Dialogue between a teacher and an administrator as school opens in 2024:
Teacher: There is mold in my classroom; it is on the whiteboard and on the ceiling tiles. We need to do something about this. You know I have health issues. This is unhealthy for me and my students.
Administrator: We’ll take care of it. No worries. It’s just mold from the summer heat when the school was closed.
Teacher: Just mold? It is dangerous to our health.
Administrator:We’re working to replace the ceiling tiles and spray the moldy surfaces across the building.
Teacher: We need to do more and now; we need to fix the problem, not put a Band-Aid on it. I need to be in a different room given my health.
Administrator: You’re being an alarmist.
Teacher: You’re not hearing me.
The above dialogue is based on an actual situation, and it is emblematic of the reality that administrators far too often do not listen to the voices of teachers. The result is that many teachers feel alienated and disrespected. More than half say they are thinking about leaving the profession, and 86 percent of public schools reported difficulties hiring new teachers last year.
Yet, most teachers care about their students and want to enable them to succeed. That leaves the teachers who remain conflicted. They say to themselves: Do I leave for my own wellness, or do I stay for my students?
During the height of the pandemic, teachers were forced to rebuild the education plane as it was flying, often without supervision and adequate training or feedback opportunities. But here’s a key insight: Teachers developed creative and sometimes novel solutions to problems they encountered daily. They found ways for education to continue despite vast challenges. That’s the good news.
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Now the bad news. When schools reopened, far too few administrators inquired about these new approaches, and were often unaware of them. School leaders failed to create opportunities to hear from and listen to their teachers both while they were off-site and when they were back on-site. This meant that positive changes developed during the pandemic were not carried forward, and the conversation centered on educational failures during the pandemic. This isn’t a problem of the past; it persists.
My co-author and I heard these observations as part of research we conducted for our new book, “Mending Education: Finding Hope, Creativity, and Mental Wellness in Times of Trauma.” During the pandemic and through 2023, we spoke with dozens of educators across the nation. During a weeklong period in June 2023, we also surveyed more than 150 pre-K to 12th grade teachers across the U.S. to capture their pandemic experiences and understand their situations.
What we learned is that teachers summoned remarkable creativity and ingenuity to navigate the continual crises with their students. Importantly, they wanted the best of the changes they created to be retained in the non-online school setting.
Related: PROOF POINTS: Some of the $190 billion in pandemic money for schools actually paid off
No one denies that there were many educational setbacks in the pandemic years; counterintuitively though, there were many positives. Sadly, these positives have not been adopted, replicated and scaled; they have been ignored as remnants of the pandemic. The result: Our schools have not improved in ways that would have been possible post-pandemic.
Take these two examples.
First, the pandemic paused standardized testing at the state and federal levels. Yet teachers, many of whom had been frustrated by the stress and limitations of testing, found new and improved ways to assess student learning. They turned to approaches such as allowing students to make oral or visual presentations (with video or illustrations) of their learning or to present portfolios with examples of their work like essays and quizzes and projects. Instead of relying on a single point in time score, educators were able to assess, and then share with families, students’ individual progress. Many of our survey respondents and other teachers with whom we worked were delighted with the changed approaches. Students were less anxious (teachers too). Teachers told us that when learning was not measured by a single score but rather in ways that captured student progress, learning outcomes improved.
Second, because learning was largely remote, traditional forms of discipline (expulsion, suspension, removal from class, timeouts) could not be used. Survey respondents and other teachers shared that they found ways to engage disengaged or disruptive students. They used breakout rooms and chatrooms to work with subgroups of students. They created group projects to enable students to learn about teamwork and peer support. They did exercises that enabled students to regulate and reregulate themselves by identifying their feelings, a strategy that benefited all students, not just those who were struggling overtly. They visited the homes of students and taught from driveways and through windows. They reached out via text or email to families to share problems and strategize about solutions.
Those changes could have continued after the pandemic. But for them to stick would have required decision-makers to listen in real time to the experiences of those working in the trenches with our students. So far, that hasn’t happened. Instead, we reopened schools as if we could return to what existed pre-pandemic; we tried to force a return to a prior “normal” that no longer exists. In short: Opportunity knocked, teachers responded and then changes were abandoned.
We are paying a high price for these failures to recognize teachers’ voices. We cannot educate from the top down or sideways in. Educational improvement comes at the micro, meso and macro levels — if we are sufficiently respectful of and open to the voices of those to whom we entrust our children. We must listen and learn from our teachers. If we do, we all stand to benefit.
Karen Gross, an author, educator and artist, is a former college 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.
Contact the opinion editor at [email protected].
This story about post-pandemic education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter.
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