Category Archives: Parent Involvment

The Exodus

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Current Affairs, Education, Education Policy, High School, Life in the Classroom, Middle School, Online Teaching, Parent Involvment, Professional Development, Teacher Leadership, Uncategorized |

Are you here to stay?

For some educators, it is the end. They are leaving the classroom. Others are leaving their current positions, changing their teaching assignments, seeking the change that will heal the damage, the damage of the last three years.

It’s hard to fully analyze what has happened to our profession. So much has changed, and these changes are real and here to stay, whether or not we are.

Let’s break it down into a few chewable bites.

Loss of Control

We educators take years to establish control in our classrooms and in our practice. But, the pandemic stripped away our control. Suddenly, we were tasked with solving unsolvable problems, such as how to continue educating students who were no longer in our classrooms. As students returned, we had no control over the work we could expect from them. Expectation had to be lowered, or we would have experienced prolonged failure for our students and ourselves. Then, close on the heels of the subdued and masked, return to schools, this year brought us a marked increase in behavior issues. Unhappy students, fueled by TikTok challenges, anti-public education sentiment, and pent up emotions, vandalized our schools, stole from us, threatened us, and refused to comply with the simplest tasks.

Loss of Respect

With parents on a national scale accusing us of teaching inappropriate materials, violating their students’ rights with mask mandates and quarantines, and having unrealistic expectations, what should we do? Some students parrot the words of their parents, disrespecting public education in general and their teachers specifically. No matter the hours we put in, the changes we endure, the new training we take on, the tears we shed, we are not always seen as allies in the public eye.

Loss of Hope

The statistics are rolling in. We are going to see the effects of the pandemic and the staggering economy on student achievement for years to come. We face the prospect of appearing to fail at our life’s work for many years to come. We have experienced the effects firsthand in our classrooms with students who are easily a year or more behind, not just academically, but developmentally. We are tasked with the continued problems of inequity and achievement gaps, the threat of gun violence, the ongoing lack of mental health support, diminished resources, and a world full of false narratives and propaganda that we fight on a daily basis, just trying to help our students discover their own truths.

Loss of Joy

There is less time for play, for art, for relaxation in the school setting. The urgency around learning loss and solving the problems growing in the system is driving us away from one the most important elements of education. Students and teachers need to find joy in learning and in being a community. Without it, there is less engagement, less safety, less overall satisfaction in the experience of teaching and learning.
It is tough to face all of the loss and carry on, but we must. Of course, some will not come with us on the journey ahead. We certainly understand their need to seek a new profession or remove themselves from uncomfortable situations. However, the rest of us need to rally and carry on in a way that restores the loss.

Let’s be clear. Restoring the loss is not a call to return to normal. There is no normal, no make education great again rhetoric. We need to embrace new solutions to the problems we face.

If we want control of our profession, we need to lift our voices and let our needs be known. Teacher leadership efforts all but disappeared in the pandemic. It is time to step back into the role of advocates and leaders. What do we need? How can we get it? Why do our voices matter? Who is willing to listen and give us the agency we have earned through our experiences.

If we want respect, we need to face this issue on two fronts. First, in the classroom respect is not a given. We cannot stand in front of a group of young people who have suffered through the last few years and demand, because we are older or we are the authority, that we deserve their respect. When you study the effects of trauma on children, you start to understand that traumatic experiences tend to create an aloofness in children. They do not automatically trust adults. Without trust, true respect cannot exist. To earn the respect of students, it will take time. Teachers will need to focus on the safe and supportive environment they provide in the classroom. They need to model the respect they want to receive. That is the only way to get it from kids who have been struggling. On a larger scale, our respect as a profession will also take time. We need to openly advocate for the safety and support of our students. Our voices need to be heard, so that the false narratives have some competition. And, maybe most importantly, we need to reach out to families and communities, including them and opening our doors. When they see what we do for kids, they will have a deeper understanding.

If we want hope for the future of education, the time is ripe for innovation, creativity, and entrepreneurship. Seek and share solutions to our common problems. What works? What helps our students? What makes us happier in our classrooms? For me, I am diving deeper into trauma-informed teaching practices and brain science. The pandemic gave me the opportunity to put my work online and expand the resources I provide to my students. I am not pulling back from that; I am leaning in. I am embracing technology as a way to open up a world of knowledge for my students, and I resolve to help them find their own truth through informed research and inquiry. After all, those kids are my hope.

Finally, if we want joy, we need to play and create together. We need to offset the incessant testing with music, theater, dance, art, physical activity, and all pursuits that bring smiles to the faces in our buildings. Happiness is the cure for all the ills we are facing, and the pursuit of happiness in education is a noble cause.

So, if you are not giving up on finding your joy in this profession, I invite you to join me in my quest for regaining our control, our respect, our hope, and our joy.

Despite the challenges (and because of them), I’m staying.

Are you?


Ready for a deeper dive? Check out the links below.

Links to stories about the crisis:

NPR’s Consider This: Teachers Reflect on a Tough School Year

EdSource: Covid Challenges, Bad Student Behavior, Push Teachers to the Limit & Out the Door

The Wall Street Journal: School’s Out for Summer & Many Teachers Are Calling It Quits

NPR: We Asked Teachers How Their Year Went; They Warned of an Exodus to Come

Here some more to address some of the problems:

Education Week Video: How Can We Solve the Teacher Staffing Shortage

Secretary Cardona Lays Out a Vision to Support and Elevate the Teaching Profession

Education Week: How School Leaders Can Support Social Emotional Learning (and Retain Teachers, Too)

Experts Say We Can Prevent School Shootings; Here’s What the Research Says

Your Turn: What does culturally responsive teaching look like in your district?

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Education, Education Policy, Equity, High School, Life in the Classroom, Middle School, Parent Involvment, Professional Development, Social Issues, Teacher Leadership, Uncategorized | , , ,

We asked our bloggers to tell us about their experience with culturally responsive teaching. We asked them:

What does culturally responsive teaching look like in your district?

How are you and the educators you know using relationships to connect with students, honor their individuality and support academic achievement?

Gretchen Cruden

“We embrace learning that connects to their real lives…”

Culturally responsive teaching may look a little different in our school. I work in a high-poverty, extremely rural school. Example? We are so rural that we are defined as a frontier school and have had “cougar patrol” as part of our playground supervisory activities. That said, our school embraces what our students walk in the door with and honor it. We are a culture of “make do” and “outside the box” thinking because our students often do have to be creative in their problem solving in their home environments. We embrace learning that connects with their real lives including studying outdoor survival skills, gardening and dissecting parts of animals their families have hunted. These lessons honor their home lives and connect families to the school. In this way, our school embraces and supports our students’ backgrounds and helps build bridges to adjacent possibilities as they grow in their academics.

Lynne Olmos

“…more celebrations of diverse cultures could benefit us all.”

For all the time I have worked in my small, rural district, there has been a sort of self-congratulatory attitude in our district. We are proud of our students of color and how successful they are in our schools. However, that success is really a tribute to their hard work more than it is to any sort of outreach or responsive programs built into the system. Latinx families make up around 35% of our community, and, though we have a migrant support program that hosts occasional events and the standard English language learner supports, we don’t do a great deal to celebrate Latinx culture. Our kids are awesome, and some of our teachers go the extra mile to embrace the diverse cultures in our classrooms. However, there is a need for a more culturally responsive system.

Every now and then, we get the opportunity to celebrate our diversity. One very cool opportunity that landed in my classroom recently was through a national project funded by the CDC and managed by the Olympia Family Theater. The project, entitled Fully Vaxxed, utilized the input of bilingual youth from our school and a few others to write plays about the impact of the Covid vaccines on Latinx communities. Three of my students participated in the program, and our Drama Club attended opening night to celebrate their work. It was awesome! 

We really do a great job supporting all students in my district, but more celebrations of diverse cultures could benefit us all. Everyone deserves to see their home language, culture, and traditions represented, respected, and honored in their school environment.

Emma-Kate Schaake

“I want students to know they have strengths in their cultural, linguistic, and ethnic backgrounds…”

I am grateful to have a district and department with enough funding to have some creativity in lesson planning and curriculum. Last year, I was able to buy four class sets of contemporary young adult books for book groups and that unit was the best engagement I had online by far. The English teacher saying that books should be windows into other perspectives or mirrors into your own is almost trite by now, but still incredibly true. 

The books we read allowed students to share their own experiences and empathize with the characters. As much choice as I can offer in my curriculum, the better. I want students to know they have strengths in their cultural, linguistic, and ethnic backgrounds, regardless. So often, students do not see themselves in texts (especially those written by old, dead, white men) and I try to deviate from that norm as much as I can.

So now it is your turn.

Tell us how your school responds to the culture of its students. How do you connect with your students, honor their culture, and support their academic achievement?

Gifted Parents

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Parent Involvment

I don’t watch much sports, but I’m an Olympics junkie. I love the Olympic motto: Higher—Faster—Stronger. That’s how I want to teach, helping my kids as they always reach for the next goal.

This year one detail from an interview with Nathan Chen, the American gold medal figure skater, struck me. He said that his family didn’t have money for skating lessons when he was a kid. So his mom took him to occasional lessons. While he worked with the coach, she took copious notes, and—between lessons—she was the one who coached him, using what she had learned at the last lesson.

In this column I talk a lot about gifted students, or, as Washington State says, Highly Capable (HC) students.

It’s time to talk about gifted parents.

We had neighbors with a son Rafe who dug up their back yard to install a koi pond and a Japanese tea garden. Then he decided it wasn’t right, dug it all up again, and redid the whole thing. Multiple times. In the end they had a lovely back yard, but only after years of mess and chaos.

Rafe had a gift for gardening.

I thought his parents had a gift too. They were willing to put up with years of mess and chaos in order to support their son.

By the way, by the time he was in high school, Rafe started his own landscaping company that helped pay his way through college.

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Hello/Good-by

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Current Affairs, Distance Learning, Elementary, Life in the Classroom, Online Teaching, Parent Involvment

This week we celebrated fifth grade graduation. We had a drive-through event at the office building for our 100% on-line school. At the top of the driveway families turned in laptops and all the curriculum materials.

Then, with music playing and the bubble machine blowing, cars drove down the hill to the cheering teachers. We passed out balloons filled with confetti, bags of treats, and wristbands that read “I 100% survived 100% online school!”

For each student we also handed out a graduation certificate. One line read, “You have successfully completed fifth grade.” I read that with each student and told them, “You are officially done with school. You don’t need to log into the system anymore.” That announcement led to a happy dance every time, the child in the car, me outside. “Freedom!” “Escape!” (in Finding Nemo fashion). “Hallelujah!”

Some students had their picture taken at the “Oh, the Places You’ll Go!” photo backdrop. Some said no thanks.

There were lots of smiles and even a few hugs.

I also spoke to every parent. Each time I said, “You did a great job.” The most common, instant reaction was physical. Shoulders fell. Heads dropped. Then the parent would say, “I thought I wasn’t doing well at all.” “I thought I was messing up.” “I thought I was failing.”

“No!” I said. “You were amazing! And you made it through this year. You did an awesome job.”

They straightened up then and starting talking about how hard it was.

“Yes. It was hard for everyone. I can’t imagine how you did it—

  • you, with three other kids at home.”
  • you, with a new baby.”
  • you, with your husband deployed.”

Side note here—I had been telling parents all year what a terrific job they were doing. On that last day of school it was clear that they read my notes as general and applying to  everyone else. Not to them. Individually, they each felt they were not doing well at all. Clearly, even phone calls hadn’t worked. All my encouragement during the year went nowhere. It wasn’t until I saw them face-to-face and spoke to them one-on-one that they actually believed me. Sigh.

Graduation was a thoroughly weird experience for all of us. It was the first time all year we got to see each other outside of Zoom. How strange was it? I didn’t recognize one of the other fifth grade teachers when I saw her in 3-D! She and I had met for PLCs nearly every day all year, but she looked different when she wasn’t flat.

One of the best things I heard that day was from one student’s mom who said it felt like I had reached through the computer and touched them. I told her it was mutual—we made a real connection in spite of the distance learning.

The other best thing was from a student who wrote in a card about how much she learned this year and added, “This year could have been so awful, but you made it close to wonderful!”

You know, I’ll take that. Close to wonderful is about the best I could hope for this year.

My take-away from all of this is that we must keep encouraging each other.

Encourage literally means put courage in.

  • Put courage in students.
  • Put courage in parents.
  • Put courage in each other as teachers and staff.

Courage comes from cour, which means heart.

Discourage literally means to rip the heart out of someone.

Our job is to put heart in. So let me start.

It was a ridiculously hard year. You maybe felt like you were failing. You maybe felt like you couldn’t do it. You maybe felt like you were never going to make it.

But look at you. You are here!

And you learned things. Like how to persevere. Like how to stay engaged with people even when you can’t be with them physically. Like how to use more and more and more technology. (Right???)

And you  made it.

You all did a great job this year.

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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Critical Thinking… and Q

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Life in the Classroom, Parent Involvment, Science, Social Issues
(original photo source unknown)

I received several emails from my son’s science teacher warning of the upcoming evolution unit, clarifying the goals of the unit, and offering opt-out pathways. I’ve long understood such disclaimers and options as being due to the reality that evolution as it relates to humankind does not mesh well with some religious cosmologies. The concept of the current biological state of humanity being a phase in a billion-year-long slow-and-steady march of natural variation does not match what many people believe.

So what happens when we go to teach current events, American history, civics and government, or other social sciences and students or families want to opt out because it does not match what they believe?

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Engaging with Students Long-Distance

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Current Affairs, Distance Learning, Elementary, Life in the Classroom, Online Teaching, Parent Involvment, Social Issues

For the last month, the number one topic in our staff meetings has been student engagement.

Meanwhile, I have a 10-year-old student who wrote a personal narrative about how he got his first car, a 1971 VW Beetle. He plans to convert it to an electric car. He said, “I want my Bug to be the first car of my old car electric conversion shop. My next car is going to be for my dad. He wants a 1966 Chevrolet Corvette with a big electric engine.” He explained that his current car, the Bug, needs work on its transmission.

Transmission? Student engagement? Same idea, right?

If the transmission isn’t working, the gears aren’t meshing. They aren’t connecting properly. The engine can have all the power in the world, but the car won’t go anywhere.

It’s the same for us.

  • If teachers aren’t connecting with students, or students aren’t connecting with teachers …
  • If schools aren’t connecting with parents, or parents aren’t connecting with schools …
  • If districts aren’t connecting with families, or families aren’t connecting with districts …

… then we can have all the skills and experience in the world, but we can’t drive our class anywhere.

Teachers at my school monitor students as they work through our district’s 100% online curriculum. We have weekly Class Connect Sessions (CCS—similar to Zoom) where we focus on the social and emotional side of school.

As far as academics go, we have students who come to CCS and do their work independently. They need an occasional check in about a lesson. Other students come to CCS regularly but don’t do their work. Or vice versa. Or they do well in one or two classes and skip others. There are students who come to about half the CCS. They struggle with the coursework. They are often behind. They occasionally come to help sessions set up by teachers, but often they don’t. Then there are the students who don’t come to CCS, who don’t do the work, who skip most of the lessons. They aren’t making progress. They don’t come to any help sessions.

We are used to having a captive audience in our classrooms. If a child won’t come to our desk, we can go to theirs. We can kneel down to their level. We can connect face to face.

The first question we wanted to solve was, How? How do we fix the problems in front of us?

Instead, the first question we asked ourselves was, Why? What makes the students (and families) less engaged?

There were several reasons why kids might not come to CCS (or Zoom):​

  • ​They have high anxiety about being on video (even if they can turn off video)​
  • ​They have speech impediments and are embarrassed (even if they can turn off audio)​
  • ​It’s one of the only things in their week that happens at a scheduled time, and they forget​

There are several reasons why students may struggle with work. Kids lack the organizational skills to tackle online learning without an adult at home to help them during the day. There are kids with ADD/ADHD, and there are so many more distractions at home than in the classroom; again, there is often no adult at home to consistently redirect them. Keep in mind, many parents work full time. Even if they are at home, parents may have up to five school-age kids, which taxes their ability to monitor them all.

Some parents and kids may not trust us yet.​ And it can be hard to reach students and families. Phone calls, emails, texts. Sometimes nothing seems to work.  

It can be daunting! Here are some ideas to help.

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Conferencing without a Conference Week

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Current Affairs, Elementary, Online Teaching, Parent Involvment

In a typical school year, our elementary fall conferences run for three days at the end of October. I sit and talk with parents and students for half an hour at a time.

This year, however, our schools started 100% online, so our district decided to have a “soft start.” The first three days in September became our “conference days.” Teachers called every family to talk them through what to expect for the beginning of school and checking that every family had computers and internet connection.

Meeting parents on those phone calls, I made brief notes about their children. “She has severe social anxiety, especially on Zoom calls.” “He likes doing his work on the computer. Online learning has suited him.” “She has ADD/ADHD, so staying focused is hard for her.” “We have two other children in the online program, and we both work full-time, so he’s going to have to work independently.”

Moving our conference days to the first three days of school meant we lost them in the last week of October. No time set aside even to Zoom with parents!

But that didn’t change the normal reminders running through my head:

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Hybrid Model: The Inside Story

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Current Affairs, Distance Learning, Education, Education Policy, High School, Life in the Classroom, Middle School, Online Teaching, Parent Involvment, Social Issues, Teacher Leadership, Uncategorized | , , , , , ,

My district was one of the first in our region to go back to school face-to face this year. We began a “hybrid model” on September 14, with seniors and K-3 going four days a week, and all others going twice-a-week in cohorts (Monday/Thursday and Tuesday/Friday). On Wednesdays we delivered online material and caught up with our work, while reinventing it simultaneously. Some of our students opted for full-time distance learning, but the vast majority excitedly prepared for the first day of school.

Our neighbor districts were watching us intently. Would we pave the way for others to follow us, or would we cause an outbreak in our tiny town?

One week in, “it” happened. A student, who later tested positive for Covid-19, attended the first day of school. Dozens of staff members and students were subsequently quarantined due to contact with the student, and the decision was made to suspend school until the 14-day quarantine period was over, giving the health department time to do all of the necessary contact tracing. Our schools and buses were disinfected, and our teaching staff pivoted to all online learning, something we were told was likely to happen from the start.

Not an auspicious beginning, you might say. But let me elaborate.

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Then and Now

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Current Affairs, Elementary, Life in the Classroom, Parent Involvment

THEN

Almost everything I need to teach math or ELA or science or social studies or health is in my classroom. Student books. Math tests. ELA papers.

NOW

I sent some of the books home with the kids on that ill-fated Friday the 13th: math, science, and Roald Dahl’s autobiography Boy. Per instructions, I sent home papers for six weeks’ worth of work.

The work I sent home immediately became “optional” once we learned that we could not require or grade any work sent home. Then, a couple of weeks later, we learned we could start instruction again.

The additional books and papers I want to use with my students for the rest of the year are in my classroom. There is no way to get them to my students now.

I have to check for coronavirus-era copyright access for materials for my students. For some of the materials, I have to scan (once I get permission) stacks of pages and email them to families. (At least I have the stuff at home!) I have to search the web for open-source materials.

THEN

I think of teaching as a performance art. I make eye contact with my kids as I teach. I respond to their body language, their facial expressions.

I walk around the room, monitoring multiple small groups. I manage behaviors quietly, usually with humor.

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