Tag Archives: pandemic

Our Children’s Eyes Are On Us

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A fellow school board member reminds us frequently, “Our children are watching us”.  These words alone cut to the quick of every discussion and issue before a school board.  The board’s actions must reflect decisions that are in the best interest of the children attending our schools.  Noble words?  Yes.  Mission-based words?  Yes.  Easy words to enact?  Not always. 

In the politics of school government each constituency except children has leverage.  Parents hold the choice card.  If they disagree with board decisions, they can choose a different school.  Teachers and staff hold the employment card.  There is a statewide shortage in every category of school personnel and a school board knows it.  Decisions that cause an unexpected resignation or retirement may create an opening that cannot be filled or, if filled, with a less experienced and qualified person.  Community residents hold the voter card to be played at board elections and more importantly in the constant flow of district referenda.  A failed referendum denies school needs.  And, recall elections of school board members are at an all-time high in 2021.

What about the children?  Children do not choose their school.  Children do not provide a necessary employment to the school.  Children do not vote.  Yet, children loom constantly in every board action as their education and nurturing are the only things that really matter in public education. 

Two questions should haunt every board member’s mind in their discussion and voting on board motions.  How will this decision affect children?  What lesson of responsible adult behavior are we teaching our children?

Today, it may be that the second is the more important question.  Are adults, board members and constituents speaking and acting like role models for children?  If children said and did the things they are seeing and hearing in our behaviors, would we discipline them for their inappropriateness? 

I was always whipsawed as a child between adults who said “Do as I do” and “Do as I say”.  The lesson of growing up right was to take the best of what you are shown and the best of what you are told to create a model for your adult behavior. 

Yet, when I watch YouTube clips of adult behaviors in some school board and local government meetings this year, I wonder where the adults went.  What I see in too many stories are not the role models we want children to emulate.

Three concepts from ages past pertain.  Respect, civility, and common good.  Almost every school mission statement or list of student goals contains words about respect.  On an everyday demonstration, we want children to show a considerate regard for the feelings, wishes and wants, rights, and traditions of others.  Children tend toward outbursts of the moment, brashness, and acting and saying without a second thought. 

It is the second thought of consideration that reigns in disrespect. These are learned and practiced behaviors that help children over time to achieve the second word – civility.  Civil behavior, somewhat of an archaic term, is courteous, restrained,  responsible, and accountable.  Civility follows the Gold Rule of treating others as you wish to be treated.  Accountability is an essential part of civility.  An adult does not get to say whatever comes to mind without consequence.  Respect and civil behavior combine to shape discussions for the common good. 

Teaching children to consider what is best for others not just self advances their progress toward maturity.  The common good is not ethereal, it is tangible.  School boards face decisions in which special interests are apparent.  Any decision that gives advantage to some at the disadvantage of the many is not in the common good.  On the other hand, a decision that improves the condition or status of a small group and equally shares that improvement with all is in the common good.  The pandemic is providing school boards with a constant arena for considering their decisions in terms of the common good.  This is a test; are we up to this test.

The children are watching us, their school board, to observe and learn from us.  While they may not have material leverage, children have the moral leverage.  We adults know we are supposed to be adult-like in our interactions with each other in our board meetings.  Very often I would like to use instant replay mechanisms from televised sports.  “Time out!  We are going to review what these people said and how they acted toward each other.  We will break down this clip to identify respect, civil behavior, and working for the common good.  Let’s see what we can learn.”

At the end of the day, children will grade us using the same rubrics we use on them everyday in school.  They have been watching and they know us for what and who we are.

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.

A Need for Principal Leadership and Supervision of Instruction in the Time of COVID

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“COVID 19 and student learning in the United States: The hurt that could last a lifetime” is the title of an article by McKinsey.org.  The authors make a compelling case that changes in COVID 19 educational practices need to happen today in order to lessen the loss of learning by children, the loss of educational productivity by K-12 graduates, and the loss of school-community interactions.  The issue, they write, is not to prevent the loss but to lessen the loss that is inevitable.y.org community interaction.  The issue, they write, is not to prevent the loss but to lessen the loss.

https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/public-and-social-sector/our-insights/covid-19-and-student-learning-in-the-united-states-the-hurt-could-last-a-lifetime#

Take Away

We are all in the COVID 19 pandemic for the long haul.  Mitigation, improved treatment, development of promising vaccines, and herd immunity together add up to several years of future life in pandemic-mode.  Schooling will be affected by COVID.  Traditional classroom teaching and learning will be exception and not the norm.  Any prior educational disadvantage will be a greater disadvantage to an equal and equitable education for all children.

That is such a downer paragraph.  Although it is true, it is not a reason for pessimism or defeatism.  Educators know how to teach to children is pandemic mode.  Schools know how to organize flexibly so that, given health data, children can be in-class as often as possible.  And, when children are not in-class they can receive the best remote education, including on-line and hand-delivered instruction and learning materials.  We can do this.

What do we know?

There is an element of best educational practice that is absent in most school pandemic designs that must be present if we are to lessen the degree of our children’s educational loss. 

A supervision of instruction and learning is a constant and proactive force in assuring that school curricula is being taught with fidelity, that teaching is directly connected with student learning, and that all children with exceptional needs prosper from their adapted educational programs.  In short, focused administrative supervision of teaching and learning holds schools accountable to the educational outcomes children need to achieve.

Principals and instructional leaders are playing huge and essential roles in organizing schools for teaching and learning in the fall.  They are sitting in and contributing to hundreds of meetings with school boards, school committees, community committees, and local health care leaders.  They are writing new pandemic rules and regulations and publishing these in online and in distributable handbooks.  They are locating and purchasing mitigation supplies, taping classroom floors and hallways for social distancing, erecting see-through barriers in classrooms and offices where distancing is not possible, mapping the bus delivery for school-to-home lunch programs, and determining screening and quarantining procedures for exposed teachers and children who are in school.  As a group, they are fully engaged in the logistics of education.  These needs will not go away in September – they will be a constant.  However, they are not the supervision of curriculum and instruction that teachers and children will need after school starts.  The supervision of teaching and learning is more important now than ever before.

Why is this thus?

Instruction in the Time of COVID can be an inadvertent return to black box teaching and learning.  When teachers are in their classrooms, each classroom is a one-room school operation.  Social isolation protocols say that only essential people – the teacher and students – may be in the classroom.  Visits are prohibited.  When teachers are on-line, they are in a tunnel of communication with students that is closed from other viewers.  When teachers are providing hands-on learning materials to children, the interaction is in a personalized backpack.  In each of these scenarios, teaching occurs in a literal black box, difficult to observe and more difficult to supervise.

Unsupervised teaching with all good intentions tends toward the expedient.    Work is planned and executed in the immediacy.  A rule of statistics is that over time all data trends toward the mean.  In the Time of COVID, average is not good enough.

To do

Principals are the engines of school site leadership.  They set not only the expectations for educational outcomes to be achieved but uphold the standards of teaching by which those outcomes are achieved.  In the Time of COVID, these standards must be accentuated.  The longs list of must do jobs must include:

  • Hold regularly scheduled faculty meetings.  The first step in keeping all teachers connected with each other and with their supervisors is to meet.  Virtual meetings meet this goal.  Just as teachers say to students in a remote lesson, “I need to see your face.”  Teachers seeing teachers faces is connection #1.
  • Sit in and observe in-class teaching when children are present.  Connection #2 is a principal’s classroom visits.  Wash your hands, mask up, keep your distance and get into every classroom.  There is no black box teaching when the principal is a regular visitor.
  • Sit in and observe in-school teaching to at-home learners.  Observe teachers at their work doing remote education.  The lesson is the same as if children were in the classroom.  Better yet, sit on camera with the teacher.  Let children know that you are present in their learning as well as present in the teacher’s teaching.
  • Join Zoom meetings.  Most teachers will create an automatic “join” for their students to connect with daily classroom teaching.  “Join” in and see the classroom from a student’s perspective.
  • Require teachers to submit lesson plans for a unit of instruction.  The rituals of teaching do not change because of the pandemic.  Teachers should submit lesson plans for units of instruction for 2020-21 just as they did for the 2019-20 school year.  Principals need to observe and validate that lessons comport with units and units comport with district curriculum – even in a pandemic.
  • Observe modified instruction described in IEP and 540 plans.  It is too easy for the instruction of exceptional children to become lost in the sea of work.  The active participation of a principal is the best assurance that plans made are plans enacted.
  • Observe enriched and accelerated instruction described in G-T plans.  The needs of students for enriched and accelerated instruction, like students with special education needs, continues in the pandemic.  It is too easy for teachers to say “regular education is good enough” for G-T students.
  • Review student assessments with teachers.  Teachers can access and use the school’s student data system from the classroom and home, so all student assessment scores can be recorded and observed.  Absent score reports alert a principal to a child who may have difficulty engaging or lacking home support.  A child who drops out of school during the pandemic may do so invisibly.  A principal who checks the regularity of submitted assignments and tests and quizzes can catch a potential drop out before the child wanders too far to return. Reviewing student assessments with teachers has the added benefit of quality control.  In a black box, assessments provide the necessary checks of understanding that physical proximity and observation can provide.  A review also assures that assessments include higher order thinking questions.
  • Check backpacks used for the delivery of instruction to at-home students.  Children at home who do not have any of adequate Internet access rely upon the daily delivery/pick up of school assignments.  Checking backpacks is quantitative and qualitative assurance that already disadvantaged children are getting what they need to achieve their annual curricular goals.
  • Complete the scheduled teacher effectiveness protocols.  The state statutes mandating schedules for teacher effectiveness evaluation are not suspended during the pandemic.  Principal work in implementing the district’s evaluation system must continue albeit in ways modified by the pandemic. 
  • Hold all scheduled IEP meetings and staffings.  Principals and instructional leaders work for the needs of exceptional children in IEP and accommodation staffings.  Once the IEP or plan is written and approved, these leaders assure that plans are implemented with fidelity, appropriate assessments are conducted, and progress data is shared with the IEP team, including parents.  The fact that meetings may need to be remote does not alter the need for meetings.
  • Constantly communicate the district’s plan that all children will be provided their annual grade level and subject area course curriculum.  Against the published beliefs that the current generation of children will be irreversibly harmed by their loss of learning due to the pandemic, principals are the front line of assurance that all children are being taught for the purpose of achieving their annual curricular goals.  The assurance needs to be realistic in pointing to slides in achievement data and equally realistic in the school efforts to ameliorate the temporariness of those slides.
  • Constantly communicate the district’s plan that at the end of the 2020-21 school year all children will be academically ready for the 2021-11 school year.  School districts have various personnel who make public announcements.  From the superintendent to public relations, people of different roles make comments.  However, school principals historically are the most centered and accurate reporters of a school’s work during times of emergency.  Principals have direct communication with school parents and community members and, to paraphrase a generalization about politics, all important school news is local.

The big duh

In the Time of COVID, a school principal is the “go to person” for almost every issue regarding her school.  However, all COVID-tasks are not of equal importance nor of the same priority.  When teaching and learning begins this fall, the job of instructional leader and supervisor must be at the top of each principal’s daily to do list.