Year 10: Week 28 - Parents Taking The Wheel

We didn’t hire for this, we didn’t evaluate for this, and we didn’t train for this, but we’re doing it because there’s a global pandemic and we’ve got to try to do what we can for our students.

One of my principals reflected this to me as we were talking earlier today. His statement summed up the current situation for teachers all around the world. I shared with him something I had told some teachers in an earlier meeting that the administration only knew slightly more what was best for our students in this situation than the teachers, and he agreed.

Teachers are looking for something that isn’t there. Any guidelines that we are getting from administrators isn’t based on a wealth of research, and the advice that teachers are throwing around comes from experiences in the weeks, not the past years. The confidence I have when I speak about what is best is mostly based on my gut feeling.

There are a lot of things that are difficult in this situation for teachers. There’s learning new technology, trying to address savage inequities that effect students’ ability to do school work at home, and coming up with curriculum that can be taught remotely because for many of us significant parts of our curriculum cannot be adapt for distance learning. Then there’s all of the challenges of working from home, which for some is a situation of isolation, and for others it’s trying to work with children in the home.

One of the most significant challenges is that there is a fundamental paradigm shift in what we are doing. Teachers in a school setting are creating experiences for students to do in school, and secondarily for students to do outside of school as homework. Our primary considerations are focused on the classroom experience.

Right now, it’s completely different. We are creating educational experiences for students to do at home, that somehow need to weave into the setting of the students’ home-life. The atmosphere in which the student learn, where they do their lessons and who is in their home, is not in our control. Our students’ life situations whether it’s being a single-child who has a lot free time or a student who has to care for their younger siblings all day means that the commitment of our students learning is out of our hands. Home-life has more power than ever on our students’ education.

I feel that many teachers operate under the false illusion of the true power dynamics in their students’ lives. Parents can make meaningful, or undo any work that happens in the school. That has always been the case. In most cases, teachers are not the most influential person in their students’ lives. There is always a relationship between what we do as teachers, and how parents support their child’s education. In this crisis, for many this relationship is turning into a tension. Our students’ education more than ever is in the hands of the parents.

This means that we have to let go.  It means that we have trust more, and it means that the tables are turned.  No longer are parent supporting what is happening at school, we are supporting the families lives at home. 

If we do this right, this will change us for the better, and at the end of this, we will be better from what we learned when we let the parents talk the wheel.