Do Kids Need to Fail to Succeed?

This week's article summary is Why Have So Many Accepted the Idea That Kids Need to Fail More.

The article focuses on the different impact the words ‘failure’ versus ‘mistake’ can have on student attitudes about the process of learning 

As I read the article, I found myself in the camp that prefers to use the word ‘mistake’ as I think kids too easily may consider the word ‘failure’ from a Fixed Mindset finite and hopeless manner, rather than a step toward progress and eventual success. To me, the word ‘mistake’ implies I can fix it, will try again and will get better through effort and practice—hence, the Growth Mindset attitude teachers try to instill in our students.

Whether teachers use ‘mistake’ or ‘failure’ with students, we all need to create and sustain a classroom culture where experimentation is the norm and where students understand that growth and progress rarely occur in a smooth trajectory and are more often fraught with fits, starts, and regressions. Because we have experience in the classroom and in our lives, we are the wise sages of our classrooms.

Telling our students about the struggles we have with learning something new will help them maintain their confidence and build their resilience as they inevitably encounter obstacles.

.Joe

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Is it important to allow students to fail in class — or not to fail? 

How much should teachers allow kids to struggle before helping them solve a problem or understand a concept? 

These may seem like simple questions, but the answers are complex.

A Texas high school teacher wrote in her blog that she has a large quote on the wall above the whiteboard that says, “In this class, failure is not an option. It’s a requirement.” As she blogged,  "As my students started to learn that first day, I have this quote hanging in my classroom, not because I have a desire to see any of my students fail the class, but as a constant reminder of the powerful learning that occurs when people have to (or are given the opportunity to) struggle through challenging material and fail a few times along the way."

A California teacher has a different take, writing that there is a big difference between failing and making mistakes and that it is important for teachers to help students understand the difference. He wrote: "Failure for a student, I would suggest, is the experience of not making progress towards their key hopes and dreams. One of the many jobs we teachers have, then, is to help them see that challenges they might face are just mistakes, which the dictionary defines as 'an error in action, calculation, opinion, or judgment caused by poor reasoning, carelessness, insufficient knowledge, etc.' Mistakes are things that students can fix — with support — in a reasonable amount of time and without an unreasonable amount of effort."

How Can Teachers Nurture Meaningful Student Agency

This week's article summary is How Can Teachers Nurture Meaningful Student Agency, which, to me, is an apt topic as we settle into the second half of the school year.

At every Admissions Open House, I talk about how Trinity helps shape every child’s character foundation. I tell parents that character at Trinity comes down to a confident sense of self and sincere care and concern for others.

Sense of self is fostered by allowing our students to develop agency, confidence in their abilities and their influence in who they are and what they do.

I really liked the 7 aspects of student agency the author lists: 

• Genuine decision making
• Knowing my strengths and stretches as a learner
• Exploring my wonderings, curiosities, and passions in school
• Having my questions shape my learning
• Having a genuine voice in the assessment of my learning
• Showing and explaining my learning in different ways
• Deciding how I want to share my learning
• Growing into the person I want to be

While the article is written by a teacher of older students, I see the aspects above as an inspirational guide for all of us as we teach and mold young minds, habits, and attitudes.

Keeping these components of student agency at the forefront of our planning and classroom activities will help our students become more confident and self-assured in their abilities.

Joe

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The term “student agency” continues to be at the forefront of the educational discourse around the world. By encouraging children to have more control over their learning, educators hope students will leave our classrooms and schools with a range of skills that will support them in being lifelong learners, engaged humanitarian, and empathetic people.

In my work with schools to create more student-agency-rich environments, I fear we may be missing the mark on what “student agency” truly is. Teachers frequently talk about student agency as a choice over assignments, like a list of items on a menu: essay, PowerPoint presentation, poster project or some form of digital literacy, such as a video, Padlet or Prezi. Although it’s important we ask our students how they would like to demonstrate their learning, student agency is about so much more. It requires educators to hold ourselves accountable to values that we must embody and intentionally work towards. 

Let’s have a look at these values in more detail in order to clarify what we mean when we talk about student agency.

Genuine decision making: Student agency is about having students take on some of the heavy lifting of learning. When students can have a genuine role in the decision-making process, this will create a classroom culture that values learning as an action. When I teach, I often ask myself, "Am I doing something my students could be doing themselves?" If the answer is yes, I de-center myself so students can take on these responsibilities. The more I do this, the more comfortable and confident they become in taking on this agency over their learning. Learning becomes a partnership between the teacher and the student as we co-design and co-construct the learning experiences together in the classroom.

Knowing my strengths and stretches as a learner: I often ask myself if my students know where they are at in their learning, where they need to go next, and if they can identify the steps they need to take to get there. Teachers can often answer these questions about each of our students, but can our students answer these questions for themselves? To help get these conversations started in class, I ask a series of guiding questions to help students reflect and begin to get to know themselves better as learners. For example, "Do you learn best alone, in a small group, or in a large class setting? Do you prefer to write, talk about or draw your learning for others to see? What is your focus threshold, as in, how long can you remain focused on something before you feel you need a change of pace, setting or action?" These questions all help students begin to take on more ownership over their learning.

Exploring my wonderings, curiosities and passions in school: All students enter their schooling as curious and inquisitive beings. They are full of questions and wonder as they explore and discover the world around them. However, somewhere in their schooling, many become complacent, disengaged, and uninterested in their learning and in school. What does our teaching do to support and honor the innate curiosity of all students? How do we lean into student wonderings to make rich connections to our curriculum? How can we make our curriculum come alive so students see it as something we explore rather than something we merely cover? These questions help honor the wonderings, curiosities, and passions of all of our students so that they can see themselves as important stakeholders in their learning.

Having my questions shape my learning: Questions are an invitation to learning. They call for us to be engaged, to be inquisitive and to research and problem-solve. In order to utilize this opportunity to create student agency, I often pose big questions to frame our units of study in class that draw students in and will act as our overarching big idea for our learning. I make this question highly visible in class. I compose this question to be compelling, relevant, and interesting with a hope that this one big question will spark wonder and curiosity in students to ask their own connected questions. We discuss the questions that students generate and begin to sort them into categories and themes before we post them in class under the larger question. They have a genuine voice in the design of the unit in that we will explore the questions they posed in our research and exploration together. Students begin to see how their questions shape their learning.

Having a genuine voice in assessment of my learning: If we are talking about student agency in the classroom, we must ensure there is student voice in the assessment of learning as well. Students have a genuine voice in the assessment of their learning when they can confidently give accurate feedback to peers, take and apply feedback without worry of ridicule or embarrassment, and embark into learning through the lens of taking risks in order to grow, rather than for a grade, mark or percentage score. Students need to feel psychologically safe if we are to ask them to take on a more active and meaningful role in their learning, which is why as we nurture student agency in our classrooms, it’s important that we also nurture relationships, trust and risk taking.

Showing and exploring my learning in different ways: Whatever the big idea or content we are learning about, I often begin the school year with a new group of students by providing a choice board through which kids can explore content. A choice board is a digital slide that I have embedded resources into that allows students some options to select information in a means that they feel best supports their learning. I often introduce the exploratory nature of a choice board by asking students, "Do you enjoy taking in information by reading text, looking at images, infographics or charts, watching a short video, exploring a website, or listening to a podcast or someone talking about the information?" Once students have reflected on this prompt, they have a clearer understanding of what best supports their learning. When facing the options on a choice board, they make a decision based on their better understanding of their learning needs and strengths. Further, I encourage students to document their learning–"evidencing," as we refer to it–in a manner that they decide. I always provide a few options in the form of thinking maps, thinking routines or templates to help anchor and organize their learning. After exploring these options and considering if any of them would support their learning, I encourage students to take ownership over this decision and select an evidencing method that works best for them. The power of this choice over showing and exploring their learning in different ways is seen in their success and engagement as well as the greater understanding of how I can best support each individual student that I gain. I observe and document their choices and pathways and then reflect on how I can help them with this agency and have them be continuously successful throughout the process.

Deciding how I want to share my learning: I often ask my students, "If you could show me your learning in any way, how would you show me what you know?" My hope is to honor the diverse learners in the room whilst simultaneously leaning into student’s strengths when it comes to agency. I often observe that students don’t reflect on this prompt with the depth, individuality or creativity I would hope the opportunity offers. That’s why it’s so important that I share with students any artifacts I have curated from other classes and previous years to help paint the picture of what is possible in their learning. I have these artifacts posted on my walls, on display on my shelves or saved as digital files so I can do a bit of a show-and-share and speak to how other students have shown their learning before them. The result is that students begin to see that in our classroom, they will have some voice and choice in how they show their learning and that they can really lean into their strengths and interests. Kids will choose things that they’re good at, interested in exploring more meaningfully and are more genuinely engaged in. 

Growing into the person I want to be: What are the enduring skills, lasting values and habits of mind that will be the legacy of our time with children in our classrooms? How are we cultivating the conditions in today’s classrooms that will nurture the empathy and equity we hope students embody as citizens of tomorrow’s world? How do we view each and every one of our students as unique individuals with strengths, talents, characteristics and perspectives that we need to honor and help flourish during their time in school? It is within our active exploration of these questions and our validation of them in our interactions with students that will give space and support for them to grow in our classrooms. Student agency is not about pushing all kids down the same pathway or having all kids choose the same goal. Student agency is about empowering students to know themselves better, determine who they want to be and identifying steps we can take together to have this goal become a reality.

 

The 10 Most Significant Educational Studies of 2020

This week's article summary is The 10 Most Significant Educational Studies of 2020

I only included 7 of the studies—you can click the link above for the other three that don’t apply greatly to Trinity or early childhood/elementary educational practices.

To me, what’s particularly gratifying is the studies affirm the ongoing programmatic and pedagogical work we do at Trinity. While there is art to great teaching, Trinity utilizes teaching practices whose evidence is demonstration of student learning and understanding.

Our school mantra is to cherish childhood as we simultaneously prepare our students for the future by shaping a strong academic and character foundation (the four Cs of Cognition, Character, Continued Curiosity, and Cultivating Confidence).

You’ll see proof below of what we’ve been focusing on:

• Importance of stimulating multimodalities (including handwriting) to reinforce content in long-term memory and ease of retrieval
• The very limited connection of standardized testing results with student success in the classroom
• The benefits (for both teacher and students) of proactive clarity about what is going to be learned and then assessed
• How student engagement aids in learning
• Why Lucy Calkins’ three cueing is not sound pedagogy
• Why deep, rich content is so important (the subject of some earlier article summaries).

Obviously, we’ve all been consumed by the black hole of Covid-19 for the past 10 months, yet this week’s article is a reminder of the bigger aspects of education and, more importantly, that Trinity, as always, remains in sync with current educational research!

Joe

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TO TEACH VOCABULARY, LET KIDS BE THESPIANS: When students are learning a new language, ask them to act out vocabulary words. It’s fun to unleash a child’s inner thespian, of course, but a 2020 study concluded that it also nearly doubles their ability to remember the words months later. It’s a simple reminder that if you want students to remember something, encourage them to learn it in a variety of ways—by drawing it, acting it out, or pairing it with relevant images, for example.

NEUROSCIENTISTS DEFEND THE VALUE OF TEACHING HANDWRITING—AGAIN: For most kids, typing just doesn’t cut it. In 2012, brain scans of preliterate children revealed crucial reading circuitry flickering to life when kids hand-printed letters and then tried to read them. Also, a team of researchers studied seventh graders while they handwrote, drew, and typed words, and concluded that handwriting and drawing produced telltale neural tracings indicative of deeper learning. Whenever self-generated movements are included as a learning strategy, more of the brain gets stimulated. It also appears that the movements related to keyboard typing do not activate these networks the same way that drawing and handwriting do.

All kids still need to develop digital skills, and there’s evidence that technology helps children with dyslexia to overcome obstacles like note-taking or illegible handwriting.

THE ACT TEST JUST GOT A NEGATIVE SCORE (FACE PALM): A 2020 study found that ACT test scores, which are often a key factor in college admissions, showed a weak—or even negative—relationship when it came to predicting how successful students would be in college. Often students with very high ACT scores—but indifferent high school grades—flame out in college, overmatched by the rigors of a university’s academic schedule. In a similar study about SAT scores, researchers found that high school grades were stronger predictors of four-year-college graduation than SAT scores. The reason? Four-year high school grades, the researchers asserted, are a better indicator of crucial skills like perseverance, time management, and the ability to avoid distractions.

A RUBRIC REDUCES RACIAL GRADING BIAS: A simple step might help undercut the pernicious effect of grading bias: Articulate your standards clearly before you begin grading, and refer to the standards regularly during the assessment process. When grading criteria are vague, implicit stereotypes can insidiously “fill in the blanks.” But when teachers have an explicit set of criteria to evaluate the writing—asking whether the student “provides a well-elaborated recount of an event,” for example—the difference in grades is nearly eliminated.

STUDENTS WHO GENERATE GOOD QUESTIONS ARE BETTER LEARNERS: Some of the most popular study strategies—highlighting passages, rereading notes, and underlining key sentences—are also among the least effective. A 2020 study highlighted a powerful alternative: Get students to generate questions about their learning, and gradually press them to ask more probing questions. In the study, students who studied a topic and then generated their own questions scored higher on a test than students who used passive strategies like studying their notes and rereading classroom material. Creating questions, the researchers found, not only encouraged students to think more deeply about the topic but also strengthened their ability to remember what they were studying.

DID A 2020 STUDY JUST END THE ‘READING WARS’?: Lucy Calkins Unit of Study was dealt a severe blow when a panel of reading experts concluded that it “would be unlikely to lead to literacy success for all of America’s public schoolchildren.” The study found that the program failed to explicitly and systematically teach young readers how to decode and encode written words, and was thus “in direct opposition to an enormous body of settled research.” The study sounded the death knell for practices that de-emphasize phonics in favor of having children use multiple sources of information—like story events or illustrations—to predict the meaning of unfamiliar words, an approach often associated with “balanced literacy.” Calkins seemed to concede the point, writing that “aspects of balanced literacy need some ‘rebalancing.’”

RESEARCHERS CAST DOUBT ON READING TASKS LIKE ‘FINDING THE MAIN IDEA’: “Content is comprehension,” declared a 2020 Fordham Institute study, sounding a note of defiance as it staked out a position in the ongoing debate over the teaching of intrinsic reading skills versus the teaching of content knowledge. Exposing kids to rich content in civics, history, and social studies appeared to teach reading more effectively than our current methods of teaching reading. According to Natalie Wexler, the author of the well-received 2019 book The Knowledge Gap, content knowledge and reading are intertwined. “Students with more background knowledge have a better chance of understanding whatever text they encounter. They’re able to retrieve more information about the topic from long-term memory, leaving more space in working memory for comprehension,” she recently told Edutopia.

Thank You For A Great First Week of 2021

Even though it’s been a tragic and tumultuous week for our country, I want to thank all of you for such a phenomenal beginning of the second half of the school year! Every email I received from parents was effusive in praise of how impressively you all engaged their children--not an easy task in a virtual environment! Parents clearly recognize the care, thoughtfulness, creativity, and energy you all put into this week. Thank you!

My emotions are still so raw from what we witnessed in DC this week, I haven’t been able to process and organize my thoughts, so forgive the incoherent blathering of the rest of this paragraph. As I watched the hate-filled, brazen vandalism of the Capitol, I recalled how many times I had stood with groups of students in the Capitol’s Statuary Hall describing the basic tenets of democracy and the complementary workings of three branches of our federal government. While our country isn’t perfect, I enjoyed teaching my students about our country’s core values and virtues, including our freedoms and our individual and collective responsibilities of being a contributing citizen in a democratic republic. To see such wanton and lawless destruction of our country’s democratic pillars--checks and balances, trust of the voting process, peaceful transition of power, putting aside personal wants for the good of the whole--was one of the lowest points in my life as an American. Much like the bombing of Pearl Harbor, this week’s events will go down in infamy in the history of our country. As an eternal optimist, though, I am hopeful that good can come from bad and those who believe in and live by fairness and empathy will guide and lead us. Here’s to a better 2021, even though it’s off to a rocky start.

Anyway, the very short article summary is a number of quotes from elementary school children who were asked to describe the year 2020 in only six words. As always, kids are more insightful (and funny and poignant) than we give them credit for: 

• Daytime pajamas make great school attire
• Never take seeing friends for granted
• The world is a fragile place
• Great parents aren’t always great teachers
• Life can be easy…and hard
• If I learned one thing: masks
• I love and hate my family
• Be catlike: nap, eat, avoid humans
• Real friends actually stick with you
• Lifesavers: doctors, cousins, teachers, elections, Minecraft

 Enjoy the weekend! Stay happy and healthy!

 Joe

National Reading and Math Scores Remain Stagnant

This week’s article summary is National Reading and Math Scores Haven't Budged in a Decade.

It’s probably not surprising that both reading and math standardized test results haven’t improved very much over the years, even when discounting Covid-19’s impact on student learning.

From my vantage point, these stagnant scores result from how America teaches reading and math.

As an article summary earlier this year pointed out, students who lack wide content knowledge typically struggle with reading comprehension: the more you know about the subject, the easier it is to understand readings about it.

Another article captures the dilemma of stagnant reading scores: “There are two essential components of reading comprehension: decoding ability and language comprehension. If a student can't decode, it doesn't matter how much background knowledge and vocabulary he understands—he won't be able to understand what's on the page. But the opposite is also true: If a student can decode but doesn't have a deep enough understanding of oral language, he won't be able to understand the words he can say out loud. Are students struggling on these tests to decode the words, or are students decoding words well, but lacking the background knowledge and vocabulary to know what they mean? Or is it some combination of both? Tests measure comprehension, not its components.”

Over the past few years, most schools have recommitted to emphasizing phonics and decoding, so my guess is the moribund test scores are more a result of not enough exposure to rich content.

To me, math test scores similarly relate to how we teach. Schools in the US continue to focus on one-step math problems and superficial coverage of concepts. On the international PISA exam, American students struggle mightily compared to students from other countries when it comes to multi-step math problems. This is partly due to our kids not having deep conceptual understanding of core math concepts, e.g., number operations, number flexibility, and algebraic reasoning.

What’s so gratifying to me is Trinity’s teaching of reading and math includes rich content exposure and ensures deeper conceptual understanding whether it’s subitizing in math or learning progressions in both subjects. And our standardized test results over the past few years tell the tale: our ERB scores both in reading and especially in math are well above the independent school norms.

Much like the slow food movement, I am a believer in the slow learning movement: for kids to truly understand, give them time to think, practice, go deeper, and demonstrate their learning in multiple ways.

Joe

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American students are struggling with reading. And the country's education system hasn't found a way to make it better.

In fact, fourth and eighth grade reading scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress essentially haven't budged in 10 years. That's causing some alarm, considering the number of reforms aimed at American schools over the past decade: stronger academic standards, more tests, stricter teacher evaluations and laws that discourage schools from promoting third-graders if they can't read proficiently, to name a few.

"Reading has just been more or less plateauing, stagnating," said Peggy Carr, a leader of the assessments division for the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers the NAEP to a representative sample of students across the country every two years.

Results of the 2019 NAEP, also known as the Nation's Report Card, showed elementary and middle school students scored worse in reading than they did two years ago. Specifically, 35% of fourth graders were proficient in reading in 2019, slightly down from 37% in 2017 and barely up from 33% of such students considered proficient a decade ago, in 2009. About 34% of eighth-graders were proficient in reading this year, a drop from 36% in 2017 and only a tiny bit better than 32% in 2009. 

To be clear, the national exams set a high bar for proficiency – higher than most state achievement tests. But they're the only consistent measure of how students nationwide are doing in core subjects over time.

"Since the first reading assessment in 1992, there’s been no growth for the lowest-performing students in either fourth or eighth grade," Carr said. "Our students struggling the most with reading are where they were nearly 30 years ago." Most schools also don't spend enough time having children practice reading fluency and developing their vocabulary, said a literacy professor at Kent State University. Fluency helps kids understand words immediately and not use up so much mental capacity laboring on each one. "Fluency requires different instructional methods than phonics," he said. "Practice is key." 

Are national math scores any better? In the short term, not really. But over 27 years, they've improved more than reading scores. About 41% of fourth graders and 34% of eighth graders scored proficient in math in 2019. That's not significantly different from 2017. Carr said the math scores are also about the same as a decade ago. But since 1990, students at both grade levels have improved in math: Fourth graders this year scored 27 points higher on the 300-point exam compared with their peers in 1990. Eighth-grade students posted an average score that was 19 points higher than in 1990.

What else has happened to math and reading scores in the past decade? The gap between the most- and least-competent students got bigger.  "Compared to a decade ago, we see that lower-achieving students made score declines in all of the assessments, while higher-performing students made score gains," Carr said. This divergence in performance is one reason why average student achievement hasn't changed in a decade, Carr explained.

The Importance of Influence in Relationships

This week’s article summary is about the various ways we influence others.

At first, I bristled at the article stating that ‘all relationships are transactional.’ 

But just like the author who at first questioned his own research, I reflected on my relationships with others and to what extent they involve transactions. All my personal and/or professional relationships include various degrees of give and take, negotiation and persuasion, trust and honesty, respect and responsibility, and/or leaps of faith. While the word ‘transaction’ has a negative connotation, the article’s author explains that the purpose of our interactions with others is to ultimately further or achieve something. This morning before I came to school, my wife asked me if I would be so kind as to get her a pumpkin spice latte at Starbucks. I said yes, went to Starbucks, and then brought it home for her. A nice gesture for a sleepy spouse, but a transaction nevertheless. 

Clearly working at Trinity (or in any school) involves establishing, furthering, and sustaining a variety of relationships---with students, colleagues, parents. Sometimes we influence others (through our support and encouragement, expertise, assistance, problem-solving, etc.) and other times we lean and rely on others. I’ve always worked in fairly big schools where it’s important to trust that others are doing their job, ensuring the effective and efficient operation of the school, be it recess coverage, drop-off/pick-up duty, balancing the budget, or scope/sequence of our curriculum.

Regardless of size, the most crucial aspect of relationship building at any school is how we treat and support one another. Teachers are caregivers and we both give and need care.

Whether or not you bristle at the word ‘transactional’ as I initially did, we need to remind ourselves and each other how important relationships are to our happiness and to school success.

Joe

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I’ve just wrapped up three years of thinking, researching, and writing about the ways we build relationships to continue to engage in good work. Throughout the process, I’ve learned a lot about the power of relationships, and about my own ability (and sometimes inability) to form them and use them in ways that truly benefit all. Here are four of the big ideas I’ve gathered in this work.

All relationships are transactional: This was initially a tough pill for me to swallow because I do not like, particularly in education, to think that every relationship we form is for a purpose. But transactions don’t mean lack of caring, interest or responsibility. Instead, it simply means that we recognize that interactions are about give and take, and that our work with each other, regardless of the roles we play, is in service to something beyond ourselves.

Influence is something to be strengthened: This also seemed negative as the idea coalesced. When we think of exerting influence on somebody, we often see it as nefarious. What I’ve learned is that influence is something we all must look to build if we hope to assist others in making the decisions that are best for those we serve. Regardless of who said it first, “It takes a village” is certainly a true statement. And no matter who we are in that village, if the knowledge and skills we have will prove beneficial in making changes in ways that will be best for learners and our community-at-large, then we have a responsibility to use that knowledge and those skills. Influencing others simply means helping them see what they might not currently be able to visualize, and helping them get to where they might not currently be able to go.

Influence can be chunked into different buckets: The ways we use influence can be broken down into four areas, depending on how much effort is needed to start or sustain a relationship interaction. For instance, a Pull force requires a lot of work to start and sustain the interaction, while a Push really only requires work on the sustaining end. A Shove is very hands-off, while a Nudge requires a lot of pre-work and little to nothing in order to sustain. Each of these Forces of Influence, as we call them, have different characteristics, different optimal times of use, and different strategies to employ. The key is that no one influence move works in all situations; we become better at growing relationships by recognizing who needs what, when, and why. Then, it is all about the how of working with others to make change happen.

No person is an island: While relationship interactions can happen one-on-one, there is very little that we do that doesn’t involve a wider circle of people we know, value, and trust. In the world of relationships and influence, incorporating the skillsets of more than one person is precisely what is needed in order to make lasting change.

This work has made me rethink my strategies for interacting with others, and the steps I take when trying to lead to change, whether it be on my own part, or in partnership with others. Overturning some thinking around relationships and relationship building has helped me welcome the power of influence and the benefit it can provide in reaching positive outcomes for all. 

Deep Appreciation for All You Do!

This week’s article summary, A Letter of Appreciation for Educators in The Pandemic, written by a college dean of education, captures the gratitude the entire country—if not the entire world—needs to bestow on teachers for their efforts over the past eight months.

 

I especially liked the words from the article’s penultimate paragraph that elevate our profession: Our country’s scientists are taking care of the science. Our medical professionals are taking care of our health. Our first responders are taking care of our safety. Similarly, our teachers are teaching our children. 

 

I’ve always been proud of being a teacher, yet today our profession--to which the vast majority of us have been called--is finally beginning to get the recognition it deserves.

 

At Trinity, all of us have made tremendous sacrifices during the first months of school, have diligently followed our PRP guidelines, and have masterfully put into practice our school mantra of Reimagination, Flexibility, Patience, and Grace. We have helped and supported our students in countless ways. We have witnessed the importance of in-person school for our students’ academic and social-emotional health and growth. And as we’re attending to our students at school, we’ve supported those who have needed to learn from home.

 

As we head into our Thanksgiving Break, I am so thankful for all your efforts, fortitude, energy, imagination, teamwork, positivity, and hope! As we take a collective breath over Thanksgiving, let’s appreciate what we’ve accomplished thus far this year!

 

Over the past eight months whenever things have looked particularly bleak or my physical or emotional energy was sapped, I imagined it was 2, 5, 10 years in the future and how proudly the future me will look back on what I did. For most of us, this will be the greatest moment of our teaching careers!

 

It can be very solitary and lonely during these unsettling times, and I feel deeply sorry for those who don’t have family, friends, and colleagues they can lean on for comfort, support, and even a good vent now and then.

 

To paraphrase Robert Frost, We have miles to go before we sleep, yet I am buoyed by being on this journey with all of you! 

 

Enjoy a restful, healthy, and safe Thanksgiving!

 

Joe

 

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While most of us are well into this unprecedented academic year, I want to say thank you to you—our nation’s teachers, who are giving 110 percent every day! Not only is your work and dedication vital to our children, schools, and communities, but it is also central to the progress of our society, especially during these particularly challenging times. You have always been at the forefront of shaping the next generation.

 

Thank you for spending countless hours collaborating with your colleagues. We see the 12-hour days, evenings, and weekends. We know you are probably worried about making mistakes, which are inevitable right now. We understand the challenge for you to learn and relearn new curricula, programs, and assessment approaches. All this while you are still expected to be fully present, including for your students who are learning remotely.

 

We see the high stakes involved with teaching at this moment, even when you have lives to live. Some of you have school-aged children of your own, some of you are caregivers for your own parents or other family members. You are doing spectacular work under extraordinary circumstances, and we recognize your commitment.

 

In many ways, this is nothing new. As teachers, you have always stepped up. When students needed safety, you provided it. When students needed mentorship, you provided it. When students needed academic engagement, you provided it. Now, during a pandemic, you have once again stepped up, albeit in different ways. By providing a space of stability, security, and safety, you are helping us collectively heal, learn, and persist. 

 

For all of these reasons, you—our nation’s teachers—need our gratitude. You are providing structure. You are providing consistency. You are providing an opportunity for our children to engage with their teachers and peers. You are providing opportunities to learn. You are reinforcing many of the basic skills that are necessary to be successful in school. Rather than asking what learning is lost during these times, we should be asking a different set of questions: How are teachers being creative? What policies, practices, and support systems have leaders put in place to make sure that you and your students flourish? What can others learn from you?

 

Our country’s scientists are taking care of the science. Our medical professionals are taking care of our health. Our first responders are taking care of our safety. Similarly, our teachers are teaching our children. It is time for us to support you—time to trust your professionalism and commitment and time to recognize the work behind your personal and professional efforts to excel for our students every single day in less than desirable circumstances.

 

While the teaching and learning experience will be different for the foreseeable future, the service that you are providing to our children, families, and communities during these challenging times is, indeed, recognized and appreciated. For those of you who are engaging and affirming your students, and supporting families, you are providing the hope that we all need right now.