The summer pandemic reflections thus far...

    This pandemic has certainly been a whirlwind for everyone, I'm not even sure I have the words to begin to explain it anymore. I am beyond exhausted as a school administrator right now, I have never had a more exhausting summer than this one but yet I'm somehow invigorated by it. I thought the last few months of last school year were a ride, until we were faced with the idea of having to come up with plans for the 2020-2021 school year. Every time we take a step forward, the state comes out with some new direction or directive and we are forced to double down and think harder. I am beyond grateful for the wonderful team that I work with, even from afar. 

    It has been hard and it is hard to imagine that we will be launching the school year in a few weeks but yet, I am incredibly excited about it. I am excited about the idea that we can reinvent education and still think we have an opportunity here to learn so much from the emergency learning experiences we had this spring to figure out what this fall will look like, if our administration and teachers can work together and feel safe. I recognize that before learning can occur people must feel safe and I am not always sure that I feel safe to go back to our high school, when I am honest about it but I know that I have to as a leader in our school. I know that part of my job will entail supporting this new isolation room where we have to put students that are displaying symptoms of COVID until their parents can pick them up, and yes... I have had several nightmares about this already. Did I cringe when I saw pictures of our classrooms now? Yes, I did. BUT.... 

    We have a once in a lifetime opportunity, we can re-imagine so much that has been wrong with education and I am very afraid we are not taking advantage of this and doing what is right by our faculty and students as instructional leaders. I was reminded in reading the Assistant Principal 50 by Baruti Kalefi that my job as an assistant principal is to assist the principal, so I have been trying hard to follow his lead. Our principal has been focused on the logistics of the building, so I have focused much of my attention on reading and attending professional development about what is going on in the rest of the world that is already back in school. How are they teaching? What do their classrooms look like pedagogically? What is the latest information coming out from the state about re-opening? This seems to change daily and as soon as we have a meeting with our faculty, an hour later there is a press conference and it changes! 

    I spend my time locating resources to support teachers and think about different ways we might still design professional development since we have more time for this at the start of next school year and their certainly will be a need for this with our shift to Schoology. I want to make sure we aren't just chalk & talk with our faculty and are truly being instructional leaders by modeling what we expect of our faculty with how they can teach students in classrooms now. This will be hard work and it will be different, we know that. But there are resources out there, we just have to look outside what we have known and be comfortable being uncomfortable, something I have preached for a while now. We have to give faculty permission to fail and be forgiving as they try new things this fall and encourage them to try again because our best lessons often come from our failures in life. Some of mine sure have but most importantly we need to feel safe to do any of this well.

 August will certainly be an interesting ride... 

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