By Tony Flach
April 12, 2020
This is truly an unprecedented time in American educational history. I have been honored to continue relationships with schools across the country, albeit remotely, and am humbled by their leaders’ and faculties’ dedication to making this time as normal and productive as possible for their students. I am hearing of heroic efforts to purchase and deploy laptops and mobile internet hotspots, duplicate materials for those families who do not have internet access, and provide prepared meals for our neediest families. Educators are doing their best to make changes while district and state leadership is doing their best to provide guidance. However, I also hear stress and uncertainty in the voices of many of our partners as they try to figure out how to make an overnight transition to remote learning. Many are asking how they should respond.
Most importantly, we need to understand that we can’t do everything. And, in the words of Ken Untener (but usually attributed to Archbishop Oscar Romero), there is a sense of liberation in realizing that. He also writes that “this allows us to do something, and to do it very well” (2007). I encourage you to reflect on your current situation and pick the one thing that, if you did it well, would allow you to do more next week to serve your students and your community.
For some districts, doing one thing right now means prioritizing their curriculum to identify the absolute safety net of priority standards. More than 20 years ago, Doug Reeves and Larry Ainsworth wrote about the importance of prioritizing standards to identify what they called a “safety net curriculum” that would be the absolute minimum that all students need to master. One school district with whom we work has done this and is directing their teachers to focus on only those standards for their instruction and assessment. They are doing this out of a recognition of the need to avoid overwhelming staff and students with a sudden switch to delivering every piece of instruction remotely.
For others, doing one thing right means engaging staff within buildings in cross-training each other in the ed tech tools they each use to build a minimum level of capacity to deliver instruction electronically. Coaches in one building realized that their staff was using a variety of tools to deliver instruction and that students in the same grade with multiple teachers were having to learn multiple systems. The leadership team decided to focus on getting every teacher in the building proficient at using Google Classroom to manage assignments this week. Next week, they will focus on using a web-based video platform to record mini-lessons for students. Their approach is thoughtful, logical, and a recognition that they cannot build the capacity of all teachers to use all tools well immediately.
What is the one thing that you need to do this week in order to be in a better position to serve your community next week?
References
Ainsworth, L. (2003). Power standards: Identifying the standards that matter the most. Englewood, CO: Advanced Learning Press.
Untener, K. (2007). The practical prophet: Pastoral writings. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press.