To encourage dialogue and reflection about staying present and ‘in the moment’, our question for the week is: What strategies do you use to help you stay in the present (to help avoid worrying or thinking about the future)? Addressing Present Needs (Week of 9/19/21) (This is an anonymous Google Form)
Blake's Guiding Lights
Our Students
Blake's Core Values: Respect, Responsibility, Resourcefulness, Reflection
Our Essential Question: How can we cultivate and curate the progression of student learning and growth?
Our Mission: Blake Middle School believes in a living mission statement, based on the concept that our community seeks and respects knowledge, integrity, character, wisdom, and the willingness to adapt to a continually evolving world.
The most important attitude that can be formed is that of desire to go on learning. - John Dewey
You cannot teach today the same way you did yesterday to prepare students for tomorrow. - John Dewey
Hopefully everyone enjoyed a nice break and some of the fall weather this past weekend. With Katie and Maggie away for the weekend, the boys and I had a pretty low-key weekend - seeing some sports games and enjoying Celebrate Holliston day on Saturday. On Sunday night we had a family dinner all together (a very rare occasion these days!) before the five-day school week resumed.
Abstract
Understanding the experiences of students and teachers during pandemic schooling is vital to educational recovery and building back better. In the spring of 2021 as the school year was coming to close, we conducted three research exercises: 1) we invited 200 teachers to interview their students about the past year and share their findings, 2) we interviewed 50 classroom teachers, and 3) we conducted ten multistakeholder design charrettes with students, teachers, school leaders, and family members to begin planning for the 2021-2022 recovery year. Rather than a "return to normal" or the targeting of a narrowly-conceived "learning loss," the students and educators in our study emphasized themes of healing, community, and humanity as key learnings from the pandemic year and essential values to rebuilding schools. We recommend that in the 2021-2022 year, schools create structures for community members to reflect on the pandemic year, celebrate resilience, grieve what has been lost, and imagine how the lessons learned from a tumultuous year can inform more equitable, resilient school systems for the future. We provide guidance on four reflection protocols to use in school communities to advance this work.
Justin Reich and Neema Avashia - Notes from the Webinar
- ‘When you face difficulty challenges in education, a really important starting point is to talk to students and talk to teachers’
- What kinds of schools will students go back to?
- Status Quo (Ante Pandemus)
- Learning Loss (Remediation)
- Humane Reinvention (this is the one that our students need)
- Very few people are motivated by saying that they are losers (in the context of learning loss)
- Why do we have the rules that we have? (a key question to ask)
- Amplify/Hospice/Create (framework for the practices in our schools - What should we amplify? What should we hospice? What should we create?)
- Guiding Questions…
2) What has been hard about learning from home?
3) What do you hope adults will do (or not do) to make school better next year?
4) What did you lose or miss out on because of the pandemic?
5) What are you most proud of from this past year?
There was a lot to process during the webinar and I found myself making direct and indirect connections to our endeavors at Blake and the goals we have for our learning community. A few key ideas shone through…
- Neema’s opening words (noted above) - ‘When you face difficulty challenges in education, a really important starting point is to talk to students and talk to teachers’ - we (‘speaking from the I’) often forget this very important and simple practice of asking questions and listening
- ‘Listening and being present’ - in research, in the classroom, in the hallways - this mantra slows the thought process down and addresses the current needs
- Avoiding the BGUTI Principle (referenced below - Alfie Kohn) - this year (and we are already seeing this) presents unique challenges and the tendency in schools is to fall back on the ‘better get used to it’ mantra to raise the ‘level of rigor’ and ‘up the ante’; this is not what is needed for our students or ourselves as the caring adults who are supporting their learning
- Responses from our students are important - looking through the responses from the opening learning inventories (asked of students and families), students and families clearly articulate a desire to enhance skills and habits of learning
- Culture and Systems shape everything - we must continue to be thoughtful about the systems we establish and the culture/environment that supports these systems - responsive systems and cultures that adapt, personalize, and support are the ones we should hope for, implement, and act upon
The posts below, coupled with a sampling of responses from the most recent question of the week, speak to the importance of staying present, listening, and addressing the needs of the learners in front of us...
The Why of Education: Doing Well and Doing Good
by Angela Duckworth (@angeladuckw) in Getting Smart
Don’t oversimplify education. A great classroom is one in which young people thrive in every sense of the word. Schools play an essential role in helping young people develop socially, emotionally, physically, and academically.
Do ask the young people in your life what they think about the purpose of education. Share a story, perhaps, of a lesson you learned as a young person that you can’t put on your resume but you hope will be remembered in your eulogy. As with so many endeavors in life, Why? is a very good place to start.
Educators, Be Future-Ready, But Don't Ignore the Present (Opinion)
by Peter DeWitt (@PeterMDeWitt) in Education Week
Future-ready is definitely a proper focus, but to get there, we need to be present-ready as well. Our immediate needs in school are on student, teacher, and leader mental health, along with an understanding of where students are academically at present.
To understand the gains that students made and the possible areas of growth they need to work on, we need to be present. To not just cope, but to thrive as teachers and leaders during this increasingly stressful time, we need to focus on not just what we control, but how we react to what we cannot control, which needs to be a present focus. We will never get to the future if we don’t pay attention to learning the tools on how we cope or thrive in the present.
...it seems that we have such an uber focus on all things future that we forget to be uber-focused on our present situations. Simply focusing on how we are breathing can help us alleviate some of the stress and anxiety we feel.
“Getting through this time” is a coping mechanism to get through a difficult experience, but focusing on the future when things may be better may also prevent us from seeing a learning lesson in the present. Why are students ghosting us? What can we do about the number of F’s we are giving to students and why are we doing it? Those are present questions we should be asking. Merely hoping for a better future isn’t going to help. Even our worst crisis can offer us a great learning experience but only if we are present when experiencing it.
Being present helps us connect with others in deeper ways and provides us with the space to ask better questions and listen more intently on the answers that we receive. Those conversations actually can help us gain an understanding of the needs of the people we are with, which will ultimately help them in the future...focus on the goals of the future, but just don’t forget to focus on all of the great aspects around us during the present.
Getting-Hit-on-the-Head Lessons (Opinion)
by Alfie Kohn (@alfiekohn) in Education Week
Even if a lesson provides little intellectual benefit, students may have to suffer through it anyway because someone decided it will get them ready for what they’re going to face in the next grade. Lilian Katz, a specialist in early-childhood education, refers to this as “vertical relevance,” and she contrasts it with the horizontal kind in which students’ learning is meaningful to them at the time because it connects to some other aspect of their lives.
What we might call the BGUTI principle—“Better Get Used To It”—is applied to other practices, too:
- Traditional grading has been shown to reduce quality of learning, interest in learning, and preference for challenging tasks. But the fact that students’ efforts will be reduced to a letter or number in the future is seen as sufficient justification for giving them grades in the present.
- The available research fails to find any benefit, either academic or attitudinal, to the practice of assigning homework to elementary school students. Yet even educators who know this is true often fall back on the justification that homework—time-consuming, anxiety-provoking, and pointless though it may be—will help kids get used to doing homework when they’re older. One researcher comes close to saying that the more unpleasant (and even unnecessary) the assignment, the more valuable it is by virtue of teaching children to cope with things they don’t like.
- Setting children against one another in contests, so that one can’t succeed unless others fail, has demonstrably negative effects—on psychological health, relationships, intrinsic motivation, and achievement—for winners and losers alike.
Even if a given practice did make sense for those who are older—a very big if—that doesn’t mean it’s appropriate for younger children. Almost by definition, the better-get-used-to-it defense ignores developmental differences. It seems to assume that young children ought to be viewed mostly as future older children, and all children are just adults in the making. Education, in a neat reversal of Dewey’s dictum, is not a process of living but merely a preparation for future living.
...people don’t really get better at coping with unhappiness because they were deliberately made unhappy when they were young. In fact, it is experience with success and unconditional acceptance that helps one deal constructively with later deprivation. Imposing competition or standardized tests or homework on children just because other people will do the same to them when they’re older is about as sensible as saying that, because there are lots of carcinogens in the environment, we should feed kids as many cancer-causing agents as possible while they’re small to get them ready.
If a practice can’t be justified on its own terms, then the task for children and adults alike isn’t to get used to it, but to question, to challenge, and, if necessary, to resist.
Healing, Community, and Humanity: How Students and Teachers Want to Reinvent Schools Post-COVID
Report by Justin Reich (@bjfr) and Jal Mehta (@jal_mehta)
We see this work as particularly timely and critical because if we do nothing, we are headed towards scenarios of returning to an unacceptable status quo or remediating learning loss through strategies with weak community support. Alternatively, listening to those closest to the problem—parents, students, and teachers—can lead to a needed reinvention of schools
In the months ahead, the best way to advance a change agenda may be through reflection - giving educators, students, and other school stakeholders the chance to celebrate resilience, mourn loss, and imagine how their learning from this past year might lead to better schools in the future. Not all of those imaginings will come to fruition in September of 2021; too many people are too tired. But there is an energy in recognizing all that educators accomplished, built, and changed, and with some rest, that energy can be harnessed again in the years ahead. We
recommend three guiding principles in the year ahead:
- Don’t define next year as a return to normal. For too many students, normal schooling wasn’t meeting their needs.
- Amplify key ideas from pandemic schooling, and hospice things that don’t need to come back. Have the school year start with a few noticeable changes.
- Engage in a year of reflection to celebrate the successes from pandemic schooling, grieve our losses, and harness the energy from the emergency to continue to build back better
The past year has been incredibly straining on students and teachers, and like most challenging events,talking about our experiences can be healing and revealing. Teachers and students are eager to debrief how they managed this past year...These conversations will draw attention to parts of schooling that we want to improve and remind educators of the incredible efforts and energy that they put forth in the past year.
The challenge will be to harness that energy—that experience and urgency for change—outside of an emergency setting; to apply that energy not to a pivot during a pandemic, but to the sustained improvement of schools. The past year we learned that everything in schools that looks fixed and hardened is actually contingent and flexible. Grades, curriculum, seat time, schedules, settings, groupings—all of these features can be changed. For all of the suffering and hardship of the past year, some of the changes we made really were for the better, paving the way toward reinventing more humane school communities.
What's Missing From Back To School This Year? The Time To Heal
by Neema Avashia (@AvashiaNeema)
The problem is that between trauma and normalcy, there is a middle step that seems to have not been included in the state’s equation: healing.
My students have carried a lot of pain with them through the last 18 months, and when I’ve asked them what they need from us, their response has been consistent: they need support, they need relationships, they need healing. Where policymakers fret about learning loss, my students are preoccupied by more palpable losses. Ones that, unless thoroughly mitigated, make it hard to even think about learning.
Healing happens when we allow people to go at their own pace. When we surround them with loving people, and allow them the space and time to be in relationship with those people. When we let their needs — not the needs of a system — dictate what happens.
Imagine trying to heal in classrooms with 30 other students, where you move from 55-minute class to 55-minute class, where lunch is barely long enough to choke down a sandwich, where your learning is measured, rather than nurtured. Where your ability to graduate is predicated on a one-off test, rather than years of work and learning. This way of doing school wasn’t right prior to the pandemic. In the context of ongoing trauma, I am even more convinced that we, as adults, need to let go of our ideas of normal, and build a system that is responsive to the needs that young people are communicating to us, in this moment, and moving forward.
Returning to normal without acknowledging the profound harm that has happened, and radically changing our educational practices — from class sizes to standards to assessment to start and end time of the school day — to mitigate that harm, enacts another kind of cruelty on our young people: the cruelty of not having your pain acknowledged or held. The cruelty of not being seen for all of who you are.
Our young people need us to see that this is the time for healing. And our schools need permission to prioritize that healing, rather than normalcy.
Sampling of Responses from Last Week’s ‘Question of the Week’: What do you need to help you learn?
- It is always helpful to know how the content I am learning will be applicable to my own improvement / growth.
- I need time to brainstorm and people with whom I can share a critical dialogue!
- A place where I am not judged.
- Resources, patient and helpful guides, time!
- Time for processing and reflection.
- Flexibility - sometimes kids need a mental health break that might not align with when the district says vacation is. Support in allowing that to happen.
- Extra help from teachers
- I don't really need anything to help me learn but I am a visual learner so keep that in mind
- Group work
- I need support, comfort, friends, good teachers, and a safe environment.
- Projects
- Have less homework and more school work
- Attention
- I think I am good
- A good teacher
- I need more hands-on activities and less screens. In social studies we went around trading cards, and that was AWESOME! It made me want to go to social studies that much more. I think that I would love SCHOOL that much more if there were more hands-on activities.
A couple weeks ago Katie sent me a text with a screenshot of this tweet from Ibram Kendi (her text said ‘for a future Natworthy’) - the words Kendi quoted from Kelsey Ko have stayed with me and are right ‘in line’ with the sentiments of the posts shared this week. Grace, compassion, and our theme of imagination can and will serve as our pillars for centering for all of our learners, students and adults alike.
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Take care.
Nat