Teacher and administrator dialogue for school opening in 2024:
Teacher: There is mold in my classroom. It’s on the whiteboard and ceiling tiles. Something needs to be done about this. You know I have health issues. This is unhealthy for me and my students.
Administrator: We will take care of it. no worries. Mold has simply grown due to the summer heat while schools are closed.
Teacher: Is it just mold? It’s dangerous for our health.
Manager: We are in the process of replacing ceiling tiles and spraying moldy surfaces throughout the building.
Teacher: We need to do more now. We need to solve problems, not put band-aids on them. Given my health condition, I need to be in a separate room.
Administrator: You’re very cautious.
Teacher: You aren’t listening to me.
Although the dialogue above is based on a real-life situation, it is emblematic of the reality that too often administrators do not listen to teachers. As a result, many teachers feel marginalized and disrespected. More than half say they are considering retiring, and 86% of public schools reported difficulty hiring new teachers last year.
However, most teachers care about their students and want to help them succeed. As a result, teachers are still in conflict. They ask themselves: “Should I leave for my health or stay here for the sake of my students?”
At the height of the pandemic, teachers were forced to rebuild flying educational planes, many without supervision or adequate training or feedback. But here’s an important insight. Teachers developed creative and sometimes novel solutions to problems they encountered every day. They found a way to continue their education despite the enormous challenges. That’s good news.
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Now, the bad news. When schools reopened, very few administrators inquired about these new approaches and were often unaware of them. School leaders failed to create opportunities for teachers to be consulted and heard both when they were away and when they returned. This meant that the positive changes developed during the pandemic did not carry over and the conversation centered around the failures of education during the pandemic. This is not a problem of the past. it lasts.
My co-authors and I heard these observations as part of the research we conducted for our new book, “Repairing Education: Finding Hope, Creativity, and Mental Health in Times of Trauma.” During the pandemic and into 2023, we spoke with dozens of educators across the country. We also surveyed more than 150 pre-K through 12th grade teachers across the United States over one week in June 2023 to understand their experiences and context during the pandemic.
What we have learned is that teachers have used incredible creativity and ingenuity to navigate this ongoing crisis alongside their students. Importantly, they wanted the best parts of the changes they created to be maintained in non-online school environments.
RELATED: Evidence: Some of the $190 billion in funds disbursed to schools during the pandemic was actually paid out
No one denies that there have been many educational setbacks during the pandemic. However, counterintuitively, there were also many good points. Unfortunately, these benefits have not been adopted, replicated, or expanded. They have been ignored as remnants of the pandemic. The result: Our schools did not improve as much as they could have post-pandemic.
Let’s take these two examples.
First, the pandemic has suspended standardized testing at the state and federal level. But many teachers, frustrated with the stress and limitations of testing, have found new and improved ways to assess student learning. They approach approaches such as allowing students to present their learning verbally or visually (using videos and illustrations), and presenting portfolios with examples of work such as essays, quizzes, and projects. I turned my attention. Educators were able to assess and share students’ individual progress with families, rather than relying on scores at a single point in time. Many of our survey respondents and other teachers we worked with were satisfied with the modified approach. Students are less anxious (and teachers are as well). Teachers said learning outcomes improved when they assessed learning in a way that captured student progress rather than a single score.
Second, because learning was primarily taking place remotely, traditional forms of discipline (expulsion, suspension, removal from class, time-outs) were not available. Survey respondents and other teachers shared that they found ways to engage disinterested or disruptive students. They used breakout rooms and chat rooms to collaborate with subgroups of students. They created group projects to help students learn about teamwork and peer support. They conducted exercises that allowed students to regulate and reregulate themselves by identifying their emotions. This was a strategy that benefited all students, not just those with overt difficulties. They visited students’ homes and taught from their driveways and windows. They reached out to families via text and email to share their problems and strategize about solutions.
These changes may have continued after the pandemic. But for them to stick, decision-makers would have needed to listen in real time to the experiences of those working in the field with students. So far, nothing like that has happened. Instead, we reopened schools as if we could return to pre-pandemic conditions. We tried to force a return to a previous “normality” that no longer existed. In short, the opportunity presented itself, the teachers responded, and the change was abandoned.
We are paying a high price for failing to recognize the voice of our teachers. We cannot educate from the top down or from the side. Improvements in education can occur at the micro, meso and macro levels if we fully respect and openly embrace the voices of those in our care. We must listen and learn from our teachers. If we do that, we will all benefit.
Author, educator, and artist Karen Gross is a former university president and senior policy advisor to the U.S. Department of Education. She currently serves as a continuing education instructor at Rutgers School of Social Work.
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