The Pandemic May Have Eased

The Pandemic May Have Eased, But There’s No Going Back for Districts

Diana Laufenberg is a former teacher who currently serves as the executive
director of Inquiry Schools, a nonprofit organization focused on supporting
schools to become more inquiry-driven and project-based. She currently lives
near the family farm where she grew up in rural Wisconsin:

The word “should” is one that I try to avoid for a number of reasons that far
smarter folks than I have spent time explaining (example). So indulge me as I
tweak the language of this question a bit by responding to “What are the most
important lessons do you think school district leaders *could* learn from the
COVID pandemic? Do you believe most will actually learn them?”

Important lessons, there are so very many. I will highlight a few that
continue to ping around in my brain years later. The fascinating thing is that
many of them are also things that I was trying to get attention for pre-COVID.

My entry into COVID school was a unique one to be sure. At the start of the
2019-20 school year, I was asked by a local history teacher to sub for her
from February through April. I was thrilled for the opportunity as I believe
that returning to the classroom periodically is important when doing
school-based consultancy work. This was the second time I was afforded this
gift since 2012. I readjusted my travel schedule to open up flexibility for
the long-term sub job and very much looked forward to a less travel-filled
start to 2020. (That turned out to be one heck of an understatement.)

I was both teaching and consulting during the first months of the pandemic.
This proved to be an interesting vantage point from which to observe all the
different approaches and machinations being attempted to deliver school in new
and unknown ways. One simple yet powerful concept that popped up consistently
was that schools with established care structures (homeroom, advisory, family,
etc.) were able to meet the immediate needs of students and families much more
easily and effectively. Every student was already in a small group that was
connected to a staff member.

This attention to the importance of having an in-school advocate and
connection yielded incredible results when trying to find all the students and
make meaningful contact with them in the initial days of the pandemic. I do
see evidence that this feature is being incorporated more into school
environments and given time to strengthen as school communities still struggle
to bring back all the students successfully to the classroom. These kinds of
classes for the students, including advisories or SEL-based homerooms, are
highly recommended to support, connect, and advocate for each learner in your
schools.

The second major learning point was the idea of flexibility and resiliency.
Throughout the past decade, I’ve been asked what the future of education will
look like. My answer consistently was … I have no idea. The only thing I was
sure of is that the future will demand greater flexibility and resiliency in
the systems and the people. Rigid systems cannot thrive with dynamic
conditions. This is a fact. I think the most notable example is the state
testing schemes that were undone by COVID.

The lesson I hoped would be learned in this moment is that a rigid system like
state testing is not compatible with the dynamic conditions of a world still
grappling with a pandemic years later. As we start the fourth school year
affected by the pandemic, I have observed some moves that are encouraging on
this front (summer learning that is much more experiential and inquiry-based)
and others that trouble me (hyperfocus on “learning loss”). If you are in a
position to lead a school or district forward through this, continue to ask
how these decisions will make your institution more flexible, responsive, and
resilient.

That leaves student agency. Students know that gig is up for school as it was.
It’s time to truly invest educational time in the idea that student ideas,
interests, dreams can have an integral and powerful place in their formal
educational journey. What students think, their experiences need to play a
prominent role in their educational path. Getting the students “back” means
actually attending to the humans who present themselves to school on a daily
basis. They are not a number, a stanine, a seat, a desk. … These are humans.
Humans need systems and experiences built for humans. Increasing opportunities
for student agency help solve the impersonal or overly institutional
experience that many students endure.

Maya Angelou knocks around my head frequently as I work alongside schools to
adjust, adapt, grow: “I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know
better, I do better.” Let’s do better, folks.

Sally J. Zepeda, Ph.D., is a professor in educational administration and
policy at the University of Georgia. Philip D. Lanoue, Ph.D., is a former
superintendent and high school principal, and he is the 2015 American
Association of School Administrators (AASA) National Superintendent of the
Year. Philip co-authored (with Sally), A Leadership Guide to Navigating the
Unknown in Education: New Narratives Amid COVID-19 (Routledge) and The
Emerging Work of Today’s Superintendent: Leading Schools and Communities to
Educate All Children:

When schools reopened, leaders faced issues ranging from addressing student
learning loss to supporting new social-emotional needs of students and staff.
There was little time to plan with any certainty. COVID-19 brought forward
questions.

Should schools and their systems go back to pre-COVID days? While the
turbulence created in response to COVID-19 thrust leaders and teachers into a
dizzying whirl of continuous change, the more important question now for
leaders is, “Will schools change as a result of what was learned from the
experiences with the pandemic?” If districts return to the way they have
operated in the past, then we have learned very little, missing significant
opportunities to improve in ways to be successful in the ever-changing world
that lies ahead. Now is the time to reinvent.

The journey ahead will be embedded as much in process as it is in program
decisions. For systems to reinvent themselves post-COVID-19, leaders must
understand the dynamics of internal change if they are to be successful in
navigating constantly changing external forces.

Through our conversations and work with districts, we have walked away with
some insights to help leaders anchor their work in adapting and responding to
the ever-changing internal dynamics and turbulence. We believe that:

Systems now must be agile and adaptable and ready to pivot quickly in making
changes through a lens of the often unknown. Returning to the rigid structures
that framed how districts and schools operated will only create the same
conditions before the pandemic where some children were successful and others
were not, with the impacted majority being the groups that need schools to be
successful.

Systems now must listen to the voices of teachers who learned how to make
midcourse adjustments, redesigning different instructional models compared
with “in front of the room” instruction. Agility and adaptability require
teachers to have a new sense of freedom in stark contrast from structured
curricular guides, unified instructional practices, and strict content
timelines.

Teachers and leaders have new insights into the strengths and deficiencies in
instructional designs based on student needs. Critical conversations must
emerge from these insights to create new pathways for teaching and learning
never scaled at this level.

Systems now must be attentive to the social-emotional needs of their teachers
and leaders. Substantial social-emotional needs have emerged for students,
teachers, and leaders. Students struggled with the loss of in-person
interactions critical to the formative years. Similarly, teachers’
social-emotional needs surfaced and weighed heavily on them. Systems are
experiencing a significant depletion of the teaching force by those leaving
the profession that is exacerbated by those no longer entering teaching as a
career.

Similarly, school leaders have felt tremendous pressure as they struggle with
daunting challenges to keep students and teachers safe while maintaining
effective learning experiences. Moving forward, systems will undoubtedly
grapple with looming building-level leadership shortages affecting succession
efforts for every school to have a highly qualified and effective principal.

Prior to COVID-19, the work of teachers was mostly misunderstood and often
distilled to test scores of the students on their rosters. Throughout the
pandemic, the true work of teachers could be seen, and they were responsible
for showing the world hope, giving students much-needed support.

Systems now must prioritize the needs of students given the turmoil for them
over the last two years, which has taken a toll at every level. While younger
students are experiencing remarkable rebounds as they return, others are
experiencing significant learning gaps in combination with much confusion
about their learning trajectory and emotional stability. There exists an
immediate need to address the magnified learning gaps and inequities as well
as the social stress students face today which will leave the traditional
approaches to addressing these concerns woefully inadequate.

We believe there are new opportunities post-COVID-19 that can reshape the
educational space, but only if leaders and teachers examine what was learned
about the educational and social-emotional needs of students and the teachers
who have answered the call to work with them. In the end, the future of
education and its success lies not in going back but solely on how we move
forward in this journey.

July Hill-Wilkinson is a veteran classroom teacher, adjunct professor, and
former administrator. She currently works as an instructional coach and
curriculum leader in Southern California high schools:

Less. Is. More. The motto for too long has been “more is more.” More testing
gives more results and more students in classrooms makes more room in the
budget. Some have touted COVID as the reset button, even the needed wake-up
call for an education.

When COVID sent us home for a year and half, there was definitely less
learning, which is devastating and will impact all for a long time to come.
Students spending less time with their friends was, for many, a black hole of
isolation from which they have not yet recovered. Terrible, terrible things
happened as a result of the pandemic, but it forced our hand when it comes to
narrowing the focus of what students really need to know at the end of the
day.

Online school made it impossible to do a lot of the activities and lessons
that some of us have done year after year. We could not do group work or give
students opportunities to feed off each other in whole-group discussions—not
well anyway. There was so much adjustment that we simply didn’t have the time,
space, or capacity to do the same things we always do, so we had to really,
really think about what exactly made the cut.

We had considerably less time face to face with students, too, because no one
in their right mind is going to have them on screen six hours in a row.
Lecture times and independent work times were in a far different balance from
what has ever been possible in public schools. Online schooling created a more
collegelike and worklike situation for high school students for which they had
to take responsibility for their own learning and their own time. They were
not supervised every single minute of every day. We could offer small-group
instruction in meetings and not have to monitor the behavior of 30 other
bodies in the room. We could finally use time differently for those who needed
support and those who aced material easily.

These situations could be repeated, at least in part, with some creative
scheduling and planning at schools post-pandemic. Districts can guide
curriculum teams to pair down to fewer standards that have to be mastered as
opposed to dozens which are “touched upon.” Time and online opportunities
could be leveraged to create the individualized learning 21st-century students
need. Those who succeeded in teaching or learning in an online environment
should have the opportunity to blend that into the return to the traditional.
Do I think they actually learned them? Not enough. Not nearly enough. But I
have hopes for changes to come now that we see what we can do with less.

T.J. Vari, Connie Hamilton, and Joseph Jones have experience as building and
district school leaders. They have authored or co-authored nine books,
including their most recent publication with Corwin Press, 7 Mindshifts for
School Leaders. You can learn more about them at theschoolhous302.com and
conniehamilton.net:

Wild change occurred during the pandemic whether school leaders were prepared
to initiate it or not. So, what was the difference between leading during
COVID that allowed schools to have the confidence, innovation, and dedication
to commit to solutions?

We believe the lesson that surfaced during the pandemic is the way we think
about problems. The mindset that emerges within effective leaders during a
crisis is not one of can we or should we solve it but instead a laser focus on
how we solve it. One by one, barriers to students accessing education were
tackled by every school district in the country. Every one of them implemented
strategies and structures that never would have been on the radar if we were
not in a crisis. It made us wonder if a crisis mindset is a way of thinking
that should be applied to our biggest perennial problems in education.

To some degree, many of our greatest challenges in education have been
accepted as impossible to change or can only be addressed over a multiyear
timeline. We now have experience that shows us that enormous problems can be
tackled with massive change in lightning speed. Because the pandemic upended
everything and created so much instability and uncertainty, district leaders
were forced to think about problems differently and with a greater sense of
urgency than ever before.

Some of these problems were new, like distance learning, but others were
simply exacerbated, spotlighting the already inequitable circumstances for
students. This exposure forced us to treat them like the crisis that they are
and always were. These lived experiences have the potential to shift how we
approach other problems in education, like teacher retention, equity, and
school safety that, like a pandemic, cannot be put on a long-term plan for
uncertain change.

There are other, more obvious lessons to be learned from the pandemic. Take,
for example, student access to the internet at home. When everything shut
down, students needed devices. Many districts had been slowly increasing their
technology inventory but faced an immediate need to get devices to every
single student. Suddenly, they were able to make happen what normally would
have taken years. But students didn’t just need devices, they also needed
internet connectivity. While this was a more complex nightmare, it was also
solved, often through collaboration with community resources.

There is no denying that without a shift in thinking about these problems,
many students would still not have devices or internet access at home today.
It was the pandemic that triggered the shift. Again, a result of a crisis
mindset.

Unfortunately, the numerous challenges that COVID-19 created also left many
people craving “normal again.” We heard from educators that they couldn’t wait
for a time when things got back to the way they were. There’s much to be said
for the human spirit that soared during the pandemic and what we all lived
through together, but our desire for normalcy shouldn’t bring us back to the
same problems that we lived with prior to the pandemic. This would leave the
benefits of a crisis mindset behind us and a retreat to an acceptance of
issues in education that remain crises.

We are inspired by how a crisis mindset allowed us to achieve what no educator
would have thought possible before the pandemic. What we’re most hopeful
about, in terms of lessons learned during the pandemic, is the breaking of the
mold for the way that we think about problems, both old and new.

Whether getting food to families whose kids weren’t in school or providing
mental health services, communities came together to solve real problems. A
new way of thinking emerged in those pandemic years. We hope that leaders,
both within education and the community, will continue to look at old problems
with a crisis mindset and not just treat them as perpetual issues that are
never likely to change. Things can and will change, change doesn’t need to be
slow, and we don’t need to snap back to a “normal” that includes suffering
with problems that could be solved with the right mindset.

Rhonda J. Roos, Ph.D., is an educational consultant coaching principals,
district leaders, and administrative teams in the complex and ever-challenging
work of leading schools. She is the author of The Deliberate & Courageous
Principal:

One of the most important lessons that principals should have learned during
the pandemic and should continue to hone in their leadership is the
fundamental skill of bringing clarity to the work of their staff.

Effective leaders know their most significant responsibility is to provide
clarity for the work ahead. Teachers have had to deal with so much, and the
gift of clarity from their leaders should be given to each of them. Marcus
Buckingham, a British author and business consultant, writes that clarity is
“the antidote to anxiety, and that clarity is the preoccupation of the
effective leader. If you do nothing else as a leader, be clear.”

During the height of the pandemic and now that it has eased, principals must
take the time to fine-tune the learning objectives with teachers, let go of
unnecessary work, and focus in on the essentials. Effective principals don’t
sit and wait for answers from the district office; they don’t sit and blame
the state for requirements and mandates; and they don’t make excuses for why
they can’t get initiatives going at their school.

It’s easy for school leaders to spend entirely too much time thinking about
the problems “out there” instead of the ones right inside their own school.
Don’t waste time on things out of your control. Focus on the critical,
essential, and difficult work for which every principal should be held
accountable—the work of answering the ultimate question, “How are students
learning and achieving in my school?”

In a book entitled That’s Outside My Boat (2001), veteran television announcer
Charlie Jones tells the story of when he was getting ready to report on the
1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta. He was incredibly disappointed when he was
assigned to broadcast the rowing, canoeing, and kayaking events. In previous
years, he had been assigned to the excitement of track and field, swimming,
and diving. He had witnessed and reported on the amazing feats of Flo Jo in
Seoul and Pablo Morales in Barcelona.

When he arrived in Atlanta a week before the Games, he began interviewing
Olympic rowers from all over the world. He asked the basic question of, “What
if it’s raining?” The answer was always, “That’s outside my boat.” Then he
would ask, “What if the wind blows you off course?” The reply would be,
“That’s outside my boat.” What if one of your oars breaks?” “That’s outside my
boat.”

By the end of those Atlanta Games, he reported that they were by far the best
of his life. Why? Because he learned so much. He learned invaluable lessons.
He came to understand for those Olympic rowers that they were only interested
in and focused on what they could control. They let the outside circumstances
go. The rowers knew they had to dismiss the extraneous factors and concentrate
all of their focus and talent on what was inside their boat. Other reporters
questioned the teams about the rain, the heavy winds, the possibility of
broken oars, and other negative aspects, too. But each team member
consistently responded, “That’s outside our boat.” It’s another way of saying
that the team was only concentrating on what was inside their circle of
influence. They were determined not to waste any mental energy on things that
could distract them from the real work they had to do.

Jones (2001) wrote, “It slowly began to dawn on me that my assignment was
‘outside my boat’ . . . the president of NBC Sports hadn’t called and asked me
what I would like to cover; he had simply given me this venue. What I did with
it was up to me.” Principals have been given a precious venue of their school.
Effective leaders clarify the work—each and every semester—that needs to get
done.They focus on specific areas until those are embedded and strong before
moving to the next areas of work. These principals are building a solid base
for continued achievement. As author Brene Brown writes, “Clear is kind;
unclear is unkind.”