Facing 2021

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Current Affairs, Elementary | , ,

I’ve hosted dinner parties in the last couple of weeks with fully vaccinated friends. It’s been delightful to see people again, face to face!

So many of those adults shared stories of how hard this year has been, how much they’ve struggled, how exhausted they are. We’ve talked about the need to rest. To recuperate. To do art and music and get exercise. To stop pushing to get everything done. 

Then I think about the kids returning to—possibly—full time school next year. And two SBA tests. (Lord have mercy! Why couldn’t we just acknowledge that this was a horrifically bad year and drop one test entirely?)

I heard an interview with a psychologist on the news the other day who said we won’t be able to “return to normal.” We will have to transition. It will be a process. It will take time.

Personally, I think we will have to focus on social and emotional learning (SEL) at least as much next fall as we have during remote and hybrid learning. For several reasons, “many students will need increased mental health support as they transition back into a full-time academic environment, and as they struggle to manage grief, anxiety, or other emotional responses to recent events.” We are going to need to monitor students, not just in the first weeks of school, but for months. Our schools will need a response plan in place for the year. We need resources and more resources.

One year I had a student die. I led my students through their grief. We wrote cards to the parents. We attended the memorial service together. We had an assembly. We planted three trees and set a plaque in the garden in memory of their friend.

memorial trees

It was A Big Deal when we changed desks a few weeks later. As everyone cleaned their desks, I cleaned out Kyle’s. When we moved desks, I made sure his was in the mix. No one knew who ended up with his desk.

“Wait, where’s Kyle’s desk?”

“It’s gone,” the kids said.

“Like Kyle’s gone,” someone added.

“Kyle will never be gone,” was the fierce reply.

We read some short stories at the end of the year that elicited yet another highly emotional response and discussion. Kyle had died months earlier.

We are going to have classroom full of students who have lost a family member or a family friend—someone they know. Imagine the compounded grief and the emotional echoes that will reverberate all next year.

I know how long trauma can linger in a classroom. I’ve seen it.

This year I’ve had parents call me, in a twist, worried that their child will be academically behind next year. I’ve said, “No, they won’t. The entire country went through the same pandemic. Everybody’s kids struggled with remote learning and Zoom lessons and connectivity issues. Your child won’t be ‘behind’ because everyone will be set back the same amount.” The parents breathe a sigh of relief.

On the other hand, I’ve had parents tell me that they aren’t pushing their kids to achieve this year. If the kids get their work turned in—eventually—the parents really couldn’t care less about the quality. I tell those parents that I understand. There is a limit to what we (teachers/schools/districts) can expect out of families when everyone is overwhelmed.

I think the very worst thing we could do next fall is walk in the door with the attitude that all our students are months and months behind and we have to get them all caught up in the space of the next nine months. “If we don’t get them caught up next year, we will have failed.” Even worse: “If they don’t get caught up, they will have failed.” “Failure is not an option!” Buckle up, kids, it’s pedal to the metal from the first day of school! 

Adding that level of stress to kids—and their parents—will be a disaster. We don’t need to be in launch mode. We need to be in recovery mode.

Instead of looking at the students who come into my fifth-grade classroom next year as “fifth” graders, I need to look at where they are. I may actually have a class of “fourth” graders, in terms of achievement. I need to start there and work forward at a reasonable pace.

Meanwhile, next year I should do art (therapy), music (therapy), and poetry (therapy). I want kids to journal, sharing their experiences, their stories, and their feelings.

I want them to heal.

According to my husband, who chairs a coworking community group, business people are doing that kind of social-emotional work right now. Adults recognize how important that work is—for adults. Kids are going to need extra SEL support next year too. 

Media Literacy: 21st Century Critical Thinking

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Education, High School, Life in the Classroom, Literacy, Social Issues, Teacher Leadership, Uncategorized | , , ,

Divided We Fall?

I’m sure there have been many times in history where it seemed like our country was irreconcilably divided. The Civil War is of course the ultimate example, with the Civil Rights movement closely following. But, all year, I have felt the strains of teaching in a cultural climate that seems both at odds with reality and finally aware of grim truths about our collective history.

I have students whose Google ID photos proudly ask to Make America Great Again , and others who display the light pink and blue flag that signifies their transgender identity. While there are always a wide range of opinions in the classroom, these differences between students feel more like cavernous divides.

 There have been several points in the year, particularly around the presidential election,  where I was a little glad I didn’t have students in class. Glad, at least, that I was the only one who had to read the vitriolic message from a student asking why we have to read about the sanctity of Black lives. Glad I could shield my students of color from his anger and unkind words that were rooted in fear, rather than empathy.  

As a teacher, the line between what is political and what’s appropriate in the classroom is blurry at best. And, when we are all bombarded with media from every angle and avenue, it seems impossible to combat disinformation. 

I’ve always found that teaching media literacy and critical consumption of media is important, but this year, among vaccine skepticism, conspiracy theories about stolen elections, and claims of learning loss, these skills felt even more pressing. My job is not to teach my students what to think, but how. 

So, this year, when I dove into media literacy and argument writing, I strove to bring the real world into the classroom. If I could prime students to at least pause and critically think about what they consumed, I’d call that a win. 

A Picture is Worth 1,000 Words 

One particularly poignant lesson my student teacher created was around the power of images and captions across different media. 

We went over connotation and denotation, and she then presented examples of images with different captions. She asked students to see how the image and their understanding of it changed based on those differences. 

For example, when students saw these two, several swore that she lightened the second photo because they noticed the brightness of the sun and trees, even though nothing but the caption changed. 

While she created the above image for the purposes of our assignment, I saw and remembered myriad examples in the real world. 

This summer, when protests for racial justice broke out across the country, I paid particular attention to Portland and Seattle where headlines diverged wildly. They were called everything from “Antifa mob” and “riot” to “peaceful demonstrations.”  Without being there, it was hard to parse the truth. Some images depicted Portland burning, while others showed a wall of mourners, holding candles. Two wildly different reports of the same story, with two very different connotations, interpretations, and impacts. 

Then, as we were wrapping up our unit, Biden announced his two trillion dollar spending package, and two different news organizations posted very different accompanying photos. One of Biden, the president, and one of Alexandria Occasio Cortez, even though she wasn’t involved in the legislation and openly said that it was “not nearly enough.” Why, then, was she included in the headline? 

These and subsequent lessons on analyzing images helped students realize the persuasive power that lay in small choices that are far from arbitrary. Captions are short, so every word matters. And yes, a picture is worth a thousand words, and our increasingly shrinking collective attention spans, they might be the most important thing a viewer sees.

Read Between the Lines 

While a caption on a forested trail might not be high stakes, the protests over racial injustice and government spending most certainly are. Students, like most media consumers, are so used to the near constant stream of information that they don’t often take a moment to pause and analyze what they’re seeing. 

Honestly, it was only because I was teaching this unit that those different posts about the infrastructure bill caught my eye. We’re so used to being bombarded with content constantly that it’s hard to remember to stop and think. 

After completing this unit, and her research on defining the police, one student told me she realized the issue was much more nuanced than what she had seen on social media. She went into her research against the movement, but ended up doing her project in favor of defunding. 

As with many well meaning, surface level media consumers, she understood the issue to be a false dilemma between police state or mass chaos, and she was actually fairly shocked when she learned more details. 

I don’t want my students to become cynical, but I do want them to recognize when they are being sold a bill of goods. I want them to understand how words and images intentionally play together to convince a specific audience. I hope these lessons at least helped them think twice. 

And, amidst rampant misinformation, fears, and theories around COVID vaccinations, I’d like to run an adult refresher course too, while I’m at it. 

 

Wednesdays

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Wednesdays are saving my life right now.

Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays, I deliver in-person instruction for 335 minutes each day (down from 350 minutes per day pre-Covid, mainly because we had to make room for rotating lunch periods, which increased passing time).

During that 335 minutes of face-to-face time, I also work in a varying amount of time to simultaneously zoom with my students who remained fully remote.

During those 335 minutes, I say I “deliver in-person instruction,” but I’m a big believer that the person doing the work is the person doing the learning, which means that I work hard to shift the cognitive load to my students… getting them doing, talking, reading, writing.

To shift that load requires deliberate planning and preparation.

And shifting that load means students produce work which deserves feedback and guidance.

When people criticize teachers’ complaints about our workload, I wonder if the public envisions the old school university prof standing in front of the class lecturing. Let me tell you, lecturing is easy. I’m at the stage of my career where I could lecture your ear off for a ninety minute block no problem, no prep on my part required…just give me a topic and a time limit. Plus, the students are just sitting and “listening” so they aren’t generating work that needs feedback or assessment. Is this what people picture when they imagine the work of a teacher?

Anyone with any knowledge of teaching and learning knows what research confirms: that sort of marathon direct instruction, the endless lecture and notes method, is wildly unsuccessful for the massive majority of learners… especially teenage learners compelled by law to attend as opposed to university students paying top dollar to get their college’s name on a resume.

Good teaching requires preparation, intentional design, and feedback (which is sadly, the easiest to let fall to the wayside when time is tight). When I’m at my best, the ratio is easily 2:1, two minutes of preparation, assessment, and feedback for every one minute of student contact.

Add to the whole mix collaboration with colleagues, communication with families, and email…so many emails…and the finite resource of time quickly is exhausted.

Which is why Wednesdays are saving me right now, and why our current Wednesday routine is one I’m hoping we can continue into our post-COVID transition.

Right now, Wednesdays are full-remote days for our student body. Students are off-campus (except for small group intervention or scheduled appointments with staff), and teachers have created independent learning experiences that students continue to engage with. The pressure here is to ensure that the “homework” we design is effective and advances learning… and considers the varied non-school environments that our students may be learning from.

But Wednesday, sans structured student instruction, enables us to make home contacts, collaborate with peers on instructional design, provide feedback on student work, and build more responsive lessons.

Yes, these are things we’d be doing anyway. But now, there is time to do that work within my work day.

I’m still up at 4 or 5 am to read student work or fine tune the day’s lessons.

I’m still at school most days well after my “work day” is over, and grabbing moments to lesson plan or respond to emails while I cook dinner or help my own offspring with homework.

But Wednesdays are saving me because, for the first time in my career, I at least feel like the system actually considers what my real work is… and is giving me time to do that work at work.

Would I rather my work be doable within my work day, not overflowing into the early mornings and late evenings? Of course.

Wednesdays are a start. We have all this talk about shaking up our system post-COVID. The quality of those moments we spend in front of kids is the direct result of the quality of those moments we spend planning to be in front of kids.

We know our system needs to change, and the systemic and predicable inequities of our students’ experience prove that. System change isn’t just about policies or trainings or different curriculum. How we structure teacher time, in my opinion, is the highest leverage change we can make to our system. Without that change to the fundamental structure of our schools, all the other efforts will be for naught.

Your Turn: Good Choices

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We’ve turned the corner toward the last 25% of the school year, and so much has changed. Since March 13, 2020, administrators and teacher-leaders often found themselves in no-win situations where no matter the decision made, some stakeholder will inevitably be left unsatisfied.

However, some choices have had a positive impact. Our StoriesfromSchool bloggers share below their thoughts on this prompt: What school or district decision (or policy) do you feel has had the most significant positive effect on students?

Check out their answers, then add your own reflections in the comments!

Gretchen Cruden

Our school decided to provide half-days of learning Monday-Thursday  for the entirety of this 2020-2021 school year for grades K-8. This has allowed daily contact with our students and negated the connectivity challenges we face  in our remote area. This continuity of learning has allowed the majority of our students to remain on track with their learning. It has also allowed teachers to serve the needs of the families we have who opted for a distance-learning model. Having this type of contact has certainly helped fulfill our students’ need for socialization as well.

Lynne Olmos

Our school is going above and beyond to make sure kids get free meals and wifi, whether they are in-person or remote. We have upgraded our community communication methods to ensure that all families have up to the minute communication. (Although, on a comical sidenote, when we arranged for Spanish translation for phone calls to families, some have been inexplicably translated into French, to everyone’s confusion!) Overall, everything we have done to maintain a sense of community has held us together. We were the only ones in our region to go hybrid (face-to-face in, half of the kids at a time) in September. Although it was controversial, it was good. Our students have been able to be in small classes  where our relationship-building has been our strongest asset. Due to the need to switch to remote when we have had to quarantine, we have become flexible and more capable of remote teaching and communication, plus we have strong relationships with the students. It has been a steep learning curve, but many of the new changes will be good as we go forward.

Leann Schumacher

In my district, our unique remote learning schedule has provided us with a lot of flexibility in how independent time is used. We have two 30 minute blocks each day for teaching whole group mini-lessons and the rest of our time (affectionately labeled “marigold time”) is to be used at our discretion. With this system I have the ability to hold regular small groups, meet with students one-on-one, and proctor math/reading diagnostics with ease. Giving teachers autonomy in how they use the “marigold time” has made a huge difference in how I instruct my students as well as manage my own time. In addition, we have 30 minutes built in each day just for morning meetings. Especially in a remote learning environment, having that solid 30 minutes to connect with my students has made a world of difference in my ability to make real connections and build solid, trusting relationships with my students.

Inessa Bazelyuk

My district ran a campaign in 2014 that helped pass a technology levy.  The levy allowed middle and high school students to check out ChromeBooks to bring home. Over the years the levi also allowed elementary schools to provide their students with one to one technology. When school closure began  last year the students in my district were comfortable using ChromeBooks at all grade levels. My school managed to distribute ChromeBooks to over 80% of the student population in the two days we had to prepare for the school closure. This levy helped equip the majority of students and staff for online learning.

Jan Kragen

I agree with Lynne that free lunches are crucial. Every student has a laptop, and I think everyone has wifi now. 

The other thing that I appreciate at the elementary level is that there is less of an emphasis on grades and more on social-emotional learning. Most of our professional development last fall was about building connections and engagement, using Classroom Compacts and RULER.

Denisha Saucedo

My district has asked each teacher to start the day with SEL (social emotional learning). This is HUGE. Students need a chance to explore their emotions and this is time set aside for just that! They need time to explore how to engage in positive relationships,  feel empathy for others,  set goals, and problem solve. SEL is the key to student ownership and developing their ability to recognize just  how “normal” their emotions are. SEL time, along with community building, unlocks their ability to see, with more clarity, the path that leads to growth and success.

Along with this, both the principal and vice principal have made it their goal to connect one on one with every student in the school! In our building, the goal is to bridge a path forward, to maintain a healthy growth mindset! This is not only for students, but for staff, families, and community members. We recognize the current situation is challenging, but not impossible.

Mark Gardner

The school where I teach was the first in our district to start serving small groups of students on-campus back in September. We tried a variety of iterations of this (kids physically moving through their ‘bell schedule,’ for example) and realized that the reason many kids benefitted from in-person contact was just that: It was in-person contact. So much of education, particularly with disenfranchised kids or kids public ed has abused, is about forging and maintaining interpersonal connections. There is also the indisputable fact that our custodian is a rock star, making sure protocols are followed so that everyone, staff and students alike, are safe.

Emma-Kate Schaake

I think our school has done an incredible job supporting students and making decisions that put students’ well being first. We implemented an “academic stimulus” at the end of the first semester. This moved the lowest end of the grading scale, making a passing grade as low as 50%. In the last week of the semester, students who were struggling  around 30 or 40% suddenly had a glimmer of hope.  If we have the ability to be empathetic and extend grace, we absolutely should. No one is at their best right now, even though we are all working incredibly hard. Students have physical, mental, and academic barriers that we simply don’t know about. Just as many Americans received stimulus checks to get by during this crisis, our students deserve our flexibility and support as well. If we can provide that in the area of grades (which are arbitrary anyway), I am all for it. 

Supporting Intellectual Pursuits through a Wide Range of Academically Rigorous Clubs

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High School | , , , , , , , , , ,

Chess made me think of my high school’s clubs. I went to Los Gatos High School in the Silicon Valley, and I wanted to see if the offerings at my alma mater would appeal to the Highly Capable (HC) kids I teach. Plus, I wanted to share offerings your school might not have thought of.

Like other students, intellectually advanced students take part in a wide variety of extracurricular activities:

  • athletics
  • arts
  • ASB
  • drama
  • music
  • yearbook

Adults tend to recommend service clubs to HC students, like:

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Caste: A Moral Call to Action

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Books, Equity, Professional Development, Social Issues, Teacher Leadership | , , , ,

The House We’ve Inherited 

I am an unapologetic book nerd. Perhaps this is not a surprising trait for an English teacher, but lately, I find myself diving into nonfiction with the same fervor as I would a captivating novel. It just seems there is always more to learn (and unlearn) and my reading list is infinitely growing. 

This past month, I had the opportunity to spend four weeks facilitating a small group discussion as a part of CSTP’s WERD book study of Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson. I can honestly say that reading this book has forever changed how I view our country’s past, present, and future. 

I know I can’t do this incredible book justice, so I won’t even attempt a poor summary here. Instead, I just strongly encourage everyone to read it. Especially educators. The caste system that Wilkerson lays out as the foundational framework of our nation has dire implications for every facet of our systems, including education.

Wilkerson has numerous apt metaphors for caste, but her analogy of America as an inherited old house particularly resonates with me. While it may seem beautiful from the outside, it has deep structural issues worn from generations and it’s maintenance can’t be ignored.

She writes, “Not one of us was here when this house was built. Our immediate ancestors may have had nothing to do with it, but here we are, the current occupants of a property with stress cracks and bowed walls and fissures built up around the foundation. We are the heirs to whatever is right or wrong with it. We did not erect the uneven pillars or joists, but they are ours to deal with now. And, any further deterioration is, in fact, our hands” (Wilkerson 16).  

I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard arguments such as “my grandparents didn’t own slaves” or “I’m not a racist, I love all my students,” which both are branches of the same tree. They work to distance the speaker from any accountability, and move them past uncomfortable feelings of shame toward more palatable places of ignorance and inaction.  

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Anti-intellectualism in American Schools

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Current Affairs, Education, Equity

How many of you watched The Queen’s Gambit? Lots of hands up? Good.

I had a visceral response to two scenes. In the first, highly-ranked American players from around the country played chess in a high school gym. There are a few people scattered in the stands, some dozing. No reporters. No cheering fans.

In the second scene, a similar group of chess players was in a swanky hotel in Paris. There were reporters and attentive spectators. 

The images stuck with me long after I finished the show. I thought about that American game and how different the place would have looked if it had been a weekend varsity basketball game.

Our nation applauds talents and gifts in sports, building gymnasiums and stadiums, supporting teams with booster clubs and cheerleaders.

America, though, has a strong anti-intellectual streak. It’s been that way all my life, but in my view, it seems to be worsening in recent years. That anti-intellectual bent reaches all the way into our educational system.

Jonathan Plucker, a professor at Johns Hopkins University who focuses on making accelerated education more accessible to disadvantaged students, says, “The ideology is turning against excellence. We are institutionalizing anti-intellectualism, and that has long-term implications for us.”

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Finding Hope in the Remote Wilderness

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Distance Learning, Education, Education Policy, High School, Mentoring, Online Teaching, Social Issues

Since the Coronavirus pandemic began in March 2020, teachers and students have been thrust into remote learning. A year has passed since classrooms have become Zoom rooms and while some students are starting to go back, others continue to learn from home — creating an opportunity to reflect on this journey.

An article titled “The Crushing Reality of Zoom School” had the tagline:, “We’re only a few weeks in. We can’t keep doing this.” This was an interesting read because at the time of the article (September 2020) we had no idea how things were going to play out. The author talked about the toll “Zoom school” was taking on families, and the difficulties his children faced engaging with online learning.

However, I had one striking takeaway: the lines between home and school have become infinitely blurred. The author wrote, “There’s a lot of humanity visible through the Zoom windows. Every day we log on—teachers, children, parents—and, invited or not, we enter tiny portals into each other’s lives.”

Remote schooling has invaded students’ most personal parts of their lives without their consent. Students with complicated home lives suddenly found their peers joining them in spaces they wouldn’t normally share with the world. For many, their personal spaces were gone. In turn, cameras went off, participation dropped, and for some, showing up to school was no longer an option for them.

As an educator, teaching to little black squares was disheartening. With lack of nonverbal communication, we struggled to know if our students were connecting to anything we were saying, or worse yet, if they were even physically at their computer. But, it’s not our place to force ourselves into spaces we wouldn’t normally be in or command that we be welcomed into those spaces.

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Giving Grace around Graduation

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Assessment, Current Affairs, Education Policy, High School | , , ,
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Earlier this month, Governor Inslee signed into law a bill intended to start a chain of events that I’m optimistic will lead straight to the students I teach.

EHB 1121 essentially authorizes the State Board of Education to establish procedures for local schools to grant credit waivers to certain graduation credits on a case-by-case basis for students impacted by events beyond their control.

There are several things I like about this. One, it isn’t limited to this year: it establishes a protocol which can be applied when a student’s education was impacted by local, state, or national emergencies.

Two, this part: School districts may be authorized to “grant individual student emergency waivers from credit and subject area graduation requirements established in RCW 28A.230.090, the graduation pathway requirement established in RCW 28A.655.250, or both” (page 2, lines 7-10 of the law as passed, which you can read here).

That last authorization is key to authentic flexibility. There are a variety of ways that students may have been impacted this year, and the “waivers from credit and subject area” requirements will hopefully give us some leeway. Some kids might have engaged in their art electives because it helped them cope with what was going on in their world, but might have struggled with distance-learning chemistry class. Conversely, another might have thrown themselves into the latter and felt unequipped to engage in the personal vulnerability that might have been plumbed in the former. The language about “credit and subject area” waivers allows us to take either situation into consideration, and not withhold a diploma from a student who was not able to check the box next to that last art or science credit.

While I do believe that the graduation pathways were a positive step forward, I am relieved that they are included in the waiver, since their nascency in policy might have meant that the COVID years would have been their first attempt at full implementation in many districts.

Bigger than all of this, though, is what the need for this bill reveals about our high school graduation credit system as it is.

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Night School For Kindergarteners

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Current Affairs, Distance Learning, Education, Elementary, Equity, Online Teaching, Parent Involvment | , , , , , , , , , ,

Equity is a buzzword in education. We hear it used by staff, administrators, and presenters. Under regular circumstances the practical application of equity seems to fall short of the ideal. During a pandemic, ensuring equity for students when teaching digitally becomes an almost insurmountable challenge. 

This school year my district stepped up to tackle this challenge with an innovative approach: an evening school option for elementary students. 

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