Meeting the Challenges of Change
Meeting the Challenges of Change
At the beginning of March, few of us even knew what Zoom was. Since then, we've been Zooming and have experienced Zoom Bombing and Zoom fatigue. This rapid change reminds me loosely of my third year of teaching when we made the shift from a 7-period schedule to a block schedule. As early adopters of the block and absent any professional development, we were overwhelmed and quickly discovered that simply combining 2 days of lesson plans into one did not work. Even though I felt I was better prepared than many, I remember feeling exhausted, confused and even inadequate after the first week of block scheduling. We all did. Lunch time conversations went something like this,
Remind me again why we made this change?
I told you this block scheduling thing was stupid.
This is horrible. I feel so bad for the students having to sit through this experiment.
Yeah, this is the worst.
It won't last.
This was just another way for the county to get us to teach more classes for less pay.
Soon, we started to figure it out. Our exhaustion started to fade and we eventually were energized by the possibilities. We learned from each other. We improved our teaching. We persevered. We saw the value of the block schedule (although most of us would still believe that it was a cost-saving measure). Many of us even became professional development "experts" on block scheduling, visiting other schools to help them make the change.
For the two decade veterans among our ranks, the switch to block scheduling may have been the last significant change we've experienced in regards to how we do what we do.
Obviously, COVID has changed all of that, upending everything. Our world changed in March. But when I listed to others and reflect on my own experiences regarding the last 3 months of the 2021 school year, it's obvious we became better.
- We became more aware of the social and economic discrepancies and inequalities that exist. We are now better equipped to meet these challenges.
- Communication between schools and our "disengaged" or "disenfranchised" families improved.
- We became better at differentiation and scaffolding of instruction and learning.
- And we focused more on the whole child and whole person.
We will continue to meet the new challenges. Yes, the work will be exhausting. We will come better educators because of our commitment to ourselves, our colleagues and our students. We've got this.
Optimizing Time with Students to Maximize Learning and Interaction
We appreciate the conversations that we had on Friday, starting off with our faculty meeting and continuing through our PLC work. One of the common threads I heard as I bounced from group to group was that we need to find ways to prioritize our "live" time with students to ensure that live time affords students the opportunity to interact with us, each other, and the content.
We need to use our "asynchronous" time to prepare them for the "live" time. To do this we can ask ourselves, How can I create learning experiences that will prepare them for our time together?
This can be accomplished in many ways such as readings, short videos, pre-recorded lectures, interactive Nearpod activities, reciprocal reading or group work. These activities lend themselves to choice boards, individualized learning menus and individualized and personalized learning, which of course increase student learning ownership. These asynchronous activities can be done at the beginning, middle, end or outside of class time. Providing students with flexible learning time also increases your flexibility enabling you to spend more time working with students based on their needs. For example, if you're meeting with your whole class at 10:30, you could meet with students who need more support at 10:15.
Key takeaways and considerations
- How can I organize my class time to provide structure and clarity for students?
- How can I leverage the power of asynchronous learning to complement and enhance synchronous time?
- What structures can I put into place to ensure students are clear about what they are doing and why they are doing it?
- When a student needs help, how will they get help?
- How can I meet the needs of struggling students and those with technology challenges?
- How can we (as a PLC) create learning tasks that can be used across all levels to lessen our planning load?
Tasks/Important Information
Fire Drill at 2:45 on Monday. This is at the beginning of break so teachers who are teaching from WAHS will not have open Zoom sessions.
We're a little out of whack with our Friday schedule but this Friday, we will have a department liaison meeting at 8:30 and department meetings at 3:30.
Be sure to open and "save" the calendar Lorita shared with us last week called "WAHS News/Information"
Birthdays
September 14: Melisa Larson
September 18: Kate Innes, Forrest Garrison
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