Season 2, Episode 14: What schools must do before the fall

Foreign. Hey, Michael.

Hey, Diane. I hope you're doing well. We're well into the topsy turvy weather of that is March in New England. And it kind of feels like the topsy turvy news cycle out there. What? You know, one moment there's optimism as more are vaccinated and we talk about the possibility of getting back in person with one another and things like that. And then another moment there's just, you know, frankly, the pessimism that's been with us over the last year as you focus on just how much devastation there's been. What's going on in your world?

Well, Michael, it feels like we're a little bit parallel in both weather and reality. We're having this spring storm here in California, which is a little bit unusual for us, but quite cold, lots of rain, some snow and whatnot. And I'm really immersed in figuring out how we're going to be reopening our buildings, our school buildings, finally here in California. And very similarly, there's a lot of emotion around this. There's a lot of push pull. On one hand, there's excitement. On the other hand, there's a lot of fear. And just managing through all of that definitely feels topsy turvy. So I can relate. And Michael, actually, it's a really good segue because I have an idea for our podcast today.

Well, I'm excited to hear that.

Well, originally, we launched class disrupted about a year ago, literally about a year ago when the pandemic began. And we wanted to just explore how we might use the disruption to our schools to make them better for all kids going forward. And as we pass that one year mark of class literally being disrupted, I'm really interested in talking about next fall. Next fall. I know, I know that seems crazy to think so far in the future. And for the last year, most of us can't think fast past tomorrow. But one of the primary concepts in education is this idea of backward planning. It comes from this approach to lesson planning called understanding by design. Any teacher who's been trained in the last 30 years knows Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe, and this idea that if you want to ensure that all your students will meet their ultimate learning goals, you need to know what those goals are before you start. You need to know how you're going to know if the kids meet them. And you have to build a backward plan of all your activities, experiences in your course to get those outcomes. And so my view, Michael, is if we're not thinking about the Fall right now, if we're not setting goals and expectations, we're not going to be planning appropriately and engaging in the right behaviors to get us where we need to go. So what do you think?

Let's do it. I love this topic. I look totally agree with you that we need to plan with the end in mind. Not just as Wiggins and McTighe would say, but frankly, Stephen Covey, who talks about how to be successful, successful as a person in life. Right. Start with the end in mind and work backwards from there to help know what you need to prioritize and what is less important and not let the urgent take over your entire life. Right. Which is so easy to do. And you know, as I think about it so much, I think of the rush over the past year has been just responding to the next thing in front of you rather than stepping back and saying, okay, we have some understanding of the currents going on right now. Fall is a great, I think, sort of timeline for us to put in the sand and say let's backwards plan from there. Understanding what are the outcomes and what, what state do we want schools to be reopening in, in effect in the next school year? So my off that, Diane, what if we put some structure around and think about the five or so outcomes that schools should expect as of the start of school in the fall and then identify what, what needs to be happening leading up to that first day so that they can be true, start from there?

I think that sounds great. I'm going to call it Diane and Michael's top five, and I'm going to kick us off with number one, which it feels just foundational, quite frankly, because we still will be in a pandemic in the fall, even if it's improved. I'm going to start us off with health and safety. Specifically, I think the outcome we need to be aiming for for the start of next school year is that all school building need to be fully open. Michael. And you know, that sounds maybe kind of silly, like, duh, of course, but I don't think that's a foregone conclusion in everyone's mind. So I think we should put a stake in the ground around that students need to be attending in person full time. And, you know, this one's pretty easy to measure. You can know if the building's open and the kids are easy to make

a smart goal around this one.

Exactly. But it also really necessitates some planning and activity now in order to meet it. And specifically, I think there's a Couple of areas we should talk about first, vaccines. I don't know if you're noticing this, Michael, but I certainly am. As the educators in our network are getting vaccinated, vaccines are a game changer here, both mentally in terms of the feeling of comfort and safety and security. But I think there's still a lot of work to be done to make sure everyone actually is getting vaccinated across the country from an educator perspective. And then, I don't know. Michael, do you think schools need to be thinking about, I don't know, policies and expectations around student vaccination when it becomes available?

Yeah, I think that's exactly right, Diane, and I think schools will need to step back on a couple of fronts because one, there's going to need to be a notion about refresh of the vaccination, right? The vaccine is good for a certain number of months. We know at least 90 days. We feel pretty confident about. It's probably a little longer than that, but we don't fully know. And so there's going to be a question about refresh and when and how do we monitor that. So I think that's going to be something to keep track of. But then the second one will be, we know that schools already ask for lots of information about what vaccines you have on a whole host of other diseases. And so there is precedent, there's ways to do this. There are ways to respect individuals that maybe have a medical exemption or some underlying reason that they can't do it. But I think that particularly as you said, once students and I think there's some reasonable indicators that children, certainly middle and high school, I think, will be eligible for vaccines in the fall. I think schools are going to have to come up with some policies and put some stakes in the ground that this is important for the schooling community to feel safe. I'll add, Diane, I think you can feel safe without it, frankly, with the measures that we've seen. But. But given the importance a lot of stakeholders put on it, I think that's a very logical place to start.

I think that's exactly right. And the reason we're bringing up this now is that don't wait to the fall to be thinking about those policies. You need to be looking at precedent now, considering those drafting, getting community buy in, et cetera, which goes right along with the second piece here, which is contracts. I mean, I don't know. There's been tons of coverage, obviously, lots of protest and anger on lots of sides around teacher contracts. And I don't know if most People realize that most of those contracts only go through the end of the school year. And so the next school year is a whole new bargaining experience for many people and in most cases will require additional bargaining because the health and safety conditions will still be not totally normal. It seems like a terrible idea to me that we'd be waiting till the summer to think about negotiating given what we saw this year and these last minute changes and, you know, parents not knowing if their kids are going back to school tomorrow or not and, you know, all of that. And so this really. I think we've got to deal with this now.

Yeah, I totally agree with you, Diane. And I would say for superintendents or, you know, heads of charter networks or whatever that are thinking about this right now, the moment you get through negotiations at the moment to reopen the building, which a lot are going to be going through over the next couple of weeks, because a lot of governors are snapping down and saying in person, schooling starting in Massachusetts, where I am April

5th, so happened to us in Washington last week as well.

Right. By the way, that seems to be a common date and I'm not quite sure why that is, but it does seem to be a common date across the country. But as soon as you're done with that, there's going to be a temptation to put it off. I would say take, take your breath, take your moment and then get right back into it the next week preparing for the fall. Because you're right, if you wait to the summer, it's just one more logistical thing that I think is going to hold you back from the conversation. I'm excited for us to turn to when we get into our, our next, you know, things that schools ought to be planning for, which is really what's the look and feel of the school going to be, you know, the actual student experience itself. But there's no question schools are going to have to think about the contracts. They're going to have to put guidelines around spacing. CDC will have something to say with this. You know, just over the weekend, Fauci made the statement that the CDC may be rethinking its 6ft guideline and move to a 3ft, which at least my read of the evidence would seem to be more in line with what we're seeing from the research as a safe space and all of a sudden would give schools the capacity to have full classes in person. And so, you know, and then the other piece, I think that schools are going to have to put some clarity around what do they expect? Mask wearing to look like in fall

for certain, for certain. All of that makes tons of sense to me. The three feet is actually a game changer from an operational perspective. I can tell you, as someone who's on the ground on that right now. The last piece I'll touch on here before we move on to our number two of five. I just want to there's obviously personalization here, Michael, like vaccines. There's going to be cases where it just doesn't work for people for a variety of reasons. There's all sorts of individual cases. And you know, you and I are both huge advocates of personalizing even within the context of a system and not even within our system should be personalized by nature. And so we'll loop back to this in our others, but just let's put a stake in the ground about that.

Put a stake in the ground. And the only thing I'll add is that even as all buildings I think should be open in the fall, some students, families will also want or need different types of schooling options. And I think districts in particular, this this applies less to like a charter network that has a philosophy and a way of doing things. But for a district that is offering many schools across a wide population with different needs and interests and so forth, I think thinking more of a portfolio model is going to become that much more important where you continue to provide a virtual remote experience. I was somewhat shocked in the state of Massachusetts, where I am, where the commissioner said recently where, you know, everyone's going back in person April 5th for elementary schools we'll extend the remote guidance for this year, but unclear if they were going to allow it for next year. I think that's a mistake. I think that you ought to have the choice for certain families in those experiences. I think they ought to look at micro schools. I think districts ought to be looking at schools that have different philosophies to meet families where they are. And, you know, that personalization, I think, mixes in with this health and safety concern.

Michael I agree, and I think it takes us nicely into number two, which is I think we both agree that you that every school needs to be thinking about a really intentional culture and connection launch, let's call it that, in the fall. And you know, at the heart of this is is trust. Trust is everything in a school and a community and in this moment in time. And what we know about trust is it's built through personal connection, through knowing people, through seeing people. And we have got to launch the year by focusing all of our attention on building meaningful Connection and trusting relationships in our school communities. This means that we as schools have to devote meaningful time to achieving the objective. I'm not talking like a one hour meeting or a back to school night or something. I mean, we're talking, we need to have a really thoughtful plan that spans weeks and the full month and sort of goes all in at the beginning and then slowly evolves into ensuring that we are building a community that has make sure that students and families have a shared sense of belonging. They feel, they feel like the school is equally committed to their success and that their success is not simply about academic achievement, but it's also about their mindsets and their habits and their mental and emotional health. So yeah, we've talked about this before, but what are your thoughts on.

I couldn't agree more with you. To me, culture, culture, culture eats strategy for lunch every single day of the week and then some. And trust is the coin of the realm, right? And Annette Anderson, professor, Johns Hopkins, has talked about how in many communities of black families in particular, trust is shattered right now with their school districts. They didn't trust the guidance that came out. The guidance shifted a lot. They were failing their kids beforehand and their communities were disproportionately impacted by this pandemic from a health perspective, also an economic perspective. And so rebuilding trust in an ongoing and meaningful way is going to be critical. And it can't be a slogan or, or something that is done a couple meetings. It's got to be every single thing you do, it has to be at the center of this. And I wanted to find culture for those listening to, to this, to us, talk about this because culture can sometimes sound airy, fairy. But the way I think about culture, it's the priorities and practices that you put in place when no one's looking. And so some of that is written, but a lot of it is just like the natural steps you take. And to me, you've got to sweat every single detail of those cultures. You know, when someone comes in the building, how do you listen to them? To the first time you have a conversation with a student and their guardians? Like culture has to pervade every step of that and it's gotta be intentional. And frankly, it takes a lot of work to build a strong culture because you gotta do it over and over again until it just, it's in muscle memory, right, of the organization. And that's gonna, I mean, let's just be honest, that's not in a lot of our districts across the country today. They're gonna have to start very intentionally now, building that muscle.

I agree with you completely. Everything you've said makes tons of sense. A couple things I would add to it is, you know, one of my board members has always said so thoughtfully, a culture will develop and exist. The only question is, is it the one you want?

So well said.

And, you know, I think that it's very weird the way people are going back this year. There's a huge opportunity for a reset of culture. And quite frankly, this is one of the opportunities coming out of the pandemic. Because I don't think a lot of school cultures were built on shared values and beliefs around families and students before. And I don't think they had language. These are the features of culture that we often hang our hats on, and traditions and rituals that reinforce those values and make them more than a slogan. I think there's a huge opportunity. I think there's some real resources people have to draw upon. This is where we should be looking. Looking at the science of human development and learning. We should be looking at trauma informed practices, you know, to support the emotional and mental health of everyone in the building. But most, you know, our kids clearly, and so big resources, but it's going to have to be intentional. People are going to have to really focus their energy here.

Yeah, Diane, and one thing you just said, in terms of the rituals and practices and traditions you put in place, I would urge everyone to remember that the traditions that you had in your building were an outgrowth of things that made sense for a certain era whenever they were put in place. They are reflections of a culture and a process that someone decided was important. We're in a different circumstance. You have different students from the ones you probably had 30 years ago when a lot of those traditions were created. Have the ability to say, it's not about the tradition, it's about the spirit the tradition is designed to accomplish. And that may mean a very intentional rethinking of some of those traditions. Some of them may be perfect, but don't just let it stick because it was a tradition for its own sake.

And then, yeah, go ahead, know the purpose of it. Know the purpose of it. And you know, Michael, there's also a huge opportunity here to really use an anti bias, anti racist lens as we rethink these things and put the microscope on that from that perspective. Perspective, because I think a lot of places will discover a lot of what they've done just because they've always done it actually are not equitable in nature.

And let's bring up one from our first year, which is, you know, what everyone popularly calls the agrarian calendar. As we dug into that for our first season, what we learned was it's not actually built even around the farming mindset. It was built for rich families who were leaving school and making all the low income families deal in effect. And that's a tradition that I would argue didn't have much purpose back then, but has certainly outlived it now. Right. And so I'll give you a second one which is, you know, there's so much conversation right now of learning loss. I would move away from that learning loss mindset to a mastery mindset, which, which I think is a perfect segue into, into number three, which is, which is about assessing students. Now we both have some agreement that schools and families do need to know where students are both academically, but not just academically, also in terms of their mindsets and habits. That whole child, right, the social, emotional state, well being of the child and where you're trying to bring each child. And I would go so far as to say over the course of the first month of return, schools ought to establish simple protocols to figure out where each child is in their building. And it should be shared with students and families. So it's super transparent. It should be worked in partnership so that parents can understand what are you trying to learn? And frankly, how can I contribute to your understanding of where my kid is? And I would just say we're not talking about like day one landing in a seat and giving a multiple choice test. That's not what we're talking about when we say assessment.

Not at all. Michael. People might be looking skeptically right now and saying are you sure you're speaking for you and Diane, we think she's the anti assessment lady, which is a bad rap I get because it's not true. I actually deeply value and appreciate assessment. I think this gives us an opportunity this moment to do the type of assessment that is meaningful and useful and productive. And so just to get really specific here, the type of thing that I'm thinking about, for example, in our schools, middle and high school, the stuff that we're working on is how do we do an opening project that is going to assess our students baseline cognitive skills so we really know where everyone is entering and at the same time built in some of those cultural experiences and connection and bringing kids back together, look at their mindsets, look at their habits across a project and oh by the way, the teachers who are doing that assessment then and the school that's doing that assessment has immediate access to the results. It's formative information that we're using as we feed back in. It's not some standardized test that some person somewhere in a warehouse is going to Scantron and then send us back months later and no one can actually, actually read the results and know what to do with it. So that's the type of thing we're talking about at the elementary level. I think everyone agrees. Reading, reading, reading. And so you know, there are ways that teachers can assess kids reading ability in person, side by side, building trust and relationship. Those are the type of assessments we should be looking for in that first month of school.

Totally agree. And I will just add two other recommendations to the list as people think about this because I'm always the technology guy, for better or worse. People always think of me as a tech, you know, people, which is not actually an accurate reading of me either as you know, at all, at all. But people think of me that way. So it's fine. I'll lean into it on this one which is, you know, for the reading records. Right. There are some tools out there, Amira Learning for example, or using soapbox labs with, with our friend Larry Berger at Amplify that can do this in automated ways so that teachers can do what I would lean into for number two which is spend time in conversation with your students. One on one, small group conversations, have dialogue to learn. What did you do during the time? Where are you? And not just academically, but from a social, emotional standpoint, but also academically like you know, I think it's interesting as Khan Academy and our friend Sal there has launched Schoolhouse World which is a very cool, cool tutoring site. The way that they verify tutors is through very simple verbal explanations on video that the community then can vet. And there's another school that I love up in New Hampshire, the Virtual Learning Academy Charter School. It's a mastery based school and the teachers there, a lot of their assessments for mastery are just a five minute conversation about the concept because it turns out after about 30 seconds you kind of know if the kid understands the concept or not. And so conversation is a huge way to tackle this also.

It's also such a great segue into our fourth point which is personalization. And personalization pulls on so many of the things we've already talked about, Michael, this idea that first of all it's an asset based approach to thinking about learning versus deficit. So you talked about this negative narrative around learning loss. We've talked about that extensively here it flips it and says, you know, what is a child actually bringing? And, oh, by the way, why don't we ask them what they're bringing, what their strengths are, what they've learned, what they care about. You know, we've spent all this time assuming what they don't know or lost this year, what about what they gained? And how do you get to that? Through conversation, through asking, which is relationship building, which allows you. Then. Then you're going to have to personalize, because all kids are not going to need the same thing. And that's always been true. But it will never be more true than this year, Michael, that all kids really will need personalization. And so, you know, we need to have. I think the goal by the end of next school year is that all of our students are on track in their learning. And imagine that, because that's never been the case. So, wow, if we hit that, that would be phenomenal.

Right.

But it's not credible to think that that's going to happen in regular classes during the regular school day without anything different happening. And so talk about how we need to be thinking about personalizing.

Yeah. So a couple thoughts, Diane, and one is first for schools, and this might be 4A, if you will, which is decide what really matters in the teaching and learning curriculum, like decide what students really need to master. It's not every single standard or concept that has been listed. And the way I would think about it personally is a combination of what's important for a prepared student in your community and what concepts will directly impact future learning. Right. And so it turns out that if you look at the math curriculum, for example, it's heavily scaffolded on previous learning, but not every concept actually matters for future ones, the ones that don't. I would ask yourself very seriously, is this important? And that. That may be controversial in certain circles, but I. You can't do everything. Nor should you. And this is actually a really good opportunity to say, okay, first we're going to understand what the students bring. That's going to help us understand what to build off of, and that's going to also understand then, if we start from our end of what's really important from our perspective, right. Then we can say what really matters, you know, what gaps do matter, and we can focus in on those as opposed to every single one.

I agree with you, Michael. And one interesting way to think about that is what would close doors for kids later on if they don't know it or they don't have it, or they don't have the skill. And that's like a real focusing, narrowing way to consider when, you know, people are personally tied to all of these different stat, you know, standards and facts and info and projects and activities. You got to let go of some of those and think about what's going to close the door.

So sadly for me that means algebra will stay, but. But that's a larger conversation for when colleges rethink what matters. But just some examples here that I think we're starting to see about how to do personalizing. Well, frankly there's been some really encouraging news in the last week or so with two studies coming out of Chicago from SAGA Education around tutoring that has bolstered learning for high school students that a lot of people say, some people say are beyond repair. Well, it turns out you can move them with just simple tutoring from tutors that have just recently graduated college. So you don't have a lot of experience. It's possible, which I think is really exciting. I'll give you two others. What Cleveland is doing, I think with micro schools not just to have a place right now for students to learn, but they're starting to talk about how do we keep using micro schools as places for students to do peer to peer learning, for example, and catch up in that way. I think that's really exciting. And then a third one, I pulled this from an Education Week article that I thought was interesting about three districts doing different approaches to catching up. And this was Ector County, Texas. They said the school district has added 30 additional days to the end of the calendar, which seems to be by the way happening in a lot of districts across America right now. And I have some concerns about that, I'll say, because I'm worried that it's just going to be more of the same in those 30 days. But they intentionally said we're not just going to do the same thing we've done. We're going to take a page from Public Impact, which is a non profit group out of North Carolina that has long talked about how do you extend the reach of great teachers. And they're going to increase the number of students who have access to the district's strongest teachers, their so called master teachers with support of college students, likely in a competency based model as opposed to delivering the same content for all students. I think that's intriguing. I'll give you a fourth one, I lied, which is this is where you can use technology not to try to boil the ocean, but to just help with the content pieces. So that you can do more in your in person time with each other, focused on the application and projects and feedback that really get you your bang for your buck.

And Michael, you're leading us right into number five. I couldn't agree more on that. You know, the adaptive technology around literacy and numeracy, you know, it's really effective. Kids use it, it's really effective and it requires a technological infrastructure that we've long talked about. And I'm getting nervous that as we start to move back into buildings, we are going to lose focus on accomplishing what I think is a very straightforward goal that we have to hit as a nation, which is we've got to make sure that broadband, there's universal access to broadband and one to one devices for every child in this country. Michael, we can never lose students and families again. Literally. We can't even access them. We don't even know how many of them and they have no means of contact and connection and ongoing learning which our data lake Day life is growing more and more digitally dependent every day. Huge equity issue. Where do you think we are on this? Are we going to get there?

Yeah, I mean, I'm concerned because a year in the evidence seems to suggest that 12 million kids still don't have access to wi fi and a dedicated device, you know, at home and that just at least we have the data now, I guess you could say. So once you have the data, it's easier to start to construct ways to solve it. But this is not where we need to be as a country right now. And it's important that we solve it. It can be solved. I'm glad that Evan Marwell, who was on the show with Education Superhighway in the first season, their group seems to be driving toward this new goal, which I think is important. The other thing I will add in terms of the losing connection with families, there are so many cool apps out there now that do simple text messaging in different languages to parents and guardians to just figure out what's going on, to make sure that they get basic messages, that they are in touch with the schooling community. And that's very low hanging fruit because while there are huge gaps in the devices and WI fi needed to really do good online schooling, when you're in there, most people do have a simple cell phone for the text messages. And so to at least create that connectivity at that level, that feels like incredibly low hanging fruit. I don't want to let us off the hook on the other one either though, because I think we can accomplish that, too. What are your thoughts?

I'm with you. I just think it's a must. It's a must. We have to do it. If we come out of this year of the pandemic with this is the thing we definitely should have done. And so I just want to keep it top of mind and present and. And focus. Focus us there.

Yeah. I'll add up one other thing, which is if you're a school or district, figure out who has the access and devices. Don't spend your dollars there. We know money is tight. Well, different topic for another episode. There's actually a lot of money coming in, but. But we know that generally. Right. Dollars are tight on an ongoing basis. Let's figure out how to spend the money where those families really, truly need it and make sure that everyone gets access. This seems like something that we can do in a targeted, smart way.

I agree with you, Michael. And, you know, let's conclude with where we're spending our time. Time is a resource as much as money. What are you. What are you reading, watching, thinking about?

I'm sticking with history right now. And I don't know why, but I might. Well, I might. Maybe because I was a history major, but. And I think I'm partially feeling the need, Diane, to not just read education and books about the current moment. I think I'm feeling the need to lift out of it a little bit. And so I think that's why I'm going back to history. I just finished Bunker Hill by Nathaniel Philbrick. It's about the battle of Bunker Hill that actually mostly took place at Breeds Hill, not too far from me in Boston. But, you know, but names are not the thing you need to memorize. Better to understand the better to understand the course of the events and what they led us on. And I'm still plugging away on Kissinger. I'm on page 500 or something.

Oh, my God.

So I'm getting there. But what's on your list, Diane?

Well, I, for similar reasons, have gone the other direction and have leaned into fiction lately. Michael. Again, sort of quiet some of the noise that's out there. You just can't do it all the time, you know. And so I've just finished the Vanishing Half by Brett Bennett. You know, given the others who've recommended it, including President Obama, naming it his favorite book of 2020, you know, you don't really need me to suggest it for you. But that said, if you're like me and a little bit slow in getting to it, I highly recommend it is. It's beautiful, it's provocative, it's compelling, it's human. It's just everything you would want in a. In a novel. And I loved it.

Well, that's a good place to leave us on a hopeful, optimistic, human place. And thank you all again for joining us on Class Disrupted, and we'll see you next time.