Since March 15th we have been learning actively. Overnight four key areas that have been resistant to reform disappeared – changing pedagogical approaches, regrouping of adults, regrouping of learners, and rescheduling of learning. As educators we tend to be passionate learners, and this crisis has thrust us all to be active learners again. Over the past month we have been working to capture that learning to inform our work in the coming school year. We have collected information from surveys, from student assignments designed to give us feedback, from active research locally and internationally, from active listening, and from active observation. From this we have come up with a framework that we will be using to develop our plan for September. We do not have all the answers, but we are continuing to ask the questions working and learning together.
First and foremost, we need to identify our priorities. The health and welfare of our students, staff, and parents will guide our logistical decisions. The National Association of School Psychologists has developed a document to provide guidance for supporting social and emotional learning and mental health as we move into the coming phases of our COVID19 journey. Our planning will be informed by this document. For other logistics our actions will be guided by our site-based Health and Safety Committee which will be working with local and provincial health and workplace safety officials. The physiological and psychological health and wellbeing of all, needs to be established before anything else can be considered. From that starting point, the rest of our priorities flow. These priorities will guide the decisions we make and the resources we allocate.
- All students need to be supported in moving from their point A to their point B.
- Work to create opportunities to reduce necessary screen time.
- Support student development of Core Competencies – communication, thinking skills, and personal and social development.
- Support student development of literacy skills – reading, writing, communication, critical thinking.
- Support student development of numeracy skills – figures, procedures, patterns, problem solving.
- Support the development of student health – physical, mental, emotional.
- Support student development of skills, attitudes, and aptitudes necessary for learning to learn.
- Embrace and develop effective collaboration skills and practices:
- teacher-student,
- student-student,
- teacher-teacher,
- parent-teacher-student.
From our experiences and research, we recognize that the most important work we need to attend to is developing positive relationships with our students and their families. Over the past three months, the increased participation of parents as educational partners has paid significant dividends. To do this we have identified some strategies and approaches we think will be beneficial.
- Communicate clearly and regularly with students and parents. Brevity is desired, accessibility is optimal, and timely is expected.
- Create opportunities to work together (teachers and parents, teachers and students, students and parents).
- Teacher teams working with educational assistants helped meet the needs of homeroom students in all learning.
- Try to find ways to have all students into our school for some face-to-face work each week.
- Make sure the grade levels are mixed as they are in the building, consciously work to break down finite groupings.
- Try to have students in for hands-on activities in small groups to engage them and to support more tactile learning.
- Plan for students new to teachers and teachers new to students in our learning community.
As we shifted to remote learning, executive skill deficiencies were amplified. As a learning community, one of our goals has been to support the development of executive skills in our students. Where this development has been successful, most students found success in remote learning. However, where organization skills, time management skills, and response inhibition were not developed, students struggled. We will be putting the development of these skills as a higher priority for our learning programs next year, especially at the beginning of the year.
- organized delivery
- tight/loose – clear plans set in advance with built in flexibility and personalization
- organization at home
- planning/prioritizing
- time management
- response inhibition
- flexibility
- sustained attention
- task initiation
- goal-directed persistence
- metacognition
Student motivation has been regularly identified as a key to student success. This is not a new concept; however, with the removal of our traditional forms of power and control, the impact of student motivation was significantly amplified. We, as educators, use to have complete control due to the “grammar of school” (Tyack and Cuban, 1995) and over-night that power went to our students. And while we still have marks and credentialing that are used for extrinsic motivation, a shift needs to happen with more emphasis being placed on growing and fueling the intrinsic motivations of loving to learn. I believe our students need to be active participants in their education rather than recipients of it. This has not changed, but the COVID19 crisis has shone a bright light on this challenge. According to the feedback we received over the past few months, students need to see the value in what they are being asked to do or they will not do it. The curriculum we are using with our students should have purpose and meaning and our students need to understand the purpose and meaning. Co-creating curriculum by being proactive and collaborative with our students will significantly increase their motivation and the value of their learning. Within this experience we heard very clearly that diversity needed to be supported and flexibility was necessary. Providing as much choice as possible in ways to engage students in their learning, ways to access that learning, and ways to demonstrate their learning will be even more important when we return to schools this fall (UDL Guidelines). And, connected to all of this is the need to mindfully scaffold and develop student skills for self-directed learning. To help prepare our students for whatever their lives will embrace, they need to know how to be independent learners and these measures will significantly improve that work.
We have seen the suspension of high stakes testing and seen many colleagues struggle to use traditional assessment practices, and that is not a bad thing. We have been talking around assessment practices for years and the removal of the schoolhouse shone a brilliant spotlight on our practices. When asked how they knew students were being successful, many teachers gave two answers: they are participating on-line and they are submitting their work. These are measures of privilege not of success. We need to be very clear about what we value and build our assessments from there. A colleague of mine coined the phrase “assessment with learning” to indicate assessing engagement and the process of learning before seeing the final product. Learning is iterative and our assessments should be as well. Conferencing with students, viewing their self-reflections, and engaging with them through different platforms will significantly improve our ability to support their learning. Designing performance-based assessments with our students, and making them authentic, will amplify growth and development beyond the content.
Finally, we turn our attention to the delivery model design. We are currently working on three designs so that whatever variances come in the fall our learning community will be prepared. Above all else, our programs must ensure equity: we will continue to prioritize meeting the needs of our most needy. In these challenging times, vulnerability is exacerbated. The models need to be developmentally responsive to student development. As referenced above, our learning programs need to be individually challenging and empowering. In all three models there will be a blend of synchronous and asynchronous learning opportunities and we have heard very clearly that there needs to be clarity and simplification of platforms used to deliver curriculum remotely. To that end we are consciously going to use only one electronic student learning system regardless of how much face-to-face time with students we have. We will also be “front-end loading” our year so that we can be proactive rather than reactive as we were forced to be this year. No matter what level of face-to-face learning we will have in September, after addressing the physiological and psychological needs of our community, we will be focused on community building, executive skills, developing specific technology skills, developing safe technology practices, and establishing clear structures.
The past three months have been incredibly challenging for our education systems, the people within them, for parents, and for students. I believe it is incumbent on us to learn from these challenges and find ways to make sure that our youth benefit from this crisis. To do that we need to collect our new-found knowledge and convert it into powerful learning forward.
Tyack, D. & Cuban, L. (1995). Tinkering toward utopia: A century of public school reform. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
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About the author: Gerald Fussell has a Bachelor of Arts, a Bachelor of Education, and a Masters in Curriculum Leadership from the University of Victoria. He is currently working on his Doctorate at the University of Kansas. He serves as the principal of a middle school for students in grades 6 through 9 in the Comox Valley, British Columbia. Gerald has been active in projects related to assessment, educational change, and inquiry driven learning. More information about Gerald Fussell can be found at his web-site, on his blog (http://whynot-gfussell.blogspot.com/), or on Twitter (@GFussell).