4 C's for Post-Pandemic Learning

There has been a lot of talk about learning loss and "catching up" in the news and media.  However, during these first few months of our new school year, the topics of conversations I'm hearing across schools are very different. Educators are far less concerned about specific content skills, chapters, or material, and more focused on students, their social-emotion health, and their ability to focus, take turns, or "do school."

For the past 20 years, we've been talking about the 4 Cs of 21st century learning: Communication, Collaboration, Critical Thinking and Creativity.  This lens has reshaped the way instruction has looked across many classrooms, including my own practice.  I adjusted much of my instructional practice when thinking about designing activities and experiences that promote these 4 C's for a more engaged classroom and authentic teaching and learning environment.  Thinking about designing instruction, experiences, and spaces, with a focus on communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity fundamentally changed who I was as an educator in and out of the classroom.

4 C's of Post-Pandemic Learning

As we return to something far less than normal,  I'd suggest we need to look toward a new set of C's for a post-pandemic landscape.  We need to nurture Connection, Compassion, Culture and Climate.  While the "first 4 C's" provide a framework for looking closer at instructional practice, these "new 4 C's" address how well and ready our students feel to put these practices into action.  Together, both sets of C's can work collaboratively from an instructional viewpoint as well as a social-emotional perspective to strengthen Agency, Empathy, and Empowerment in our students.  These are emotional competencies all educators want to help their students develop.  Fostering a learning environment where educators can design and deliver instruction through a lens of connection, compassion, culture, and climate will help promote and strengthen these competencies.  

My universe is elementary, but if the upper grades are anything like our K-5 experience, words like agency, empathy, and empowerment are not at the top of our lists when describing students' current experience.

Student agency is a buzzword that has been hard to define in terms of what it looks like, but seems easier to identify when missing.  I'd suggest that’s exactly what we find our students missing when the rituals and routines of daily classroom activities become problematic.  I have heard countless descriptions of executive-functioning breakdown, short-fused refusals, or constant challenges with things like waiting turns, navigating the cafeteria, or working together. The social-emotional opportunity loss far outweighs any measurable (but equally educational) content, and deserves equally deliberate and focused attention if we are serous about "catching up" the whole child.

Social-emotional learning and executive functioning are two clear examples of focus areas and buzzwords in our business.  For all of the SEL focus and available professional development, there almost has to be a back-to-basics foundational focus in order to take those next-level SEL steps.  How can we have a conversation about students' ability to employ effective executive functioning strategies when their environment, routines, and instructional environment has been continually adapting to changing guidelines, initiatives, and expectations? Can our climate handle the culture shifts we are demanding?

🔗Connection

Now more than ever, it's all about relationships.  Relationships develop trust, encourage risk-taking through partnership and support, and create pathways to communicate for (and about) learning.  It's no surprise that connection was the first and fastest loss when shifting to remote, then hybrid, and even still in our modified environments.  It's not just about masks and spacing, it's about the play, the small group or 1:1 closeness, and especially the cafeteria, snack, and recess where students work out the social dynamics of childhood.

💙Compassion

It's easy to say (and easy to see) that students are struggling, but so are classroom teachers, support staff, and specialists.  Just being in our buildings is no return to normal, and I think we all underestimated the lagging toll this past two years has taken, and will continue to take, on the social emotional health of our learning community.  For every student we see pop on the surface, it's safe to assume there are a handful with less visible struggles that we need to attune to before we can ratchet up the content demands, or we will only enhance the struggle.

🏫Culture

Culture is often described as the values and norms of a school or system.  It's the structure that determines how values and beliefs transfer toward an environment of learning. This is the staff, the tone, the sights, and the sounds of a school. It's the hallways, playgrounds and staff rooms.  It's the messaging on the walls and cafeteria.  When we look at the challenge of deploying initiatives at a district or building level, whether it's new content-curriculum or the work of diversity/equity/inclusion, it's the culture that can impact how well any initiative will succeed, and the expression of how well stakeholders feel about their culture (and efforts to shape it) creates the climate. 

🌡Climate

Climate is the temperature of a shared space.  Where culture focuses on the way things have always been done; climate is actions and behaviors that demonstrates feelings among students and staff.  The frequent comparison is that climate refers to the way people feel about school, while culture is defined by the way people act in a school.

There’s a relationship among these 4 C's. Connection is a byproduct of compassion. Building relationships and employing empathy throughout our buildings develops an environment that cultivates relationships and builds connections. Similarly, climate is a reflection and expression of culture. If we want to shift the perceptions, feelings, and emotional temperature that reflect the climate of our community, we need to examine the values, routines, and rituals that identify its culture. 

While the line between culture and climate can be blurry, it's clear to see that our sets of values and norms, as well as our behaviors and feelings about teaching and learning in the past two years, have been put to the test.  Just like we preach, we need to analyze the data, adjust our approach, and leverage what we've learned if we're serious about learning and growth.

Back to School '21: Lessons Learned

My annual back to school post has been an interesting mile-marker these last few years. Between diving into a new district and watching our working world turn upside down from COVID, these posts have been as much about looking (and thinking) back as much as they’ve been about the excitement and anticipation that September always brings. In that spirit, the theme to this year’s back to School post is Lessons Learned. 

☝Let’s Not Get Back to Normal

Back to normal has an ominous ring to it. Back to normal can also mean back to easy or familiar, and there was plenty of normal that was problematic.  For boundary pushers, disrupters, and those thinking outside the box, the runway is beginning to clear to make sure that some habits and practices of the past aren’t reintroduced after laying dormant for a year and a half.  This return is a huge opportunity for schools that are willing to reflect, and educators who are willing to redesign their mindset of what “back to normal” needs to look like. 

🔎Reflection Required

Out return is also rich with coaching opportunities, but not for new tech tools and toys. As always, we need the time and space for a truer and deeper dive into how and why particular learning opportunists can be delivered with intent and engagement.  As an educator and a coach, I think our professional community is raw but ready. The most effective and engaging coaching opportunities that I’ve been a part of have happened in-time and in-context, meaning there’s an immediacy and authenticity to our work that starts and ends with improved student learning and increased engagement. It also requires reflection, which requires time, which requires admin support and staff buy-in. My very informal, but very serious, primary goal for this upcoming year is to help reshape some of the perceptions and prescriptions surrounding the coaching role in my district to better support this effort. 

💻Blended? Personalized?

Remote learning, hybrid learning, and even our return to in-person did not automatically individualize instruction or personalize learning.  Without warning, training, supplies, or design, we relied upon technology to survive, to deliver content, to stay connected, and to attempt to maintain a continuity of learning as well as community.  To paraphrase the movie Argo, remote and hybrid learning were the "best bad idea" we had, but let's not pretend it was either authentic or effective blended or personalized learning.  Blended learning has been talked about for a decade or more at this point, but instances of true blended learning through designed, deliberate integration plans and practices are still hard to come by. Digital learning, tech integration, or whatever districts want to call it begins and ends with active and engaged teaching and learning. One thing we learned for sure was that more tech didn’t equal more learning, and that being in-person sometimes felt no-less remote. 

🚦Start/Stop/Keep

A question I’ve seen a few times across Twitter is “what should we start, stop, or keep doing as we move forward?"  When thinking about effective leadership by principals and administrators, this is a question that would be a powerful way to start our new year together. If we fail to recognize any bright spots or discoveries brought about by our new (and otherwise rotten) distance/remote/hybrid/returned landscape, it’s a failed opportunity to continue to grow up as professionals.

😠Learning Loss is a Loaded Term

Learning loss is abstract and immeasurable. We will feel the impact of our shared experience and professional avalanche for a long time, and we will undoubtedly encounter students with varying gaps across all domains, but trying to quantify the scope and sequence of “missed skills” only furthers to reinforce the social/emotional impact and leads away from the necessary recovery work ahead. 

To tweak a popular Twitter quote, we may not have been in the same boat, but we’ve been in the same storm, and how we emerge from it can be as impactful as how we weather it.  As schools and districts, we need to broaden our focus from response to recovery, without returning to systems and structures that have long created cracks where challenges expand, equity is ignored, and real students suffer. 

😏Suspicions Confirmed

When our schools came back to full-in learning, many of our edtech worries came true. Many chromebooks were stashed away and digital learning dropped significantly. This wasn’t a bad thing. In fact, I think it was critical to the community-building that was yanked away from classes through hybrid instruction. What has yet to be determined though is whether we will be seeing more of a backswing or backslide.  A backswing mirrors the natural pendulum of our teaching profession, where the gaze may drift, but the focus ultimately remains. My backslide fear is that the gaze may drift so far that teachers may dig their heels into old-school habits. Community-building experiences and face-to-face (even masked) instruction will always be the very best of best practices, but let’s not reject the tech tools and teaching strategies we’ve relied upon for the past few years just because their reminders of  a rotten period. 

👫Masters Matter

Veteran teachers carry a deep toolkit. I’ve often said that there’s an unfair assumption that new teachers (digital natives) should be somehow expected to be highly skilled practitioners because they may be more skilled or comfortable with tech integration. The pandemic (and remote teaching/learning) were a massive equalizer in many ways across our profession, but one doesn’t need to look far to find veteran educators, who may have otherwise been tech-resistant, reluctant, or simply uncomfortable, more swiftly pivot to deliver high quality instruction in a completely new format. Was it an awful, artificial, and ineffective process at times? Undoubtedly, but veteran teachers who know how to do what they do best deep in their bones found ways to deliver. They taught their student before content, they connected to learners before laptops, and they empowered and acquired their own professional development to show up for kids, not for credits. 

I've said it before and I’ll say it again: Teach-savvy beats Tech-savvy every time. Now is the time to bridge these educators and leverage their expertise and experience to learn from and support each other. Look to those who survived and thrived!

👑Leaders Can Let Go 

In the past year, some of the most  effective leadership instances I’ve seen have been from administrators acknowledging and adapting to the reality of the circumstance rather than trying to control or reframe the narrative. Those who could pivot with transparency and support their staff were able to gain trust and provide more authentic leadership. That’s all educators truly needed through the pandemic and beyond. Empathy, trust, and support went a long way in keeping a community of skilled practitioners “in the game,” even when the rules seemed to be changing week by week. 

🧠Cognitive Overload

For most educators I know, the shared cognitive overload hasn’t allowed for specific or targeted PD, other than a the critical re-envisioning of how to do what good teachers have always done well to begin with, just in a new context. There just hasn’t been brain space or bandwidth to accommodate traditional PD, while the need for constant learning and tracing was clear. The result was a more flexible, authentic and intentional self-directed cycle of professional development to respond to the needs and moment. 

😱😭😷😌Validation Helps

Midway through our last pandemic school year, favorite Twitter follow Matt Miller  tweeted that he was turning into the teacher that he didn't want to be.  At some point last year, I think everyone in our profession shared that same feeling.  There's an affirmation in hearing it from someone else, as there is also an affirmation in this optimistic quote from Jeremy Miller shifting into a tech integrator role for the first time,  "I hope I can help empower Teachers to empower their Students to create and innovate using tech to accelerate and accommodate learning." My hope is that the road ahead leads teachers back to the teachers they want to be and know how to be. 

👏Teamwork Makes the Dream Work, Even if it’s a Bad Dream 

When it came to weathering the storm and all of its surprises, colleagues relied on each other personally and professionally to make the best of bad ideas without spiraling into negativity. As we return with  continues questions and uncertainty, let’s continue to lean on the things that have always sustained us: relationships, inspiration, discovery, and the choreography of a classroom full of engaged and active learners.