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/
😠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.
