The Silver Lining: A Chance to Transform Schooling by Deanna Chappell
We have a problem: With COVID-19 a fixture in our lives for the foreseeable future, sending our young people back to school as usual is difficult to imagine, if not inconceivable altogether. Teachers are afraid to return to school but miss their students. Parents don’t want to endanger their children’s health or that of other family members, but they also need to get back to work. And, let’s be honest: there is such a thing as too much together time at home, especially when part of it is spent trying to encourage (or cajole or just plain force) our kids to do their online schoolwork while they cry about missing their friends. Students know that zoom time is a weak substitute for in-person time with their teachers, while teachers are working double-time or more to make it the least bad as they possibly can. The whole situation seems untenable, and is causing much consternation in households and communities across the U.S.
If we look closely, though, we may see an opportunity here. If we can resist those forces that will swoop in under cover of disaster capitalism and further demoralize and deprofessionalize our teachers, insist on more useless testing of our children. They imagine that a “market model” can fix things (even with Betsy DeVos on the way out, we know that these neoliberal logics, rooted in capitalist ideas of scarcity and competition, are hard for many of us to resist.
On the other hand… like New Orleans after Katrina, we have a chance to re-imagine how we “do school.” Sadly, New Orleans let for-profit charters and other neoliberal predators overrun their public schools – school districts everywhere learned what NOT to do from that tragic example. Hopefully we can tap into the creativity and passion of one of our greatest community resources – our public school teachers – to lead the way toward a more just and beautiful future, even out of this fraught space that COVID has made for us.
Too often, the way schooling happens is based on convention and habit – a kind of “this is the way we’ve always done it” mentality. This is why we still have summers off, even though research clearly shows us that those summer months are not beneficial to many, many students. This is why we start Kinder during the calendar year in which we turn five, and why we have age-based class grouping, and days artificially divided up between math, language arts, science, and other disciplines (if we are very lucky, our school has social studies, PE, art, music, and “foreign language” opportunities carved out as well). In this crazy moment, we are free of these assumptions about what school must be like – we have had those “givens” ripped right out from under us, and it is uncomfortable. The seven-hour school day is an impossibility. The 180-day school year is a figment of our imagination. And I’m not going to lie: I am enjoying seeing standardized testing circle the drain
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For some, this is terrifying. Freedom is scary at first, just ask Plato’s cave dweller! And right now, we have the freedom to embrace something new. What an exciting prospect – to think of activating our creativity and our love of learning and teaching – to embrace collegial relationships among educators, and between educators, families, and the community, as never before – to dream the impossible dream!
“What are you imagining?” you might ask. Well, for some of my thoughts, read on. But don’t stop there - I hope you get inspired and excited to activate your own creativity. And don’t keep your ideas to yourself – this crisis demands all of our best input to come up with a solution. Although the situation may seem ugly, the outcome might be beautiful!
Not all of our teachers will be able or willing to go back to school physically, but some will. How can we arrange it so that those who can are able to be with kids, and those who are not are able to work online?
If we can only have ten students in a room at a time, we need to adjust the school schedule. What if we had cohorts of 10 students on a staggered schedule, with extended hours of the school day? If we had different groups meeting from 8-11 am, noon-3 pm, and 4-7 pm, that’s 30 students meeting in person – and as a bonus, we are serving three meals for kids who need them. If we had three cohorts (MW, TR and FS) that’s 90 students in one supergroup!
With the 8:00-3:00 school day out the window, we are free to think of our topics as existing under larger thematic umbrellas, rather than disciplined into separate buckets! What if eight adults (a combination of teachers, specialists, and community volunteers, perhaps) planned a course – maybe a four-week integrated curriculum about ... choose a big, fun topic … Crater Lake, or the Civil Rights Movement, or water quality, or poetry? Within an integrated curriculum model, reading, writing and ‘rithmetic are side by side with history, geology, chemistry, art, and critical thinking. If these 8 adults offered this course three times per term (12 weeks total) that’s 270 students getting inspiring content!
One last thought: Why do we still think of our students as batches, defined by date of birth, that need to do all the same things at the same time? With a different way of scheduling we could offer courses according to topic rather than grade level, and kids could choose what they are really interested in, which we all know increases their excitement about learning.
For those of you thinking, “The union will never allow it” and “We have to have some way of making sure everyone learns the same thing” and “Teaching on Saturday? No way!!” I say this: Yes, I am an optimist, but only because I believe in our teachers, and our students. I believe we all want something better. And I believe that if we are allowed to imagine… to envision what we want, that we will be smart enough and brave enough to make it happen. I know this with my whole self. Let’s get on it!