I’m practicing gratitude. When I think about things to be grateful for as an educator, I realize there are so many silver linings to the current complicated situation for schools. Yes, there are troubles, challenges, and anxieties. And, there are also silver linings.
The freedom to focus on formative assessment is one of those silver linings. What do grades, the major form of summative assessment, mean anyway when our students have so many stressors this year? Since grades may not be so valid, let’s use every cool neat-o feature of technology to give our students lots and lots of formative feedback. Use the little comment box in Seesaw and the mike icon to leave voice comments. Use the Mote extension if you’re using Google Classroom. Leave private comments in Google Docs. Send a private chat comment in Zoom. Let’s encourage and motivate. Let’s give specific suggestions and invite revisions and improvements. Let’s not worry about our end-point judgment (this is B- work!), but rather our incredible superpower as teachers to coax growth and improvement!
Another silver lining is the opportunity to put students at the center, driving their own learning, posing their own questions, creating their own investigations. Teachers can step back and be architects of scaffolding and curators of resources. The truth is we do not know when a student, a class, a school, will be sent into quarantine. We have to be ready to pivot at a moment’s notice without interrupting the flow of the children’s learning too much. What better way to be ready for that than to make the learning totally portable, totally driven by the child! Wherever they are, they know what they are learning and what they have to do next, because they’ve had a hand in designing their learning effort. One child would like to study local native animals. Another would like to study constellations. All of the children can practice the same skills however. For instance: all of the children can read reading-level appropriate books and websites, all can interview an expert, all can organize an outline, all can create a piece of art to complement their research, all can rehearse an oral presentation for classmates, and all can write a final report.
Yes, there are troubles, challenges, and anxieties this school year. And yes, there are silver linings that free us up to be the best educators we can be for our students. And that give our students the opportunities they’ve been waiting for.
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