Cycle 3 Reflection

 Since last March, I feel like I have experienced almost every form of teaching: full in-person before the shutdown, then fully remote with students I already knew with a synchronous option but no obligation, then remote with brand new students, and now a few iterations of hybrid synchronous lessons. It has been exhausting, to say the least. But I think a lot of the reason why it has been exhausting is that it takes more energy, effort, and time to try to have the same kinds of community, personal relationships, and in-depth conversations that come more naturally in the classroom. Last spring was about survival and giving students “grace over grades,” prioritizing their well-being, which I fully supported. I used that opportunity to revise some of my grading policies regarding late work and plagiarism to give students more opportunities, explain themselves, and reflect on their actions instead of just punishing them. These are policies I’ve continued and built on this year. As Darling-Hammond states, it is abundantly clear that “students’ social and emotional experiences influence their learning” (2020). I can’t count the number of students I know who lost relatives, had family members hospitalized, or had a parent laid off. The pandemic created new stressors in students’ and teachers’ lives, but it also brought our school’s collective attention to all of the socio-emotional issues students were already dealing with, that were not being fully acknowledged in our planned or enacted curriculum. 

For example, student stress can increase the likelihood to academically dishonest behavior such as plagiarism or copying on a test (unfortunately, I can’t find the study I read last year that supported this). I had one very hard-working AP student last year who copied an entire essay verbatim. When I realized this, I was more surprised than angry. My first reaction was to ask him why he plagiarized, and he told me that his family had been severely impacted by covid-19 but didn’t want to say more. He was overwhelmed and made a bad choice. I wondered how giving him a zero (tanking his grade for the MP), per school policy, would really be in service of him as a student or a person. So I told him to write a letter to himself, explaining his actions and the possible repercussions if he were to do this again (such as expulsion from college). I also let him write a new essay and replaced his missing grade with the new one. In the revision for that new essay, I ended up having a great conversation with him about his essay and our relationship remained positive through the end of the year. I don’t know what would have happened to that relationship if I had just punished him instead of trying to understand his choices and help him the best I could. One positive aspect of teaching this last year is that I feel more compelled, and supported by administration, to prioritize my students’ well-being over grades or assignments. I start from a place of compassion and curiosity, asking students “help me understand why” instead of meting out punishments based on policies that I didn’t get to write and that don’t know our circumstances.

 Our school has been more lenient in enforcing grading policies on the books, given failing or close to failing students more time to make up work, and provided some social-emotional learning training (SEL) for staff, but it has not seemed as integrated as the level that Darling-Hammond speaks of. I hope that the changes our school has made can be codified as policy as opposed to just being for these extraordinary circumstances. Additionally, some sort of working relationship with experienced professionals to help with SEL and a more clear communication structure for assisting struggling students would be really beneficial. I don’t know if our administration fully understands how isolating this last year has been for teachers and how ‘giving us room to do what we think is best’ can actually be really emotionally draining and lead to wildly inconsistent policies. On a macro level, I agree with Darling-Hammond to improve educator preparation and professional development, and that this should happen on local, state, and national levels, but I don’t know what “incentives” she is actually referring to. And I wonder if the more pressing question is not what are the incentives for improving education, but what will actually get those in power to recognize and act on these incentives? Some teacher’s unions (like NJEA) are strong, but I think public buy-in would be required for the necessary expenditures and that would take a massive campaign. Maybe the shock of this pandemic will cause a change. Because I know that a return to “normal” will be extremely detrimental. We haven’t even begun to address the trauma that all of our students will experience once the pandemic is actually over.

I agree with Darling-Hammond that teachers should be trained in face-to-face, remote, and hybrid teaching, and the synchronous and asynchronous possibilities for those modes, but I think it would be insane to expect teachers to be shifting between those different modes throughout the year without notice far in advance. While I have come to appreciate the value of asynchronous learning at times, and the creation of my own videos or the use of resources like Khan Academy or AP Daily videos (via Collegeboard), the synchronous hybrid model is extremely dissatisfying. I have half my class in person and half on Zoom, and I feel like I am not able to devote my full attention to either. I strongly agree with the claim that "teachers also need to learn how to support their work with formative assessments, how to enable social-emotional learning, and how to engage in trauma-informed and healing-informed practice" and that more communication between alumni and student teachers as well as role-playing teacher-student and teacher-parent interactions should be a necessary part of teacher prep programs (Darling-Hammond, 2020). However, Darling-Hammond focuses a lot on how to better the current educational model, as opposed to the overhaul to it that Ken Robinson or Salman Khan (to a lesser degree) address. I think that one way to fulfill the more individualized learning model that Robinson advocates for is through asynchronous learning through videos like Khan Academy's, but I think what Khan is missing is the personal interaction between student and teacher and the benefits of collaboration that Robinson mentions. My students have told me that they prefer a video that I make about a subject to one by an expert teacher they don't know. I believe this is because they actually have a personal relationship with me, so there is to some degree a social component to their processing of a video I make, whereas a stranger guiding them can't interact with them outside of that video. I also have seen that students have been conditioned to shorter videos by social media like Tik Tok, so even the structure of those videos for asynchronous learning might have to adapt. I think a school in the post covid-19 era should do more to individualize learning for student by giving every student an IEP that includes options for asynchronous and hybrid learning options.