Back and Better
What will school look like a year from now? I make four predictions.
“Back and Better”
This is our theme for the school year. Back, because no matter what we will be teaching and learning with our students in 2020-2021, either in-person, online, or a blend of both (my school’s current operating model). Better, because this experience, as awful as it is, will likely lead to significant change and positive growth in the future.
Not every educator shares my optimism. More than a few worry that our students are going to slide back in their learning due to lack of in-person instruction, even though we have little evidence to support this theory. As one teacher shared with me, “We need them in the building. How can we effectively teach over a Zoom chat?” I did not disagree with the teacher, while also remembering the Peter Johnston quote that “we are not the only teacher in the room.” More broadly, we as educators tend to view ourselves as the sole way any student can learn.
However one views this situation, the concern over the pandemic is real. And if the resounding belief as a collective profession is that students will fall behind because of these limitations, then that worry could potentially be realized.
This is not an acceptable outcome, so we need to change our response to the situation. We have to believe that our students are resilient, that we will come out of this as different people, and over time I believe for the better.
What we need right now is specific faith: a clear description of what the light at the end of this tunnel can resemble. What will school look like and feel like and sound like when this is over? How are we likely to grow and change for the better from this experience? Based on what I have read and experienced, I have four predictions.
The whole child will become the priority.
A year ago, I submitted a proposal to ASCD to publish a book on instructional leadership. It was declined. Their explanation: “We will be focusing more on the whole child.” I personally questioned their decision, at least to myself.
Looking back, this seems like a wise shift. ASCD offers five guiding principles for addressing the whole child in schools:
Each student enters school healthy and learns about and practices a healthy lifestyle.
Each student learns in an environment that is physically and emotionally safe for students and adults.
Each student is actively engaged in learning and is connected to the school and broader community.
Each student has access to personalized learning and is supported by qualified, caring adults.
Each student is challenged academically and prepared for success in college or further study and for employment and participation in a global environment.
As I reread these, they remind me of many school districts’ mission and vision statements. In the past there was less pressure to actually move toward these ideals. Now, the whole child feels like an imperative.
Standardized testing and teacher evaluation models will be rethought.
It’s hard to embrace the whole child initiative if students and schools are still being judged by their standardized test scores. The same goes for teacher evaluation initiatives that also try to quantify complex performances.
What will rethinking these initiatives look like? I’ve advocated for a while now the implementation of digital portfolios as a primary assessment process. They can be utilized as a stand alone system for documenting and celebrating student learning. They can also complement annual testing to provide a richer picture of a learner.
In my school, we are exploring a simple slide deck that teachers can use to structure a gathering of evidence from the classroom. We are in cohorts, and I am avoiding entering their physical spaces as much as possible. If faculty can capture artifacts of their practice via video, images, audio, and student work, along with instructional walks I might do from the hallway, we could have a more authentic representation of their current capacities.
There will be less teaching overall.
As shared previously, some educators and parents are struggling with the traditional idea of school overturned. They want their five days a week back, and that if teachers aren’t teaching, then learning cannot be happening.
The problem with this is information and resources are abundant. In fact, they have been for a while and the pandemic has made this more clear (in addition to the terrible inequities we have yet to address). Individuals can learn just about anything with an Internet connection, a functioning computer, and a small network of experts who are available and willing to help.
This means we need to start shifting to teaching students how to learn. And that means we need to teach less. This will and is already causing some identity conflicts. If someone can learn without the formal role of a teacher in one’s life, what does that mean for education in general? Even the term “teacher” or “leader” is loaded. There is an assumed authority in this position, one that now needs more credibility in the eyes of the learner to be earned.
There will be a renewed interest in student engagement.
Attendance, grades, and time spent in school are no longer accurate measures of student learning (if they ever were). Conversely, the level of student engagement is a strong indicator of student learning. Our parents saw this in the spring.
However, collectively defining engagement is like nailing Jell-o to the wall. Ask ten educators what it means and you will see what I mean. We can find some excellent explanations in books by Regie Routman, Peter Johnston and colleagues, and Brian Cambourne and Debra Crouch, but how do reach a mutual understanding?
We might want to begin by defining what engagement is not. Here are a few characteristics of disengagement that come to mind:
Compliant but not fully attending to the learning
Refusing to participate in tasks
Not following the rules or expectations in the classroom
Instead of reacting with the typical consequences, we might instead ask, “Why is this student disengaged?” This question can lead to a cascade of ideas for what’s possible in how we might change our environment and instruction to improve engagement.
I recently posted a quote I discovered in one of my old graduate school textbooks.
“Public education is woven so tightly into the fabric of American politics that dramatic, rather than incremental, change is almost always the only change that can occur.”
– Guthrie, J. et al, Modern School Business Administration: A Planning Approach
The change we are going through is dramatic. Yet I still believe the best process for change is incremental: small adjustments in response to new information, toward a larger goal of student success in the 21st century. Maybe these four predictions will be realized, maybe they won’t. For sure, the pandemic has given us some space to innovate. What is likely to occur is what we believe should happen and we make efforts toward this.
What do you think about these predictions? Please share in the comments.
Photo by Fabien Bazanegue on Unsplash