By Evan Robb

America and the world are experiencing a time of significant change, a time of great challenges. Educators, with little to no warning, have had to transition learning and instruction to an online environment for millions of children. In tandem with shifting learning and teaching to the online world, we also face the challenge of moving our schools’ cultures to teaching and learning online. This shift creates an opportunity resulting in a challenge to you and myself: If the culture of our schools and divisions will need to exist online, then we have a collective responsibility to sustain our schools’ cultures and keep them alive and maintain their vitality. This will require leadership.

When things run smoothly in schools, we often take leadership for granted. However, during these times of the changes and challenges caused by the spread of COVID-19, we start to define leaders and their leadership by their words and actions. To maintain the positive elements of a school’s culture in this climate will require collaborative leadership that includes administrators, teachers, and support staff. 

If you are an administrator, consider these six reflections so you can set the tone in your online school. If you are a teacher, apply these same reflections to your online classroom. All staff has a responsibility to create the school they want during this time of remote learning.

As you review my six points and my culture-building questions, consider where you are right now, what you are doing well, and what changes you can make. 

Six Points and Questions for Reflections

Set the Example: Educators must set an example of what behaviors define the school during remote learning. Collectively, we set examples through modeling, consistent response, and repetition. Consider the professional examples set in lesson creation, expectations, personal efficacy, taking risks, being innovative, or the example set in maintaining communication and feedback to students and families—inconsistency results in confusion.  

Culture Builder: Are your actions setting an example and inspiring others to do more and be more?

Enhance Connections:  Take time to make connections with students, families, colleagues, and friends.  Everyone will handle the time of remote learning differently, but most people in education enjoy making connections.  

Culture Builder: Are you initiating connections? How are you making connections? Are you sharing successes and challenges with colleagues? 

Cultivate Relationships: Positive administrative-teacher-student relationships are always part of an effective classroom and school.  Relationships don’t happen by accident; they require effort and a commitment, a mutual understanding that they are important. 

Culture Builder: How are you creating positive relationships remotely to get students motivated and interested in engaging in learning?

Do Maslow Before Bloom: Grace before grades. We cannot fully understand the challenges faced by all families and students. This is a time to be flexible, more caring, and more empathetic. Schools can exist without grades, but they can’t without feedback. 

Culture Builder: Are your lessons and communications demonstrating flexibility, empathy, feedback, and grace over traditional assessment?

Choose Optimism:  Appearing down or frazzled can have a negative impact on those around you. Effective principals and teachers create and model a definable tone for communicating optimism and positivity. Staff who model optimism impact other staff, students, and the culture of a school.  Optimism is the ability to focus on where we are going, leaders own their optimism, and everyone can be a leader.

Culture Builder: It can be hard to be positive during difficult times, but each day we can choose to be optimistic about the future, better days will come. Are you choosing optimism through words and actions?

Engage in Self-Care: Educators give to others. But to be our best, we also need to give to ourselves. When we do, we are better. Better at instruction, collaboration, communication, reflecting, learning, and perpetuating the culture of our classrooms and schools 

Culture Builder: How will you take care of yourself knowing this will make you more effective at what you do?

Reflect on these six points and culture-building questions as you lead remote learning and hone your school’s culture in a remote learning environment. To nurture your school’s culture during remote learning, offer supportive feedback, help with finding appropriate materials, meet frequently to answer questions, and live growth mindset every day, knowing that with time and hard work, school leaders, teachers, staff, and students can move forward in a positive environment. Make a commitment for yourself, students, parents, and schools to enhance your school’s culture every day!

Audere est Facere

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By Laura Robb

Teachers, school leaders, parents, and children are facing many challenges after states shut down schools to keep everyone safe during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The saying, “Necessity is the mother of invention,” has transformed educators, parents, and students into the pioneers of remote learning for primary, intermediate, middle, and high school students. We’re figuring out how to help different age groups learn and what kinds of materials teachers and students need. Time and schedules are issues.  Materials are issues.  Figuring out the WHY, WHAT, and the HOW of presenting lessons remotely are challenges we’re just starting to understand. Moreover, all of these are stress-makers that affect the emotional well being of teachers, school leaders, children, and parents. Here are some tips for maintaining balance and wellness.

• Stay connected to family, friends, colleagues, and students through social media, email, texting, and telephone calls and you’ll be able to hold onto that physical sense of community you had to give up.
• Get exercise. Walk, work out with a video, ride your bike, and try to get fresh air every day.
• Set aside time to do something for yourself: read, watch a movie, listen to music, play an instrument, paint, keep a journal.
• Try to establish a teaching schedule and know that you will have to refine and adjust ideas. Remember, you are a modern-day explorer trying to develop remote learning that works and redefining what community means!

Keep records of what you tried: save teaching videos, keep notes on lessons that worked and those that need improvement, collect student feedback, debrief with your school team, department, and/or colleagues you usually converse with.  Know how much students, parents, and your community appreciate what you are doing! Then, it’s important to prepare for the possibility that school might close again and discuss and reflect on re-envisioning teaching and learning.

Re-Envisioning Teaching: Remote Learning

It might seem odd for me to ask you to think about what might happen in the future now.  Unfortunately, due to the rapid advance of COVID-19, we were all caught with little preparation time.  Once things return to normal, it’s human nature to forget the difficulties faced by many. However, by keeping good records from your remote learning experiences, you will be ready to work with your school’s leaders and staff to help them plan for the future.  What follows are fifteen areas that will most likely need rethinking.  Read them. Choose those that apply to you and jot some notes that you can share so when your district is ready to discuss these, you will have much to contribute.

Fifteen Aspects of Remote Learning to Explore

1. Preservice Education. Colleges and universities need to have remote learning classes for different subjects and age groups in order to prepare teachers to teach and support students online.
2. Remote Professional Learning for School Leaders and Staff. It’s beneficial for staff to meet, and pool what they’ve learned from their remote teaching experiences. Equally important is for school districts to develop remote learning online classes teachers can take as well as lead.
3. Create a School Pandemic & Epidemic Playbook. Develop “to do’s” for school leaders, teachers, staff, students, and parents so if you only have a short window prior to closing your school, everyone leaves with the materials they’ll need.
4. Broadband for All. Ensure that all of rural America and urban families living in poverty have access to the Internet.
5. Access and Equity. All students need to have access to computers and the Internet for equity and access to lessons to exist with remote learning.  District and school leaders need to explore ways to connect all school children to online learning.
6. Attendance Issues. Districts need to determine ways to require attendance to online lessons.  Some teachers tell me that only 1/3 to 1/2 of their students are joining lessons even though they have computers.
7. School E-Library. Consider having a part of the library’s books and magazines in e-book format, too. This can enable students to access books for independent reading and for research projects. Try forging a partnership with your community public library to gain access for students and teachers to their e-books.
8. Independent Reading. You’ll want to maintain students’ volume and interest in reading.  Teachers can send books home with children before schools close, but schools can also explore websites that have e-picture books and e-chapter books for all subjects.  With students’ help, teachers can find ways for students to share one to two books a month online with classmates.
9. Instructional Learning in All Subjects. Departments can collaborate to pool ideas and develop remote learning techniques that work when a teacher is not present.  Sharing what you find works with colleagues is important.
10. Conferring.  Discuss whether this can occur for middle and high school where teachers can have 70 or more students. What accommodations should be made? What will it look like for grades K to 5?
11. Interventions. These are important for all students who require assistance and some re-teaching. Will there be a daily time in the schedule? Will interventions be scheduled as needed?
12.  Teaching & Learning Schedules. Make these reasonable and consider that most parents are working remotely or on a job. How can flexibility be integrated into schedules?
13.  Television Classes. Look into state or county-run television stations to explore how these can be used for remote learning and reach larger audiences.
14.  Teachers Meet & Dialogue. Finding time each week to have a virtual meeting to discuss teaching techniques and students’ progress.
15.  School Leaders Provide Support. School leaders can explore ways to support teachers, students, and parents so all maintain a positive outlook.

Closing Thought

As you embark on this unchartered journey, let me share a reminder–care for your emotional wellbeing and your health, so you can support your students and colleagues, and also have time to connect with family and friends.  This is your new frontier! By collaborating and reflecting on your teaching and students’ learning, you will make a huge difference in their lives and construct the foundations of remote learning for future generations!

Laura has written many excellent books! Check out The Reading Intervention Toolkit

Follow Laura on Twitter @LRobbTeacher

Follow Evan onTwitter @ERobbPrincipal

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by Laura Robb

Each year, education publishers, promote programs that offer guarantees for boosting reading scores and transforming striving readers into students who read well and widely. These programs require total fidelity from teachers if students are to show progress on assessments. The problem is in order to show progress, most program’s assessments focus on collecting data only on the program’s materials that students have practiced. And data includes phonics, phonemic awareness, and fluency exercises; syllabication practice and worksheets with a short text and questions that test recall of information.  I take issue with these programs because:

1. They don’t know anything about the children you teach: their strengths, needs, interests, and feelings about reading.
2. They include short texts that don’t build the stamina students need to concentrate on reading a book.  Moreover, a diet of recall questions makes reading boring and fails to engage students in analytical and critical thinking.
3. Reading wonderful books is not part of their intervention protocols.

Fragile learners—students three or more years behind their grade level—continue to lose reading ground because they aren’t reading.  Instead, they’re practicing skills in isolation, out of the context of reading.  In fact, they don’t have opportunities to practice and apply strategies and skills because their reading volume of books is close to zero. In his 1977 article, “If They Don’t Read Much, How Are They Ever Gonna Get Good?” Richard Allington wrote:

“Too often the procedures commonly employed in remedial and corrective reading instruction seem to mitigate against developing reading ability by focusing more on the mastery of isolated skills with relatively little emphasis on or instructional time devoted to reading in context. To become a proficient reader, one needs the opportunity to read. “

Allington’s words ring true today! For striving readers to improve and move forward, they need fifteen to twenty minutes every day at school to read self-selected books they can and want to read.  Teachers help them select “good fit” books that they can enjoy and that inspire them to read more!

What’s the Purpose of Interventions?

A question that teachers and administrators should revisit a few times a year, so they remain grounded in responding to the kinds of interventions appropriate for each student.  For me, the answer to this question is to help striving readers thrive and become proficient readers who love to read and choose reading at school and at home.  The best way to accomplish this is by helping students find books they want to and can read and enjoy. This means having a rich classroom library, with multicultural books on diverse reading levels that are relevant to students’ lives.

Once Students Are Reading, What Else Can Teachers Do?

In student-centered classrooms, teachers have an abundance of interventions at their fingertips. Confer with students to discover their feelings toward reading and whether their reading is fluent and expressive.  Listen to students’ discussions with a partner and small group to gain insights into how they view characters, conflicts, problems, and why characters change. You’ll notice whether students are inferring and drawing conclusions, pinpointing big ideas, etc. Read students’ notebooks for their written responses reveal their reactions, questions, and depth of comprehension and understanding. Then decide whether you need to meet with individuals or small groups to think-aloud, model, or re-teach a lesson.  Or, you might pair-up students who can support one another with notebook writing, figuring out tough words using context clues, etc.

Note that the interventions grow out of the needs each child exhibits based on their instructional and independent reading.  Everyone won’t need the same interventions. You, the skilled teacher, can develop interventions that are flexible and respond to and meet the needs of each child.

Why is the Classroom Teacher Important? 

The classroom room teacher is the most important interventionist. The research completed by Gretchen Owocki  (2010) points out that a skilled core curriculum teacher can improve the reading of 80 percent of his/her students.  Daily interactive read alouds, where the classroom teacher thinks aloud to model how he/she feels about a book, reacts to the story, figures out tough words using context, and applies strategies are interventions. Students’ self-selecting books for daily independent reading is an intervention that offers them time to practice and apply strategies. Instructional reading, supporting students’ growth as they read books that stretch their reading capacity with their teachers’ support, is an intervention. Notebook writing about reading that asks students to analyze and think deeply about texts is an intervention. Discussing books to develop critical thinking is an intervention.  Conferring that invites teachers to model and think-aloud and then asks students to practice, is an intervention.  

Somehow we’ve lost our way and bought into the notion that worksheets, isolated skill-and-drill lead to reading proficiency and joy in reading. Unfortunately, the results of the 2019 NAEP (The National Assessment of Educational Progress) tests in reading for grades 4 and 8 show the opposite. Scores have been flat for ten years, and 67 percent of fourth-graders who took the NAEP in 2019 read below proficient.  When students achieve a proficient score on the NAEP, it indicates that they have learned enough in fourth or eighth grade to do well in the next grade.  This. Isn’t. Happening. The result? Too many students are being left behind!

We Can Do Better

We can and must do better. It’s time to listen to Richard Allington who cautions teachers that our most fragile readers need to have texts of appropriate difficulty in their hands all day long (my italics). This means that schools invest in books at diverse reading levels so that every child will be reading throughout the day in social studies, science, math, electives, and during library classes.  Yes, reading is an intervention! And when students practice the skills related to reading expertise in the context of wonderful, inviting and engaging books, teachers can change the trajectory of their students’ reading lives.

Laura has written many excellent books! Check out The Reading Intervention Toolkit

Follow Laura on Twitter @LRobbTeacher

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By Lester Laminack

One morning at breakfast I noticed Steve, with coffee mug in midair, staring through the windows into the woods behind our house. I sat quietly watching him for a moment. Then, without shifting his gaze, he spoke aloud.  “I’m so impressed by the fearlessness of squirrels. They just run to the end of the branch and leap with no fear of missing the next branch, no fear that branch will not hold them.”

I’ve thought about those squirrels and the idea of fearlessness. Squirrels make branch-bridging-tree-travel look effortless. Indeed there appears to be no fear at all. But is it fearlessness that leads them to move quickly, gracefully even, through the trees? Or does that freedom and grace come from another source? Is it confidence? Skill? Practice? Or something else? At what point do baby squirrels become those confident, graceful branch-bridging acrobats? Are they trained by their elders? Is it a matter of natural agility, instinct, and genetics? Or is it that great skill developed over time builds confidence. And that confidence fuels practice which in turn builds competence.  And that competence reinvested in authentic use yields performance that appears effortless, or dare I say, fearless.

My thoughts shifted to both teaching and learning. When we see someone doing something so well that they don’t even seem to think about it, we can quickly fall into the trap of believing that it must be easy. It is likely that you have experienced this phenomenon yourself. Those DIY shows for home improvements are led by individuals with a passion for the work, extensive knowledge, much practice, and experience with both failure and success. Those hosts break the project down into small steps with the camera fading in and out between steps. The episode makes a project appear to be manageable and accessible to the novice. The show gets you engaged and energized so you make the trip to your home improvement store, purchase the supplies, return home and fearlessly begin to make that magic makeover yourself. Then it suddenly becomes more complex than you had imagined. You can’t remember the sequence of steps involved. You watched the show in under an hour but forgot to factor in those captions on the screen signaling a four-hour wait for stains to set and sealers to dry. Your project doesn’t turn out quite right and you have to call in someone to help. You get frustrated. You vow to never attempt another DIY project. You proclaim yourself “not the handy type” or “just not good at this sort of thing.” You become skeptical of those DIY programs. Your experience shapes a portion of your identity, and unless you have a new experience–one with success–that identity may become a permanent thought that limits your willingness to even attempt another DIY project.

Consider the possibility that teachers can be like the hosts of a DIY show. Like those hosts we have a passion for our work, extensive knowledge, much practice, and experience with both success and failure. A competent teacher can make any task seem accessible. A teacher’s demonstration can make something seem easy, effortless, natural. Yet, when the novice student fearlessly attempts the task and is met with less than stellar success there may well be a sense of frustration, even failure. That experience may come with a resistance to make another attempt; an ego protecting wall saying this stuff is useless in the real world. I fear that too often we teachers meet those reactions with an attitude that is less than supportive and understanding. I fear that, as teachers, we forget we are the hosts of the DIY show and our students are the one’s with wide-eyed eagerness who can be easily disillusioned.

Do not misunderstand me here. I want fearless learners. I want us to encourage our students to jump in and have a go, to attempt without fear of failure. But, how do we have that without squelching their desire to try or instilling a belief that they aren’t capable? Consider this again, great skill developed over time builds confidence. Small successes build confidence. And that confidence fuels practice which in turn builds competence. And that competence reinvested in authentic use yields performance that appears effortless, or dare I say, fearless. Now, let’s think about what it takes to reach the point where students are willing to invest time building essential skills, knowledge, vocabulary, and processes that will give them the confidence needed to continue.

It has been my experience that there are at least four essentials:

• Trust
• Feedback
• Vision
• Tenacity

I believe that learning hinges on an established relationship between teacher and student where there is trust. Students must trust that they are allowed to attempt without the expectation of perfection. They must trust that you and their peers will support them in their attempts, no matter how shaky. They must trust that it is natural and expected and accepted that learning is a series of repeated attempts with growth over time.

I believe that trust builds with feedback that speaks to strength. Students need to hear what they are doing well as a context for suggestions for improvement. I believe that students need suggestions in small digestible bits that they can implement to experience growth and success. I believe such experience leads to receptivity to additional suggestions, in fact, they may well seek them out.

I believe that success brings confidence that engenders the competence to imagine more, to develop a vision for the work. The ability to envision allows the student to imagine not only what comes next, but also to imagine how all the steps fit together and become the whole. Vision, in my experience builds and becomes clear with experience, knowledge, language/vocabulary, success, feedback, and trust.

And that leads us to tenacity, the ability to stay with the task and cope with the small stuff along the way.  Tenacity, in my experience, is fueled by vision. One must have a sense of purpose, a sense of the outcome, a sense of how to get there, before the willingness to stick with it emerges.

Fearlessness may be the wrong word for squirrels and learners. But that graceful movement sure looks fearless to me.

Lester’s books are on Amazon!

Learn more about Lester Laminack, check out his website!

Follow Lester on Twitter @lester_laminack