(Photo Credit: User:OgreBot/Uploads by new users/2016 March 04 18:00)
Over the last several weeks, I have been speaking with teachers, principles, and district administrators from across the country. Universally, the changes to how school works, how education works, are disruptive to educators.
Those who are fairly tech-savvy fare better. One teacher who already had Google Classroom set up felt lucky because all she had to do was extend what she was already doing. She said thank goodness that she had already trained her kids on how to watch flipped math videos online, how to look for assignments on Google Classroom (and then complete and turn them in). Her kids were familiar with Nearpod content. They all had the tools that they needed for success. And yet, it was still a struggle to find enough of the right materials to fill a day in meaningful ways. Her reading program had been from a basal rather than adding more “screen time” to her kids’ day. Just a few weeks ago, that had been a good thing. Now she worked to piece together resources and find a new normal where her kids felt connection, a predictable schedule, some kind of normal routine to what school looked like now.
In the interviews I have completed, no one is succeeding more than this dedicated teacher, and many are working even harder with many more obstacles. As I talk to schools, the order of business seems to follow Mazolow’s hierarchy pretty consistently.
First order of business: Communication
This might seem higher on the scale, but without communication, resources can’t get to families. And typically, the families who need it most are the ones who are hardest to get in touch with. Some districts are spending the bulk of their resources just finding everyone and making sure that they are okay—for a very minimal definition of okay.
Feeding Everyone
If you haven’t been in the school system since you were a student, this one might surprise you, but I hear from many schools that their families depend on the school for this contribution to the family budget. They count on not buying breakfast and lunch five days a week. If they have to suddenly add that expense—and sometimes that expense comes along with lost wages—it is truly a burden on many families.
Getting food to students during this time is no small feat. If parents are essential workers, who is there to go to the school to pick up the food? Schools have had to add hours in the evening for pickup or get creative, like one district I talked to that arranged for a school bus to deliver lunches to apartment building parking lots.
Now here’s the trick with communication, families have to know to come down and get the food. And parents have to give permission for kids to leave the building to go to the parking lot by themselves, because remember, parents are at work, and kids are home (trying to manage school and tending younger siblings) alone.
Technology
Even if we completely forget all concerns about screen time, not all families have a screen or internet to get content on to the screen. Most (though not all) families have at least one cell phone, but while that works for notifications, try fitting school for multiple kids around one phone after work. Not the most effective way to do things.
School infrastructure varies. Most common is one chromebook per family with the hope that they aren’t destroyed or lost or what have you. Many schools have purchased wifi hotspots—but suddenly having enough budget and taking the time to research, purchase, distribute, etc. is not instant. Schools are more likely to have 1:1 chromebooks for high school students, less likely for younger kiddos; iPads play more of a role in early elementary. There are a lot of devices out there, but you’re lucky if your school has sort of enough.
What Do We Teach?
This one is all over the map. The schools who have more affluent settings are more likely to be covering new content—though I haven’t talked to anyone who is trying to cover content with as much depth as they would in the classroom.
Another option is to cover only those standards that are easier to cover through distance learning. The philosophy is that it is better to succeed at some learning than fail at expectations that are too high for the teachers along with everything else that a teacher is juggling right now. And I can see the argument there.
Some schools are just reviewing. Nothing new, just review and solidify what has already been taught. This gives teachers and students a little bit of breathing room to focus on learning an entirely new system while still doing some good for education.
And what about grading? Most schools are opting for non-punitive grading. The rules vary a lot, but the basic idea is that your grade is assumed to be what it was before we all went home (or whatever your grade was from last term). It can go up as students complete new work, but not down. This prevents penalizing students for being in inequitable situations, and yes, it inflates grades and makes them significantly less meaningful, but we all muddle through.
Planning for Next Year
This is a big one. Again, some schools are already heavy into preparing, others hope that they can think about it one of these days, but all of them agree on one thing—the range of where kids are in standards mastery come fall will be wider than it has ever been. Some kids will keep learning; some kids not so much. It is highly unlikely that kids will be learning the same things to the same depth as each other.
Everyone knows that we’ll have a big job this fall. We will need data and tools to personalize learning like never before regardless of where school takes place.
How Has School Changed Forever?
No one knows for sure. Everyone agrees that it will never be quite the same. Some believe that it will be vastly different. Certainly teachers have been forced into a steep learning curve with technology teaching tools that some have resisted for a long time. Will that be a benefit for education—clearly, that is a debatable answer. It depends on a lot of variables about what happens with that technology. I don’t know that anyone wants kids to be passively staring at screens all day as concepts roll over them, but what does good technology look like in education?
What Schools Are Getting Right, Right Now
It has been humbling to see the dedication, care, and worry that so many people are pouring into kids and their families right now. They aren’t just doing a job, they’re tracking down members of a community to make sure that their people are safe, fed, and hopefully educated a little. I don’t know that the impact that educators are making on these kids will ever be measured—it will likely be lost in next year’s worries about lost learning time—but these women and men are doing what they went into education to do: make a positive difference in kids’ lives. They just had no idea that it would look like this during their preservice courses in college.
noellecarter 