Flying Off a Cliff

My friends, we have been pushed off a cliff into our current digital teaching, haven't we? Not by anyone being unkind, of course. This pandemic and its timeline were not anticipated by educators. But here we are, at our respective homes, in our respective bunny slippers, worrying about our respective students, trying to figure out our respective tech problems. 

But as we have pretty much settled in, I know that most of us have seen some silver linings in digital teaching. 

Other than our bunny slippers and our lack of commutes. 

I have seen some of you SOAR with your digital teaching -- not like the guy falling off the cliff, but like the superhero flying  off the mountain that you all are (even when you don’t feel like it) 

There are things I know you all have discovered that you love in digital teaching. 

• Maybe it’s DBQ Online
• Maybe it’s having kids use the chat to collaborate
• Maybe it’s stepping down the kids’ workloads
• Maybe it’s virtual field trips
• Maybe it’s Canva for student projects
• Maybe it’s letting go of “right there” questions. 
• Maybe it’s Flipgrid for engaged student responses
• Maybe it’s leaning into the social and emotional side of teaching
• Maybe it’s Safari Montage for safe Youtube viewing
• Maybe it’s some cool resource you’ve discovered you can’t live without. 
• Maybe it’s something else entirely! 

Whatever it is, do me two favors. (please)

First, tell me what is your favorite thing about digital teaching (bunny-slippers-wise AND ALSO teaching-wise). Send me email, chat me, or whatever. I’m not going anywhere, either. 

Second, make a digital note for yourself. And start thinking about how you can use that thing you like from the NOW, from digital teaching when you go back in the physical classroom in the fall. How can you use Flipgrid or digital chats or Canva or whatever? 

Let’s start thinking now about the things we are learning to love about digital teaching -- the ways we are all GROWING as teachers from digital teaching -- and how we don’t pack those great teaching moments away with our bunny slippers when August comes around. Let’s bring our great digital teaching “finds” to school with us and keep those things rolling, just like we’ll keep the hand sanitizer rolling. 

Although I don’t think I will pack my bunny slippers away completely. I am in LOVE with my bunny slippers. 

I know some weeks you think you’re drowning. Some weeks your kids think they’re drowning. 

You’re not drowning and you can make yourself “drown less” (if that’s a thing). 

Remember you are only supposed to be giving 2-3 activities per week that are 20-30 minutes long, right? This is not brick-and-morter-school. Life and school are drastically different. This is hard. We aren’t supposed to be stressing out the students which in turn stresses out the parents which stresses out the administrators which stresses out the teachers! The solution to a lot of the stress (but certainly not all of it) is to give kids (and ourselves) less work.

Slow down. You don’t have an exam. Your kids won’t die if they don’t cover a benchmark as thoroughly as they usually do. Make it fun. Keep it fun, so they keep learning for the next month. 

And then, tell me and make a note for yourself about what worked well and what you can take back to your classroom. 

Hang in there, team. It’s almost May!  And this summer, we can all... hang around our houses some more? 

Anyway, email me and let me know what’s working for you about digital teaching! Like you miss your students, I miss my colleagues! Have a great week! 

-Tracy

I Walk The Line

So, Johnny Cash sang about walking the line 60+ years ago, singing about how he tried to stay on the straight and narrow path of “being good” in the face of temptations. 

As I sit in my living room, I think about the many, many lines I am walking the line these days despite the fact that I don’t go very far (or anywhere). And how the line is ever shifting and confusing. Remember a month or two ago when we just had to stay in groups of less than 250 people? Or just use hand sanitizer more often? That WAS walking the line! 

So, here are a few lines I’m currently walking

• The line between getting exercise and being around other people.
• The line between being a good parent and a good employee.
• The line between braving Publix again or ordering takeout (and supporting a local small business).
• The line between needing Pop Tarts for mental health and not needing Pop Tarts for physical health.
• The line between needing to make an amazing, engaging lesson so the students actually do it and learn something and the line between needing to not spend 20 hours on a screen.

It’s a definite line.

Because A leads to B leads to C leads to D... like this ...

If I assign boring work, the kids won’t be engaged.  

If the kids aren’t engaged, they will stop logging in. 

If they stop logging in, they stop learning in my class. 

If they stop logging into my class, they might stop learning altogether. 

If they stop learning altogether, the fourth quarter is a waste.

If fourth quarter is a waste, my most struggling students will be even more behind than ever.

If my most struggling students are even more behind, then how will they ever catch up?

However ... 

I have to walk the line. 

Have you gone down the rabbit hole looking for some cool activity lately? The internet is a big place. Go looking for something more interesting than the usual stuff and you can spend hours and hours digging and sifting through the resources. You can get lost and sucked into a time warp where you search and explore for hours, emerging well after dark wondering where your day went. 

You have to balance your students’ needs with your own needs. This is always true, but work blends into home life a little more easily now that we can’t get into our cars at the end of the day and leave the school building. 

Number one, as Dr. Grego said in his recent email, please give yourself grace. 

This is not your regular classroom. You are not teaching five 45-minute lessons anyway. The kids are not in front of you. So, please give yourself and the kids grace to still work through figuring these things out. Let it be messy. Let lessons bomb. Be forgiving when the kids mess up or you mess up or when a lesson falls flat that you thought would rock. Or when the technology doesn’t work. Or when the kids don’t work. For real. 

Number two is that many hands make light work. How do you make a great lesson? How do you find great resources? Where do these colleagues find awesome virtual field trips and learning games? Divide and conquer! 

You can use the resources that come out of our office or share the work with your friends and colleagues. 

But please walk the line between finding engaging lessons and working too hard. Please don’t work too hard. Life is too stressful right now for you to spend 18 hours a day on your computer. 

But please don’t totally skip the engaging piece and just assign textbook readings with questions at the end. If we do that, we lose kids. And if we lose kids right now, it’s awfully hard to find them again.

What lines are you currently walking? How are you succeeding (or not) at walking the line between engagement and overdoing it? How are your kids responding? 

I really do want to hear from you. I really do miss you all! Email me at newmantr@pcsb.org 

-Tracy

Bunny Slippers, Siri, and Alexa

So, Now that we’re a couple weeks into this distance learning stuff, like most situations, I am finding some definite positives and some definite challenges to this working from home thing. (Note: there are no actual “positives” to COVID 19 itself. Be safe. Stay home!)

• Positive? Not taking an hour-plus every morning to get the kids to school in one direction and get me to wherever I need to be in the other direction! 
• Challenge? Needing that full hour-plus (broken up here and there) every day to read my kindergartner his assignment directions and set him up on each assignments (Note: his teacher is amazing. His assignments are very appropriate. He’s just a kindergartner and a bit attention-demanding)
• Positive? Not worrying so much about what I wear or dressing like a “real grown up”. Less time and hassle! 
• Challenge? I am about to WEAR OUT my fuzzy bunny slippers in APRIL, y’all! Real shoes are not worn except for my daily bike ride or walk around the neighborhood. Plus, I cut my own bangs and I’m pretty sure they aren’t very straight. It’s a hard thing to do when you wear glasses and need them to see to cut your own hair but they're in the way of the bangs.  

I think there are some definitely positives and negatives/challenges to teaching from home, too. Anyone agree with me? 

• Positive? The kids are quiet. Or if they’re not, you can’t hear them so it doesn’t bother you or each other that much (except in class meetings on Teams)
• 
  Challenge? The kids are quiet! You can’t tell if they’re learning anything or if they’re daydreaming or ignoring you or watching Tik Toks all day. 
• Positive? No bathroom passes. No scheduling computer labs. No worrying about who has a pencil. No passing out materials. No raising hands. No waiting for a copy machine line or running out of copies for the month. 
• Challenge? Uh, no paper or book materials! No student hands to raise or see. New logistics problems -- getting digital materials to kids in the best and most efficient and useful ways. Ways that open and work...

And here’s another issue...

DOK Levels of thinking. Some definite positives and challenges here, too!

• Positive? You have every digital resource at your kids finger tips. Every kid has a (digital) textbook AND a device! The “assignments tab” is finally working! (thank goodness!) Suddenly, half the problems that used to thwart your day are gone (copiers, textbooks, pencils, bathroom passes, chatty children)
• Challenge? “Right there” questions don’t work anymore. They just don’t! The kids are just going to google them. Or text their friends. You can no longer ask “When did ___ happen?” or “What’s the name of ___?” I mean, you CAN, but it sure isn’t very useful. . 

We talk about things being ungoogleable (Just say that word out loud. It sounds so awesome!). That’s become important since the beginning of the days of the internet. It’s become even more important that we ask kids to do more than regurgitate shallow facts. It is even MORE important in the days of kids having personal cell phones and personal devices in class -- or AS their whole class experience!  

It is CRUCIAL today, now that every single kid is on a device all day long. 

It makes no sense to ask kids to spend time on “right there” questions when they’re all on devices. They can literally click “control-c” (copy) and “control v” (paste) without spending much (or any) brain power on comprehending the question or the answer. 

We need to move on past low level questions anyway. This digital learning moment should help us accelerate that.

Low level questions and memorization were important for centuries before photocopy machines, to pass on culture, history, knowledge, and oral tradition. 

And then came the internet. And now, instead of needing to memorize these pieces of information, we can Google them. THere are so many more pieces of information than there used to be anyway.Or, weirder still, we can ask Youtube (did you know that more teens ask Youtube questions than Google?) Or we can ask Alexa or Siri. 

And now our students are online all day for school. 

Who was the 16th president? Control-C and Control-V. 

When did Rome become an Empire? Control-C and Control-V.

What happened in Miranda v. Arizona? Control-C and Control-V.

They don’t actually LEARN anything that way. 

So, part of our teaching change is POSITIVE now that every kid has a device and we can all take virtual field trips and play Mission US or iCivics games. 

But part of our teaching is a definite CHALLENGE because we now can’t really use one of those standard teacher tools: low level questions. I mean we can, but without being in person, it becomes mostly busy work that is instantly cheated on, WITH parents noticing,and we can’t catch the cheaters. Yikes! 

So, what do we do instead?

We can move up the DOK Wheel, even one level. It’s the 4th quarter anyway. Kids have learned 3/4 of their school year and they are smarter and better readers than they were in August. So, instead of “right there” questions, let’s ask them to summarize, use context clues, infer, predict, or find cause/effect. You all have been doing these things all year. So let them try once with scaffolding (if they REALLY need it) and then take the scaffolding away and let those kiddos fly on their own! 

The key to this is QUALITY OVER QUANTITY. 

I’d rather have three or four (or two?) good questions that are mid or high level on the DOK than ten low-level DOK questions where the answers really come from Alexa or Siri. 

If you’re tempted to ask “right there” questions, try one of these instead.

• What is the main/central idea? 
• What is the author’s claim?
• What evidence does the author/video/art/chart give?
• What is the cause of ___?
• What was the effect of ___?
• Summarize _____.
• Compare ____ to ____.
• What’s the difference between _____ and _____?
• Infer what the author/artist is trying to say about ____?
• Predict what you think is going to happen next.

I know that my fuzzy bunny slippers count this distance-learning as a positive. And my parenting-while-working-from-home definitely counts this as a challenge. 

But as we work through our positives and challenges, let’s make sure to roll with the punches and be intentional about quality over quantity and mid- to higher levels of thinking. Nobody is paying us to teach Google, Alexan, or Siri. Plus, those guys know all the answers anyway. 

How is your instruction shifting with our current way of work (other than bunny slippers all day)? Have you thought about and adapted to the fact that your students are Googling or asking Siri or Alexa the answers to all the low-level questions? As always (and more now that I only see one other adult all day!) I LOVE to hear from you! Email me at newmantr@pcsb.org 

-Tracy

Humans First, Learners Second

Things that are different (in unexpected ways

1. There is a wooden train set that runs under my work chair. If I move my work chair, I derail the really important train to Train City.  (yes that pic is from today, from my living room)
2. Four of us cannot work at the kitchen table without unpleasant consequences. Thank goodness for IKEA “click and collect” where they put your new, cheap IKEA table in your trunk for you. 
3. You don’t need hand sanitizer much if you don’t leave the house! 
4. My kids are lonely. They don’t have social media to interact with people and so all their interacting is within our house. So they are all over me!!!
5. Ordering takeout is an act of helping others? Sweet! Tacos as a service project!!! 
6. My house feels smaller than it ever did before. 

But honestly, if you don’t leave your house much (and where are you going to go?), you really don’t know what it’s like in someone else’s house. 

Maybe you live alone and you’re super zen about all this. Maybe you live alone and you’re lonely as all get-out. Maybe you’re going nuts, cooped up with your family or roommates. Maybe you’re cozy with your family. Maybe you’re going to strangle the person or people you love with. Maybe you’re anxious and worried beyond the norm. Maybe you cannot figure out what to do with digital learning. 

Your kids are in one of those situations, only with a lot less control over their lives.

• Some of them have parents working from home who have set an annoyingly structured schedule.
• Some of them have parents working from home and have no schedule. At all. Do whatever, whenever. 
• Some of them have parents at home but who are not currently working because their restaraunt/nail salon/art gallery/airline/hotel/gym/retail store is closed. There may or may not be schedules. Parents are freaking out about jobs and money.
• Some of them are home alone (or at grandparents/neighbors’/aunties’ houses) while parents go to work in healthcare/first responders/sanitation/utilities/groceries /delivery/construction jobs. 
• Some of them have been on their phones since we left school (ok, all year) and have a great support system of friends to keep them connected. 
• Some of them have been on their phones, connected to online harassment and bullying with no schoolwork or counselors to distract them and are at their wits’ end. 
• Some of them don’t have phones (or not anymore now that a parent has lost his or her job) and are now disconnected from their whole social support system while social distancing.
• Some of them are still out roaming the neighborhood with their friends anyway because parents are at work or are too panicked about their lack of income to keep it together. 
• Some of them are freaking out about a sick member of their family who may or may not have COVID-19, but they’re assuming it is anyway. 
• Any of those scenarios above, it may be getting tense. Unhealthy family relationships are getting really unhealthy. Bad habits are getting worse. Kids are scared and alone a lot. Or NEVER alone. Or lost and adrift

So before you dive into Sources of Law or Ionic Columns or Dred Scott...

Dive into how the kids are.  Where the kids are. 

Are they ok? Do they need an ear? Social interaction? Empathy? A break from parents breathing down their necks or do they need a grown-up to be in charge of something?

I know you’re not the counselor (although I am sure that the counselors are working their magic in crazy new ways, too) but you-the-teacher have always been the first line of checking in with students. 

Remember Maslow’s hierarchy of needs? 

You start from the bottom. You have to handle your physical needs first. If you don’t have food, shelter, and so on, you can’t really worry about safety. If you don’t have that taken care of, you can’t really worry about relationships (which is why so many parents, spouses, siblings, and other relationships get rocky during times of crisis).

Once you have enough food, water, safety, security (is this where the TP comes in?), and relationships, only THEN can humans really work on accomplishing goals and achieving their potential. 

So, if they’re worrying about what they’re going to eat or if they’re going to be evicted or about that loved one with a high fever and a cough ... a kid isn’t going to care about the difference between Doric columns and Ionic columns quite yet. 

*If I can mention that this is ALWAYS the case, COVID-19 or not. Often what we call “not caring about education” is a case of a kid or family not being able to focus on that part of Maslow’s hierarchy YET because they are too focused on a lower level with having to worry about safety needs or physical needs. Just a friendly reminder from your college psychology class! 

So how can I help? I’m not the counselor! I don’t know what I'm doing digital teaching and I’m living in one of those crazy uncertain scenarios above! 

1. I say this as a mom a lot, but I’m going to say this as a teacher, too. Airlines say it all the time (ok, less this week, but still). Put. On. Your. Own Oxygen. Mask. First.

You can’t help anyone else if you are losing your stuff. Take care of yourself. Do all the stuff they tell you to do to make this time easier. Go take a walk. Get exercise. Facetime with your people. Eat healthy. Smile (physically smile!). Watch kittens and puppies on the internet. Play with your kids and pets. Get sunshine every day. Don’t overdo the news and social media. Don’t expect to be a digital teaching superstar. (None of us are quite yet). Unplug when you can. 

2. Ask your kids how they are -- and listen. And answer them, individually. They miss you. They miss real life.  They’re human beings and they need you. And if they have problems bigger than you can handle, email the counselors and the same team you usually go to. They’re still there (well, at home). 

3. If kids have COVID-19 questions (especially with all the social media craziness), check out The News Literacy Project

4. If Social Emotional Learning has never been your forte (or if it is) now is the time to embrace it. Check out CASEL and their resources to support educators. 

5. 
   Whatever you do, PLEASE DO acknowledge it! Don’t pretend like everything is business as usual. It’s not. It’s a crazy, different, scary new world. Coronavirus is in 196 countries. Currently, 1/2 million people worldwide have it (although with struggles to get enough tests that is generally agreed to be a low number) and 20,000+ have died. Roughly half of our country is under some sort of limited mobility orders, including our own county. The economy is in unbelievable shape. Please don’t pretend like everything is normal. Kids aren’t stupid but if you pretend everything is fine, it will insinuate that you think they are. 

Try saying something like “I bet this time has been weird or scary. It’s definitely made me anxious. But I am so glad to have you guys back! I have missed you!” 

This is hard for all of us for so many reasons, from our personal health fears to our disconnectedness to our stepping out of our comfort zones digital teaching. Plus, the toilet paper is still hard to find. 

Put your oxygen mask on and take care of your students’ social and emotional needs. And if this isn’t your strength, ask for help. We’re all figuring this out together. None of us are experts in this situation.

This is waaay more important than any content you could teach this year.