"We do not learn from experience. We learn from reflecting on experience." - John Dewey
"If we take it just one day at a time with a positive attitude, anything is possible." - Alex Trebek
One Year Ago...
As the days fold into weeks and weeks transition to months, we continue to be vigilant in our efforts to hold the COVID-19 virus at bay as much as is humanly possible. Usually, as I've noted here before, the vigilance takes a great deal of energy! However, our first priority as a school is learning so we are also doing our very best to elevate learning as much as humanly possible too.
The challenge is that learning, at this particular moment in time, does not look or sound much like it used to for our students or our staff. All the teaching beliefs, research and pedagogical experience that typically influences lessons, investigations, projects, conversations, creations have been set aside in favour of classroom management and control to keep everyone as safe as possible. This does not just change the students' experiences, it also changes the way teachers plan, engage and assess student achievement. Uncharted territory that we have waded into with the same determination as we have engaged in protective health precautions.
We are drawing the map as we walk the path.
Learning, as we understand and champion it for all our students at EHS, is best accomplished when children are actively engaged with their minds, hands and bodies in doing and thinking.
When children are able to socially construct knowledge together, they question, explore, analyze, compare, contrast, interpret, investigate, problem solve and work together to utilize numerous critical thinking skills and approaches that develop understandings to be successfully applied in multiple situations.
Learning as it unfolds in these ways is both engaging and exciting! Children want to come to school, are willing to make mistakes and celebrate them as bold steps towards future success. This fosters resiliency in learning as well as curiosity and achievement with students.
It's the best part of being in school, from my perspective - I can visibly see and hear learning all day, every day - spilling out into the hallways and every space in and around the school. Laughter, conversation, exclamations of 'Look! Look!' and 'Oh! that didn't work - let's try this...' fill the air and result in amazing representations of learning.
As teachers, we create provocations and invitations to learn - as well as develop direct teaching opportunities on a daily basis that support and advance the visible next steps in learning for each child that have made themselves apparent in the students' productivity. Our work is to observe, question, provoke thinking, nudge, offer opportunities for learning that catch children's attention and invite them to get involved in the work immediately, even if the skill set is not quite a match, because doing is learning and learning generates growth in skills.
Except today, the world cannot tolerate the most effective learning situations. Children cannot gather and work together collaboratively as they are accustomed to doing; their connections and conversations must be significantly curtailed and controlled. Touching same surfaces and items is absolutely not possible. Mixing in learning spaces is not a possibility. Provocations and invitations to learning must be framed as independent, solitary engagements. Class sizes, movement restrictions and health precautions restrict and confine those exuberant learning opportunities we have so successfully fostered and championed on behalf of our students - your children.
It is not an understatement to say invoking huge health precautions while re-thinking everything we know and understand about teaching and learning all within the space of a few days (all the time we had to re-think this when we regrouped in late August) was enormously challenging. We definitely focused our attention on the health precautions for the first few weeks, trying numerous ways to honour what we know about teaching and learning within the confines of these restrictions. We attended to the physicalities first - use of space - creating individual learning spaces and 'buckets' holding personal learning tools and books, tracking seating plans and movements of classes each day, staggering entries/exits to limit possibilities for close contact, taping 'lanes' in our hallways, closing off sinks in the washrooms to allow for appropriate spacing, increasing supervision three-fold in hallways and for washroom breaks, closing down free play on the school grounds, creating our 'triad of healthy practices' we follow so diligently each day. Gradually, we have restricted movements of cohorts even more over the past weeks to ensure contacts between groups of students are as limited as possible in a school building.
Drawing the map as we walk the path.
This was the map we focused on drawing first - how to keep our children as safe as possible.
Through September, as we navigated the precarious terrain of instilling health precautions into our daily work, we focused our learning time on building new relationships with our students who had missed almost six months of school, moved on to the next grade of learning and had been re-organized to ensure families were together in similar cohorts/hallways, as well as gathering new assessment information through observations, direct informal assessments and collecting information from parents, who had been the 'teachers' for the intervening six months at home. Slowly, we began trying on new assignments and activities that were of a much greater solitary nature where students worked independently and waited for teachers to access them, one by one, as time allowed.
This was a painstakingly new process for the EHS staff - not only were we navigating classrooms differently, fully masked, we were learning to look for different evidence of understanding, asking students to write more independently and attempt tasks independently until we could get to them to offer support. This required changing the way we scaffolded and structured tasks since we do not want students to learn how to do something incorrectly and then have to un-teach and re-teach strategies. And all the while, staff continued to be vigilant in ensuring students did not leave their learning spaces, remove their masks unless appropriately distanced, did not touch anyone else's learning supplies or leave the room for any reason without the presence of an adult. Unfamiliar practices are quickly becoming our way of moving, behaving and responding in the classroom.
And again, we are drawing the map as we walk the path.
Teachers are spending a significant part of their day using classroom management strategies to effectively keep children in their 'learning spots' (ie. at their chair/table) and focused on tasks that are solitary with expectations that are very much paper/pencil concentrated. As one student told me quite vehemently earlier this school year, "This new way of doing school is not meeting my learning needs!" Most EHS teachers would agree - it is not always ideal to demonstrate everything you are thinking and wondering about on a piece of paper, nor does it engage learners' minds/hands/bodies in expressing their new understandings. But it is what it is, and we continue to make the best of every learning situation - incorporating art, music, drama, movement-in-place, video, use of technology - whenever possible.
Three months in we are still finding our way - every day brings new challenges that we continue to wrestle with collectively and independently, as teachers, to keep the spotlight on learning. The kids are, for the most part, happy to be in school and are working to adjust to these new learning circumstances, although there is no doubt the need for vigilance in classroom management has become the most active component of the day in classrooms.
The strategies we would typically use to support students with focus and attention on learning (such as SPARK, CALM, Wonder Time, using the Maker Space collaboratively, independent investigations across the school, extracurricular activities like Choir or Intramurals, borderless access to the Learning Commons and other areas of the school as needed to support learning) are not available this year and we know active learners need to be active, so the constraints of solitary sitting-in-place require much greater effort on the part of students to attend to learning.
This uses more energy and reduces the energy students have to attend to actual learning because they are trying - so hard! - to sit still, not move around the room to get the resources they need to enhance their learning experience, collaborate with classmates, ask a teacher or support staff member for support.
There is a clear dance of trying to control movement and behaviours that both teachers and students are engaged in every day as we navigate this new learning landscape. We have wiggle stools, therabands, stress therapy balls as strategies we typically use in classes to support children with staying-in-place. We engage in body breaks every morning and afternoon - outside as much as possible (distanced from other cohorts, of course) or in-class with a video. Children have daily PE opportunities that are intentionally very active and, again, frequently. But there is no doubt our children are coming to school in a decidedly restrictive learning environment that some days irritates all of us more than seems tolerable in the moment! Still, we all persevere and try new iterations of the now-familiar patterns - change a seating plan (and record it!), stop everything and share a read aloud story, take a brief, unplanned body break (inside or outside), have a class gratitude meeting.
Drawing the map as we walk the path.
I am aware that this blog entry sounds very much like a giant whine!
And I think it definitely is as I just try to make sense of the journey as we travel this unfamiliar trail.
I would absolutely be remiss if I didn't celebrate that our learners and staff have also been incredibly creative and innovative with Coulee School outdoor learning opportunities, the Remembrance Day Ceremony, our first Peace Assembly and outstandig, creative approaches to a songless music program, an active, sustained daily Phys. Ed. program and the establishment of our virtual book borrowing program through our Learning Commons - students, teachers and staff have not lost their innovation or creativity by any stretch of the imagination! It's just been muted temporarily :)
And now December is peeking over the horizon. It has been a long time since I heard spontaneous laughter in the hallways and I miss that so much! We are beginning to consider how we might make the month a 'bright spot' in the year - weave some opportunities for celebration and caring into our daily control and management cycles that might spark some of those instant giggles and shouts we appreciate so much as indications children are enjoying their time at school. They like being here, we know this; they like being with their peers and having a place to go that is familiar and has opportunities to do things that are different than when they are home; they like learning even when it is not as hands-on or engaging as before. Enjoyment, however, remains a somewhat elusive goal. And enjoyment certainly leads to greater engagement and, therefore, learning.
Drawing new lines on the map as we travel this new path.
We may not love the strategies we have to abide by, but we appreciate they are keeping us safe in this absurd year! And we will continue to do our very best to keep learning at the forefront with consideration for student engagement and enjoyment a primary focus.
It has definitely been an unusual educational expedition, this 2020 year - and I am hopeful the map we finally finish as we traverse the months of 2020 is one that will be able to be folded and buried in a drawer forever once the pandemic has been tamed and school gets to become a full-brain-and-body learning experience again!
Lorraine Kinsman, Principal
Eric Harvie School
