Category / professional learning

by nflanagan

Rebounding from the Pandemic

I just secured appointments for the new COVID vaccine, plus my annual flu shot. In science, we trust— no hesitation or overthinking. Several of our friends and colleagues have recently tested positive, been treated and recovered, eventually. Accessing the new vaccination is a no-brainer. And as the former saliva queen of my middle school band room, I have been a flu shot devotee since the 1970s.

It’s pretty clear that we’re seeing COVID aftershocks; the pandemic isn’t over. That’s not an arguable question. What to do about the unpredictable tail of this pandemic—how to protect, how to exercise caution, what lessons have come from the crisis, and what is forever altered—that’s what we should be pondering right now. 

Last week, we saw Ed Yong at the National Writers Series (one of the best things about living in Traverse City). He and his interviewer came out on the stage wearing KN95 masks. I have been following and admiring Ed Yong, ever since I read his pieces about COVID in Atlantic Magazine, and saw him on MSNBC. Once he started speaking, with his British accent, impeccable logic and vocabulary, the mask (and his twinkling eyes) only served to accent his keen intelligence.

He was there to talk about his latest book, An Immense World,  which is wonderful, by the way, highly recommended. But about an hour in, there was a shift to questions about the pandemic. Yong said he would not sign books, face to face, after the talk, one of the perks attendees clutching their own copies usually enjoy. He was protecting his health, he said—too many early flights, airports and being shorted on sleep.

Then, he talked about how difficult it was to be a science writer, researching the causes and outcomes of a global health crisis, interviewing people on or after the worst days of their lives. He stressed how essential it was to consider something like a worldwide pandemic with an open and curious mind, as well as deep empathy. No preconceptions, and a focus on human beings.

For the first time, his words did not come rushing out, as he talked about political mistakes that cost human lives and societal forces resisting justice and equity, not to mention unethical practices in science. He’d seen too much suffering, he said. He needed a break.

Then, taking a deep breath, he said he’d gone for a short walk that afternoon, to a bridge over the river that runs through downtown Traverse City. Standing on the bridge, he’d seen a hawk. In the middle of the bridge, looking east, you can see the hawk’s nest on the left bank, he said, third or fourth tree down. Every person in the audience could picture that bridge—only a half-block from the Opera House, where we were sitting.

A hawk’s nest!? Downtown? Cool.

Yong talked about how many more things he noticed, during the pandemic, when traffic died down and people stayed home. Things that were always there, but became obvious when we had time to look. To breathe, and appreciate how good breathing feels. Small joys.

It was an inspiring moment.

It struck me that most of us have no clue how much has changed, in the larger world. How many times have you heard someone wistfully expressing their desire to return to the past—a past that we label “normal”? If only things could go back to the way they were.

But normal is dead.

Normal is dead in politics, in labor and manufacturing, in medicine, in travel and hospitality.  And of course, there’s no more normal in education. Chasing normal in education is a fool’s game—what we had before the pandemic should not function as aspirational goal for the future.

If business as usual has been altered in public education, that could be a good thing. At the very least, temporarily gutting the system—closing schools, shifting instruction to online platforms—should have served as a seat-of-pants instruction manual in the limitations of on-line relationships.

Here are a handful of things we might have learned about public education by experiencing a global pandemic (but probably didn’t):

  • The gross inequities in access to wireless capacity and devices.
  • The social necessity of being with other children and teenagers in maintaining mental health.
  • How faulty-to-useless testing data is in structuring relevant instruction that meets children where they are (which is supposed to be the point of standardized assessments).
  • How political leadership matters in rebounding from a crisis that involves an entire slice of citizens: our children.  
  • How utterly dependent society in general is on school functioning as M-F childcare.
  • How much privilege matters in reshaping public education practices—Who has grabbed the microphone and the media as the disease recedes? Who is left out, once again?

I could go on. In fact, I’m planning a series of “what did we learn from the pandemic” blogs over the next few weeks. As Ed Yong noted, a global cataclysm needs to be approached with an open and curious mind, and deep empathy for our fellow humans and creatures. I’m not seeing that deep caring, or willingness to explore change, in education.

In the NY Times today, there was an interesting article on the upcoming population peak—the point at which the number of humans on the planet begins shrinking. Scientists think this will happen in 50 years or so—and that now is the time to think about the impact of fewer people on the health of the planet, as family size shrinks.

The planet is down about seven million people, courtesy of COVID. That’s a fact. Here’s an assignment for your students: What impact might those seven million people have had on making the world a better place? What can YOU do to make the world a better place? What would make your schooling more useful in pursuing that goal?

What could we learn from asking those questions?

by nflanagan

(Almost) All You Need is Love

Scene: Interview with right-leaning MI media personality, c. 2003, re: National Board Certification

Interviewer: So you say that National Board Certified Teachers—NBCTs– are the cream of the crop. What, specifically, do these teachers do that other teachers don’t?

Me: Well, lots of teachers have the qualities and skills that NBCTs have—but NBCTs have undergone a rigorous assessment of what they know and are able to do. They have studied standards for professional teaching and provided evidence that they are demonstrating those standards.

Interviewer: So what are those rigorous standards that all teachers should be aiming for?

Me: The first one—a foundation for good teaching—is knowing your students well, and being committed to their learning.

Interviewer: Seriously? You’re saying you just have to… (adopts snarky tone) love the kids? Even the bad kids? That’s all it takes?

 —————————————–

In case you’re wondering, the interview did not improve much after this moment. Many folks are laboring under the notion that some teachers have magical, almost indefinable skills that whip classrooms into shape and make learning come alive. Other teachers, presumably, have to rely on a boring combination of content knowledge, discipline and fear.

Nobody expects teachers to love every one of their students—not even the National Board. But teachers who do not develop positive and open working relationships with their students, teachers who believe that their job is dispensing knowledge, then measuring students’ retention of that knowledge, will always be behind the instructional curve and may never become what we think of as a “good teacher.” 

Peter Green, whose work is always worth reading, just wrote a moving and beautiful piece about teaching, in which he says this, about loving our students:  Here’s a big thing I believe about love–it’s not so much a feeling as an action and a choice, a commitment. You can choose to love people, and you can do it based on who you are instead of waiting to be inspired by who they are.

There’s that word, commitment, again. Greene also says this:

Twenty years of modern reform and especially two years of pandemess and CRT panic have worked to drive love and trust out of schools. Since (at least) A Nation at Risk, critics have deliberately ignored and abused the notion that teachers might choose to teach out of love and care, but must instead be threatened with Consequences.

Bingo.

All of this love talk goes a long way toward explaining why—again, and again, and in spite of what sometimes seems like an organized media conspiracy to crush public education—parents (somewhere between 80% and 85%) report being satisfied with their public schools.

If the only information you get about the public schools in your community comes from Moms 4 Liberty, or articles about School Board uproars over book banning and faux accusations of grooming, or the relentless drumbeat of “learning loss” that substitutes quantification for compassion— well, you’re likely to be in the majority of non-parents who think public education is failing.

And let’s be brutally honest—some public schools are so stressed that trust and commitment aren’t in the cards. They are, in fact, failing to be committed to their students, and their students’ learning. These failures show up in inability to hire qualified staff, incoherent curriculum, lack of strong leadership or trust, and general chaos—not test scores.

I like the way Matt Barnum (or whoever wrote his headline) phrased it: Are Parents Mad at Schools?

The data-supported answer is no. No, they’re not.

Because— in spite of the pounding that public schools have taken during and post-pandemic, there is still commitment and caring, teachers who drove around rural districts with stapled-together packets and backpacks full of food. Teachers who persisted in trying to adapt to teaching on-line or outdoors. Teachers who went to school unvaccinated, because their students needed them.

Parents also see, up close and personal, what the impact of a global pandemic has been on their own children— not just the disruption to their normal lives, but the free-floating anxiety around masking, illness in the family, squabbling over vaccines and fear of catching a potentially lethal disease. Children who were sad or bored, whose days lacked the social and intellectual structure of M-F schooling, recess and friends.

What kids need now is not, God help us, “acceleration” techniques to get them to an arbitrary (testable) level of learning. They need the aforementioned structure, knowing what to expect from their world. They need the concern and commitment of their teachers.

What about content— knowledge and skills, the measurable outcomes of school? Here’s a secret: Most of what is learned in school has to be continuously refreshed and applied in order for it to stick and be useful in adult life. Scoring well on a test is not a mark of being well-educated, prepared for adulthood. Human relationships prepare us for life. Content comes and goes.

And bad kids? How do we love them?

I was fortunate. For most of my career as a music teacher, I had students for two to three years, sometimes more. I did come to genuinely love—or at least get along swimmingly with—nearly all of them. I was fond of them, and am curious now about what they’ve done with their lives.

But there was this one kid…

It was a year after I’d been out on leave, and had been assigned to teach a semester-long music class that students did NOT choose. Lots of those students were surly at first, being forced into an elective they didn’t want. It was an uphill climb, but eventually, I started winning them over. I saw them relax and even enjoy the things we were doing. There was laughter. Except for one boy.

He was defiant. He refused to participate. He muttered things about me and his fellow students under his breath. I tried ignoring him. I tried gently looping him into groups. I tried calling him out, but with humor. I kept thinking he just needed to know that I was committed to him, and wouldn’t give up. He remained bitter and overtly hostile. Once, after students had formed groups to create compositions, he picked up his belongings and left the room, for no apparent reason, letting the door slam (of course). He was hard to love.

So I mentioned him in the teachers’ lounge (sometimes, good things happen in the teachers’ lounge). You know about his brother, right? one of my colleagues asked. It turned out that this boy’s older brother had committed suicide in the school parking lot the previous summer. Because I had been gone, I didn’t have a clue. Nobody bothered to tell me.

The semester was almost over. I never did develop any trust with this boy. I would have given him a great deal more emotional space, had I known, and interpreted his anger very differently. I would have tried much harder to love him. Because— and this is often true— students often just need the security that comes with knowing their teachers are committed to them, no matter what.

by nflanagan

The War Against Icebreakers

Best Twitter–is it still Twitter, considering its ugly new Maga-X logo?—thread of the day: A war on icebreakers in upcoming professional development for teachers. The things people report being asked to do range from silly to downright demeaning.

Icebreakers from my own pantheon: Building structures with toothpicks and marshmallows. Holding hands and forming human knots. Lining staff up by length of service to the district. Trust falls. Any number of exercises using chart paper, balls of colored yarn and/or stick-on dots. Also—looking into each others’ eyes for 30 seconds, not breaking eye contact, which was weirdly moving and also kind of creepy.

Once, at the beginning of two days of pre-school year PD, we watched a cool and interesting short video about school climates, and how to determine what individual schools or districts genuinely value, vs. what they say is their mission.

Video asks: How often does the entire school get together—and for what purposes?

Me, in post-video discussion: Our first three scheduled assemblies are the one where we read and discuss the school rules, the fund-raiser assembly where kids are offered prizes for sales to provide basic instructional supplies, and the fall sports assembly. What does that say about our values?

Administrator:

(Later, he sent me an email expressing his anger that I would suggest our collective values are skewed. Which wasn’t precisely true. As a group, I think the staff did have positive values around the students and teaching, and a collaborative spirit, which are all you can ask for, really. Even if we weren’t demonstrating those in routine assemblies.)

In his oldie-but-goodie post “Thirteen Deadly Sins of PD,” Peter Green runs down, more ruthlessly and amusingly than I, the Big Errors PD presenters make. Lame icebreakers for people who already know each other barely gets a mention.  

I actually think there is value in getting the staff together to explore and improve the work they’re doing. And I say this as a music teacher who underwent countless reading-across-the-curriculum and how-our-new-math-series-applies-to-you workshops. There’s value in talk between people who teach the same kids, even if their disciplinary content or instructional practices are different. There’s even value in one of the simplest icebreakers I remember: Taking short walks around the building or outdoors, with a staff member you didn’t know well.

Here’s an exercise I used to use in workshops around Teacher Leadership: draw a teacher leader.

This draw-a-leader technique was one I used, many times, in workshops around teacher leadership, for diverse audiences. I can testify that if you want to clear a room of school administrators, who suddenly have to step out in the hallway for an ‘emergency’ call, start passing out chart paper, crayons and markers, and ask them to draw something.

The Twitter thread notes, repeatedly and vehemently, that exercises in a professional learning session should always be tied to the PD topic presented.  Every veteran presenter knows that turn/talk time, including the ubiquitous practice of sharing notes around new content or a provocative question, runs past the time allotted. People like to talk to each other—or, at least, are willing to listen to what their colleagues say, a break from being lectured.

When staff members talk to each other, it’s a kind of baseline for reflective practice, a low-risk chance to express opinion, share experiences and ask questions. But there’s an underlying fear that teachers are somehow cheating when they teach or enlighten each other, or take the time to argue about the essential nature of their work.  I can’t fully explain this, but I think it’s rooted in hierarchies and the growing, media-fed dismissal of teaching as a true profession.

As Peter Greene notes, at the very least, professional development sessions can hammer home what NOT to do in your own classroom. Anne Lutz Fernandez, in an excellent piece on the teaching crisis, says:

It’s worth noting that teachers have long found the professional development they are offered to be wanting. The report admits that some school leaders “struggled to find and hire high-quality professional learning providers” and “were quite disappointed in the quality of support they received from vendors.” This isn’t new. Back in 2014, the Gates Foundation found only 3 out of 10 teachers were satisfied with their PD.

There’s work to be done, clearly. Here’s one of my own PD failures:

For several terms, I taught an online graduate course on teachers and policy. The teachers who participated frequently did not know each other; sometimes, they came from across a state or across the country. And—just as in a K-12 classroom—not much happens until folks feel comfortable sharing their thoughts. Although the course eventually had Zoom-type meetings, the on-line structure meant self-introductions, shared writing, and conversation threads. Virtual icebreakers.

The first of these asked course participants to share a book about education that was meaningful to them. This turned out to be Not a Great Icebreaker. Many people finally confessed they’d never read a book on education, except for assigned readings in college or grad school. Or—one person would share a book, and the next half-dozen would say “Oh, yeah, I read that, too,” which is a better answer than “I can’t remember any books about education that ever changed my thinking.”

When revising the course, we changed that icebreaker to: Share a link (book, article, cartoon, meme) that illustrates how you understand the education landscape right now. We thought perhaps full-blown books were a heavy lift for practicing educators.

Also not a great icebreaker.

 A couple of people posted things, couched in disclaimers—”I’m probably the only one who thinks this, but…” or excuses “This is all I could find. Is this OK?” And lots of people were unwilling to stick a toe into the conversation. They would tell you their name, what and where they teach—but digging deep into education policy and practice issues with people you don’t know well turns out to be intimidating.

Maybe it’s the Twitter (X) effect: Short and sassy wins the day. Keep your real values close.  Or maybe teachers don’t have enough time to really think about the incredible responsibilities of the work they do. Or maybe it’s the fear that professional learning doesn’t require a workshop or novel content—but happens most effectively when you have B lunch with a couple of sharp colleagues whose ideas you trust.