Education Association
• American Association of Physics Teachers
• Association for Middle Level Education
• National Council for Teachers of English
• National Council for Teachers of Mathematics
• National Council for the Social Studies
• National Association for Gifted Children
• ASCD
• American Association of School Librarians
• ISTE

Read, watch, listen, and engage.  Our ubiquitous, digitized world allows us to be professionally connected wherever we are.  I, for one, read/watch/listen and write every day.  Most often, I am not able to mass my minutes to do so.  I use the odd 10 to 20 minutes throughout the day to start, stop and finish an article in a journal, podcast, audio clip, YouTube, or post.  My IPad and phone keep me professionally connected.

More importantly for in-school educators!!

It is the in-school, down-the-hall, faculty and staff associations that will carry an educator through the pandemic.   No one in a professional association’s editorial offices knows your working conditions like the person in the classroom, office, or workstation next door to yours.  Professional publications inform, uplift, and motivate.  But, no one outside your campus understands exactly how your Pandemic Plan affects your daily ability to do your professional work and how it affects you – professionally.

Why is this thus?

I am reminded of the binding camaraderie that develops when first-year teachers enter a school or when a first-year educator bonds with an experienced mentor.  The group of first-year teachers find each other and share with each other in ways that transcend friendship.  In their immediacy, it is the sense of a common rookie status to create each person’s professional entity.  Rookies flock together because us they lack the assumptive knowledge that comes with experience.  They build their knowledge by talking and sharing with each other.  In later years, the sense of trust derived from their rookie seasons keeps them close as professionals. 

This binding also takes place when a person new to an assignment aligns with an experienced mentor.  Their connections transcend time.  My mentor of 50 years ago and I still share e-stories.  We have insider knowledge and history that no one else shares.

I observe this camaraderie among teachers, custodians, secretaries, teacher aides, principals, district office staff – it is universal.  It is personally and professionally essential.

Every educator is a rookie in this pandemic.  No one has assumptive knowledge based upon prior pandemic experience and all are seeking mentors.  This pandemic requires educators to build their camaraderie through the personalized and everyday reality of facing and overcoming large and shared problems.  The insider relationships fashioned now will blossom even more in the post-pandemic.

To do

• Re-establish the strengths of best collegial practices.  Tell others what you are doing, how you feel about your work, and how you are dealing with the pandemic pressures.  The root definition of the term collegial is a shared responsibility among colleagues or peers.  Today, it is a responsibility to share.  Stressful times call for an increase in collegiality not a decrease.  Talk to each other, if not in person through phone calls, text messages, and e-writing.  Colleagues talk with each other.

• Move from collegial to camaraderie – there is a difference.  Colleagues live in the professional world and comrades live in a more personalized professional world.  The pandemic is making every story very personal.  Mind the difference and use it to your mutual benefit.  You will not be comrades against the world, but comrades against the ways that COVID are causing you to work as educators.  This commonality helps to allay the feelings of separation and working alone.

• Be strengthened by the affirmation of your peers.  Most Pandemic Plans create closed office and classroom doors with little to no opportunity for physical proximity.  There is no gathering in a common prep area, a lunchroom, or a staff meeting room.  Hallway and parking lot talk are not inappropriate – just not safe.  Take time to share your professional work with others and listen/watch others share with you.  This is no time for silent observation – affirm each other’s work.  The more you affirm others, the more affirmation you will receive.

• Build trusted and reliable voices.  In our state, teacher unions and local associations helped to build professional connections.  While legislation neutered unions, it was not a death knell to the need for professional collectivism.  Educators may not choose to certify in order bargain as a group, but they can join as a professional voice.  The isolation caused by mitigation protocols that demand isolation can give rise to misunderstandings and misinterpretations.  Trust requires conversation.  Conversation requires a willingness to speak and to listen. Trust your collegial voices.

• Work in the big picture window.  The first order of schooling is to educate children.  All other discussions support that order.  There really are no “Yes, buts…”.  Accept this and then work out the details. 

• Build the future.  Schooling in the post-pandemic will not snap back to the pre-pandemic.  New knowledge, skills, and dispositions about education are developing and these will need to be accommodated in post-pandemic education.  Professional voices will be necessary to sculpt this newness into future practices.  If we can bring our collegialism, camaraderie, best and affirmed practices, collective voice, and big picture thinking to these issues, a post-pandemic education will serve our communities and their children well. 

The big duh!

The pandemic will subside due to the alliances of medical resources and the alliances of people committed to living and working through a war on a disease.  The devastating tragedies of death and illness will be mourned for years to come.  Honoring and never downplaying these, today’s children require all educators to stay the distance.  Their future depends upon the quality education we provide during the pandemic.  The quality of our associative work today has a direct bearing on the education of these children.