September can be better than August; October can be better than September

This post was originally shared in an email on September 4, 2020. If you would like to receive my next email update, you can sign up here.

Last Friday, I facilitated a “one month in” stepback meeting for the leadership team of a small district. It had been a turbulent summer for this community. Soon after they opened for sports training, they had to begin quarantine and contact tracing. The superintendent had said “I don’t think we’ll make it a week in person.” 

So far, things were going better than they had feared but there were lots of surprises. They’d dramatically changed the expectations for virtual schooling and had a number of families opt out of virtual and switch to in-person, which prompted shifts to their staffing plan. Two classes were quarantined that week. It took all the leadership team had to get school up and running and keep the community connected. They wanted to step back on how it was going but we were all dragging as we came to the call for the last two hours of our Friday at the end of a long and emotional week. 

Then a funny thing happened. As the team poured out the challenges and the victories, took a hard look in the mirror to see what was happening, examined what was true and what was missing . . . everyone’s energy level increased. As we looked hard at which students we were most worried about, we gained a stronger sense of purpose and focus. We ended the call with five hard problems to solve. But we all ended feeling lighter. The superintendent told me their leadership team has had new energy all week since.

Focus is hard to find in a crisis. It turns out focus is impossible to find while trying to reopen schools in a pandemic. There are too many interconnected problems to solve and they all need attention at the same time. But once a leadership team can breathe again, even just a little, it’s probably time to check in on how it’s going and figure out who needs help most. It’s probably time to find focus and set goals. 

Here is the agenda and template we used—they’re imperfect and likely incomplete but you can adapt them to your context or framework.

But simple, continuous improvement is neither a template nor an agenda—it is a mindset and a habit. It is a commitment to keep asking:

• What is working?
• What is not?
• What are the most important problems to solve?
• How do we solve those problems?

No one is going to have an easy or consistently great year this year, but we can have a year that keeps getting better. October can be better than August. January can be better than October. The 2020–21 school year can be the year of continuous improvement. 

And if we keep coming back to a clear mission and goals, with explicit attention to priority groups of students, we can stay centered in our mission as educators. We see common anchoring goals emerging, which ensure students, particularly priority groups of students, experience the following:

1. Access to school—attendance, engagement, and assignment completion to stay on track 
2. Affirming, loving relationships with teachers and peers
3. Engaging learning experiences targeting the most important work of the grade

One of our values at Instruction Partners is “choose optimism.” To be honest, some days I find it hard to keep choosing optimism. The uncertainty is exhausting, the inequity trajectory is grim, and the stress and stakes are high. But some days I look back and marvel at how much we have learned in a short amount of time, and it reminds me that we have every reason to believe in our ability to solve hard problems in the future. We know we can do hard things because we have done hard things. 

Here are the resources I am learning from this week:

• Instruction Partners’ latest guidelines for effective distance learning practices
• This article about how to cultivate gratitude, compassion and pride on your team brought me back to good fundamentals. 
• McKinsey’s framework for remote and hybrid learning has some excellent insights and frameworks. 
• Edutopia’s 8 strategies to increase participation in virtual classrooms were all practical.
• Amplify’s released free â€œStarting Points” SEL activities to start the year.

Finally, I want to lift up and celebrate Andrea ‘Fitz’ Fitzgerald, one of our talented math leads, who recently published her first book, “The Rookie’s Playbook,” for new teachers looking for strategies to develop a strong culture, strengthen relationships, build self-awareness, and gain classroom management skills. 

Final word this week goes to Fitz;

"Think about your heart; it's the most powerful organ in your body . . . it ensures that blood flows properly throughout our bodies and supports all our other systems. Culture and relationships are the heartbeats of our classrooms. . . . I want to ensure that your classroom has the best "heart health" possible. . . . [here are] five principles that will significantly impact the “heart health” of your classroom:

  ? Set positive, High expectations

  ?  Examine your own bias (what’s getting in the way of the connection?)

  ? Be Authentic—real recognizes real

  ?  Relate to, know, and connect with your audience

  ? Be Trustworthy and consistent”

One step at at time, together,

Emily