Glen Cochrane
Suffolk STANYS Chair
The educational community is under stress that has never been seen before. Uncertainty and the lack of day-to-day and perhaps week-to-week predictability are things no one likes. The teaching model now has multiple modalities of hybrid, in school, and remote instruction. Many teachers have webcams following them in class as they concurrently teach their remote and hybrid students. It’s an impossible job of trying to equitability attend to the students on the screen and the ones in the room face-to-face. We know students learn best when in group discourse and using science materials in activities, but that is almost impossible with physical distancing. Everyone is trying to integrate compliant platforms to better engage students into the district’s Learning Management System. These strategies have given rise to many concerns. What about the inequities with students without computers and without broadband access? What about doing all this with multiple teacher preps. How do we assess students formatively and authentically when they are home? Add to that our personal fears of the disease infecting us and spreading to our families and community.
Certainly, this is an unprecedented moment with conditions we all wish never happened. My question is, so why is so much the “educational system” moving along like things are normal? I heard a teacher talking about their SLOs, administrators are pushing to get observations done. And, what about APPR? Teachers are looking at the lack of student engagement and are talking about huge failure numbers. They wonder, “How will my students learn enough to pass the regents when we meet a couple of times a week and there are no hands-on activities?” What about the students on screen time that “aren’t really there?” Teachers are trying to engage students with asynchronous activities for home-based students but where is the accountability. Besides course content, we need to consider putting efforts into social emotional learning to take care of our students and ourselves. Again, this is a very abnormal time for everyone. Students might be frightened, have experienced serious illness or death of family or friends, have experienced economic catastrophe, and are struggling with food insecurity.
Why is the educational system maintaining expectations of teachers and students as if this is a normal year? With luck, current talk has a COVID vaccine available to the general public the second or third quarter of 2021. Even with vaccines available, a significant number of people will not get one which reduces the success of heard immunity. The challenges we have now will likely continue for almost all the 2020-21 school year.
It is time for a reality check and time to face the reality of a year we wish we could forget. Let’s be positive and learn new tools to put in your pedagogical toolbox. Become a better teacher by striving to become much more adept at technology. Importantly, address diversity of students we are charged to teach. Prioritize the curriculum to what matters, not for the summative exam, but what matters to our 21 st century learners. Develop tasks that encourage and expect students to use the resources of the Internet just like we do when we are trying to figure something out. It’s not about what students can recall, but what they can do and figure out using resources. Students need to make claims using evidence-based reasoning. They need to be able to sort valid sources from mere hearsay. They need to be held accountable but should be engaged with real world scenarios and applications.
Of course, we all need to be sensitive to the realities of this frightful year, and do our best, even if we know it could be better. It’s all we can ask of ourselves.