Monday, March 30, 2020

Educators: Rise or Revert?

When I coached basketball at Scecina, the head coach posted different quotes in the locker room as the quote of the week or game. One of those quotes had a story that went with it, and I clearly recall how Coach Burke, a lay coach who was a detective for the Indianapolis Police Department, explained how he had come across the quote. He got the girls into a huddle and started the story that follows: 

“When we train our officers on how to draw their weapon, we train them over and over again to draw and not shoot. 1000s of reps of drawing their weapon without shooting, then putting it back in the holster correctly.  Rep after rep of doing that before we move to drawing their weapon and actually shooting. There are a series of questions that we have to go through in our mind before we actually draw to shoot. It is imperative that we practice that over and over because when it matters, we need to be certain we have officers trained to make the right decision. Your quote this week aligns with that idea: In times of crisis one will not rise to the occasion but revert to their prior training.’“

Coach Burke went on to explain that this is why we drill basics over and over in practice, this is why we practiced simple things like inbounding a pass after a made shot correctly, this is why we went over plays again and again.

The past weeks have refreshed my memory of the circumstance by which I obtained this quote in my memory bank of quotes and I used it to reflect on the current crisis. What are we all reverting to?  What was our training and how has it prepared us for this moment?

Teachers around the nation are kicking into high gear and working hard to figure out how to help students learn in this new reality. The stress of a pandemic is magnified by the stress of trying to figure out solutions to problems that many of us were not trained to solve. We are great at making the best out of situations because we do that everyday in the classroom. I've seen educators across the country step outside of their comfort zones and dive into online instruction and video conferencing. I've seen edtech companies offer training and services for free to help us navigate these times. The edchats on Twitter are full of new people, seeking ways to make online learning work for them and their students.

This is experiential learning in action and we are doing our best in the circumstances. We are not great at remote education and creating student managed learning experiences because those require experience and training that we never got until now. Sadly, the majority of schools and districts in the United States do not make adult learning a priority. Many educators find themselves in a culture of compliance, not a culture of learning. I fear that this culture will cloud the opportunity we now have to do real learning about real issues for the sake of compliance and trying to make what we do in the classroom work remotely. 

What would this month have looked like if our nation had prioritized learning instead of testing in our schools over the past decade? What if we had funded our schools so that all educators could spend time each day learning about practices that would improve their instruction? 

Don’t get me wrong, educators are the people you want to go to war with, and I’m not minimizing the efforts that we are all making. I’m just proposing that, had we properly used the knowledge we have regarding how people learn and self-actualize, we might be in a less panicked mode in regards to the task of educating outside of the 4 walls of the classrooms.



I am fortunate to be prepared to work remotely, having done that exact thing for 6 years prior to returning to the classroom. I know how the ebb and flow of a remote work day goes and I have a pretty good handle on how to be productive in that space. I was trained for years in how to help students take ownership of their learning and uses technology to have students demonstrate competency. My last job included training 1000s of teachers in project and problem based learning. I know that my training is kicking in and I am grateful for that. I am not the norm though. Not by a long shot. Even with all the training I have, it’s really tempting to try to reinvent my teaching, but I believe my students will do exactly what they have been trained to do so let’s hope some of what I’ve done with them the past 7 months stuck.

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