A View From the Schoolhouse
So… I’ve been feeling the urge to write again, and that urge comes in no small part from the process of going through this podcast where Christian and Russ asked me so many really thoughtful and interesting questions that forced me to really think.
I hope you enjoy it…
[So… I suppose a silver lining of this crisis for me is that it’s kick-started me into writing again. This is the third post in a series about this moment in time. The first two are Taking Care of the Kids, Advisory and Crisis and “Doing School” in the Time of Coronavirus.]
I want to expand a brief Tweet-thread I wrote the other day.
Districts all over the country are realizing that we cannot grade in the ways we always have. Districts are going ungraded or doing Pass / Fail or some version of “Grading Lite.” And there are roughly a hundred ramifications to those decision that we’re going to have to figure out – how it affects promotion and graduation status, how schools figure out final grades for the year, etc… – but many of the first ramifications that leap to most folks’ minds deal with the apparatus of school. Schools do serve many functions in society – and yes, one of them is deals with the credentialing of kids through a degree-seeking program.
And because of those carrots we hold out – grades, advancement to the next year, class rank, graduation – we lean on the compulsory nature of school to varying degrees. Yes, every good teacher I have ever known has tried to make their lessons interesting, and the whole project-based learning movement has been about making the work that we ask kids to worthwhile and interesting.
But there’s still a lot of the “Game of School” in every school – SLA is no exception. I’ve always explained it to kids this way – we have to be here, so we have an obligation to make our time together and the work we do meaningful. But it starts with the recognition that we have to be here.
Now they don’t.
In many, many districts kids will be held harmless from the work in one form or another. And again, I think that’s the right decision. But it does raise really interesting and difficult questions for all of us. First and foremost is this:
What does mean to be a school when work is no longer mandatory?
Fortunately, there are models out there for us – the Free School / Democratic School movement has been around for a very long time, and models like Summerhill and the Free School movement have modeled a version of this kind of education, albeit face to face for years, and they illuminate both the promise and the challenge of what we face. Importantly, even as we look for examples of this in our educational histories, we need to remember that the models we would look to were chosen by students and families. This is not that, and makes it all the more challenging to do this well.
With that, I wanted to expand a bit on some of the questions from that tweet-thread and, in doing so, probably find more new questions as well. With that, here’s my take on that first question…
I think there’s two important pathways to consider this question – the first involves still working within the traditional lens of what we teach in school – blurring and breaking the boundaries of our traditional disciplines, but still thinking in terms of science, math, literature, history, etc… If we look at that lens, we can think critically about the question, “Why would a student want to learn this? Do this? Create this?” And for some kids who love a subject area, the answer is easy, but the better way to engage in that question is to truly take this moment in time to show kids how the work we ask them to do right now will help them make better decisions as a citizen / scholar / person right now. There may never be another moment where teaching exponential functions is so relevant to our lives. Looking throughout history at how governments have responded to crisis provides a powerful lens on the current moment. And if there was ever a moment for choice-based readings and student-organized book clubs, that moment is now.
And with any of these ideas, this is a moment to get kids to see themselves as explorers of ideas. Creating space for discussion groups, book chats, exploratory writing, student-driven artifacts of learning all create space for kids to play in the world of these ideas and concepts in ways that are not as often explored in traditional classroom spaces. It will be harder to quantify, but right now, we don’t have to in all the ways we have in the past. That might mean — will mean — that fewer kids will do everything they are asked to do, but what it hopefully means is that kids find ways to explore the topics of school in ways they haven’t before.
The other thing to consider is that now can be a moment in time to ask kids to take the leap to learn something they have wanted to learn and haven’t had the chance or time to. Want to learn podcasting? Come up with a topic and learn it. Is there a genre of reading you love and want to read more of? Write in the style of? Suddenly feel compelled to learn everything there is to know about viruses? Got a programming language you want to explore? Now is the moment… and kids have long learned outside of school, but now school has an opportunity to value that and recognize that in ways that hasn’t always been taken seriously before.
As schools, we have a moment where we can ask kids to create artifacts of the learning beyond traditional school work (with some reflection attached to it) and share them with the larger school community and larger community via whatever modality they choose and linking them to either a blog engine, GoogleSite, Portfolium, LMS, etc. And if kids are using smart folksonomies, they can see who else is doing interesting learning along similar topics.
Yes, we’ve seen this idea before – lots of folks at one time or another were playing with Google 20% time (even as we learned that it wasn’t all that well-executed at Google), but for all kinds of reasons – many of them dealing with the compulsory nature of school (and work) – schools found it hard to manage. Because it is. But now we don’t have to. We can create a structure for kids to fill if they so choose, and because we don’t have to worry about if they do it during first period or fifth period, we have a moment where the old constraints aren’t there, so we can put this out there as a ways for kids to build their own sense of what it’s going to mean to be a learner for when their lives are no longer bound by the schedule and routine of school..
For SLA, we’re going to try do do both of these things. We want to make sure we are creating the conditions by which kids really do want to continue doing the subject-specific learning because we do value the work we ask kids to do, and we’re going to see what kids show us that they are doing beyond the traditional boundaries of what we think of as school. And the hope is that that process of reflecting upon it and sharing it will elevate the learning as well. The more we can help kids see themselves as empowered learners right now, able to tap into their agency, the better chance we have of helping them through to the other side of this crisis.
And with that, I’m going to incentivize my own sharing by saving questions two, three and four for another blog post (or two) and publish what I’ve got so far. You can help push my learning (and anyone else’s who comes by to read) by leaving your thoughts in the comments.
Stay safe.
A lot of folks have reached out asking me to write about what learned about moving online when you can’t be in your building because of what happened to SLA in the fall. I can tell you that it’s not easy to write about… and I am not sure that people will find a ton of comfort in what I write next… but in the spirit that it could help someone, I’m sitting down tonight to write.
But before I write anything about how we might think about school during this time, go ahead and read what I wrote for NASSP about Leading During a Crisis. That is as good a lens as I can come up with for thinking through how to act and make decisions and treat people during this time.
With that said…
People need to get comfortable with the idea that, in many respects, whatever we come up with for school right now isn’t going to be all that great. There’s a lot of reasons for that – first and foremost is that we’re not ok right now. People – students, teachers, admins, parents – are anxious and scared and cooped-up at home and all sorts of things. That’s very real, and we know that – in the best of times – the world outside school impacts school in powerful ways. Now is no different.
Secondly, as many folks have written, the level of access is wildly different, family to family, kid to kid, community to community. Even in a home where there’s access – does every child have a solid device? Do families have reliable wifi? Is there someone techie enough in the family to troubleshoot when something goes wrong? All that said – I applaud the efforts of districts like New York City and Boston and Philadelphia who are mobilizing on the fly to get internet-ready devices into every students’ hands. That might be their least bad option at the moment, and importantly “least bad” might be the very best they can do.
Third, this kind of shift happens best when it’s intentional and thoughtful. There are dozens of questions that schools should answer thoughtfully when they move systems online — and that’s even if they are going to a blended format. Simply getting good at the tech is really just one piece of the puzzle. And those questions should be tackled thoughtfully, engaging all stakeholders in a conversation that just isn’t possible right now.
And yet… here we are. We’re probably all going to be out of school for a while, so we’re going to have to figure some things out on the fly and do the best we can. So here are some thoughts on what “as best as we can” might look like.
First, one of the most important mindsets I think schools need to have is this:
What is the least bad decision we can make right now?
That sounds defeatist, but it’s not. It’s realistic. And it guards against any kind of hubris – which could quite possibly be the worst frame of mind to have right now. This isn’t a moment for those of us who have loved a lot of these tools for a long time to rush in. It’s a time for humility and an understanding of how fragile this moment — and those of us in this moment — really is. Thinking about “What is the least bad thing?” is a recognition of the moment we’re in. Kids didn’t choose this. Your teachers didn’t choose this. You probably didn’t choose this. So, now, given all that – what is the least bad thing you can do in the moment.
And by the way, this isn’t to say that there can’t be some amazing things that happen. There will be kids who find ways to do incredible things during this time. There will be teachers who find out that they have a facility with ideas and tools that they never gave themselves the opportunity to explore before. And that is all great – and you should definitely make a point of capturing all of those things so that, when all get to the other side of this pandemic, you can learn from the best things you did and use those amazing moments as building blocks for however you choose to move forward into whatever new normal we discover.
“What is the least bad thing we can do?” is, in some ways, a darker version of “What is the worst consequence of my best idea?” which is a concept we’ve used at SLA for years to make sure we stayed humble and never fell in love with an idea without examining unintended consequences or questioning who is privileged by it or what will go wrong, even if the overall concept goes right. “Least bad” is a recognition that whatever we do right now to move schools into an online version of themselves, it’s not the way we should do it under any normal circumstances, and what it becomes, then, is perhaps our own educational Hippocratic oath to remind us that so much of what we’re about to do is triage.
So how do you make your least bad decisions?
There are probably a lot more, but that’s enough for now.
Of course, all of these ideas are good ideas for us to consider all of the time, but they take on added import now. Intentionality and stepping back to question why we do what we do is something that we can all do a better job of. During “normal” times, it’s very easy to fall back on “Because we’ve always done it that way…” but we’ve never done this before, so we lose the easy answer there. But because of the speed with which everyone has to operate right now, it would be easy to just try to replicate “school” online. If we do that, and in our haste, we fail to see the unique challenges of this moment, we’ll do harm, and our first guiding principle should always be to do no harm.
