This week on TeachLab, host Justin Reich is joined by a panel of teachers from across the country to bring their personal experiences of teaching during the pandemic and to discuss a recent report that was led by Natasha Esteves, a former teacher, and now a student at the Harvard graduate school of education called The Teachers Have Something to Say: Lessons Learned from U.S. PK-12 Teachers During the COVID-impacted 2020-21 School Year. “I had one interviewee say, ‘Everybody wants to tell teachers what to do, but nobody knows what teaching is like, and nobody knows what teaching is like during a pandemic.’ It's a very odd place to be in when you have other people telling you what to do while they are working from home and asking you to return to the classroom, or while they are working from home and asking you to teach remotely without sufficient professional development and how to do so.” -Natasha Esteves
This week on TeachLab, host Justin Reich is joined by a panel of teachers from across the country to bring their personal experiences of teaching during the pandemic and to discuss a recent report that was led by Natasha Esteves, a former teacher, and now a student at the Harvard graduate school of education called The Teachers Have Something to Say: Lessons Learned from U.S. PK-12 Teachers During the COVID-impacted 2020-21 School Year.
“I had one interviewee say, ‘Everybody wants to tell teachers what to do, but nobody knows what teaching is like, and nobody knows what teaching is like during a pandemic.’ It's a very odd place to be in when you have other people telling you what to do while they are working from home and asking you to return to the classroom, or while they are working from home and asking you to teach remotely without sufficient professional development and how to do so.” -Natasha Esteves
In this episode we’ll talk about:
Resources and Links
Check out the full live event Teachers Have Something to Say
Check out all of Teaching Systems Lab COVID-19 resources
Transcript
https://teachlabpodcast.simplecast.com/episodes/teachers-say/transcript
Produced by Aimee Corrigan. Recorded and mixed by Garrett Beazley
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Justin Reich: From the MIT Studios of the Teaching Systems Lab, this is TeachLab, a podcast about the art and craft of teaching. I'm Justin Reich. We're back in the studio and excited to share with you what we've been learning about the impact of COVID 19 on teaching and learning. This is the second episode in our series on emergency pandemic instruction. So if you missed our last episode Healing community and Humanity: How Students and Teachers Want to Reinvent Schools Post COVID, I hope you'll check it out. Really excited to be able to discuss a recent report that was led by Natasha Esteves, a former teacher and now a student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education called The Teachers Have Something to Say: Lessons Learned From Teachers During the COVID Impacted 2021 School Year.
Justin Reich: At the Teaching Systems Lab over the lab year and a half, we've dropped quite a bit of what we normally do. I mean, what we're supposed to be doing is designing the future of teacher learning, helping to think about new and dynamic ways for teachers to learn and get better in their work. But about 18 months ago, the world began to fall apart and we realized that a bunch of the research we had planned just wasn't going to work. And because we were going to be enshrouded in chaos for what we thought at the time was weeks or months proven to be years, we needed to go in some different directions. And we just thought it was incredibly important to start documenting what was actually happening in schools, and in particular, the experiences of students and teachers in those schools. A former colleague, professor of mine, Richard Elmore, great Harvard Graduate School of Education professor described what he called the instructional core. And the instructional core is where students and teachers and the resources they use to learn all interact.
Justin Reich: And there's basically no learning that happens outside of that instructional core. There's all kinds of activity in school, boilers get turned on and AC gets turned off in the winter and buses move people around. Taxes are collected, budgets are made. That stuff happens in schools. But if you want to look at where teaching and learning happens, it all happens with the interactions between teachers and students. What we want to talk about today is a series of interviews we conducted with nearly 60 teachers trying to understand how teachers in different contexts, different subject areas, different circumstances experienced teaching and learning during the pandemic, what were the challenges they faced, what was supposed to be happening in their classrooms, what actually happened? What was working, what's hard? And what do teachers think we ought to be doing differently and better in the future? We have a terrific panel of educators from all across the country who came together to help us answer those questions, I hope you'll enjoy the conversation.
Justin Reich: I think as a place to start we'll just ask folks to introduce themselves. I think it would be great to hear about the things you've been working on this week. So tell us who you are and what kind of work you do and the things that have taken up the bulk of your time and attention this week. And why don't we go ahead and start with Maya?
Maya Chavez: Yeah. My name is Maya Chavez, I am a teacher in Providence, Rhode Island. And this week as with many weeks, I've been focused on trying to advocate about the health and safety concerns I have for students within the Providence district and also across Rhode Island. So I've been doing a lot of advocacy around that, and I'm really glad to be here today.
Justin Reich: Great, Maya, thanks for joining us. And Kit?
Kit Golan: Hi everybody, I'm Kit. I'm working at a private school in the greater Boston area this year. And I would say that the last week I've spent a lot of time thinking about how we record data and give feedback to students that is meaningful to them and helps them really understand where they are, what they know and how to move forward from there.
Justin Reich: Terrific, that's great. And Michael?
Michael Machado: Hey, good afternoon everyone, thanks for having me. My name's Michael Machado, I teach social studies at an alternative high school that's just north of Denver. This past week has really been an opportunity to reset with my students from a social emotional standpoint. And so that's been the focus of my work in trying to get back to an even heel in the room.
Justin Reich: Will you tell us what you mean by a reset because you all have been in school for a few weeks now?
Michael Machado: The atmosphere in the room has just gotten heavier and heavier as the weeks have passed on. And I had to just put a pause on content and have an honest conversation with my students about what's going on and trying to understand where they're coming from, what do you need from me? How do we get back to a space that feels more welcoming and conducive to learning? And so it was a lot of a tough conversation and then adjustments to pedagogy.
Justin Reich: That's great Michael. Thanks for sharing that, I really appreciate it. And Natasha?
Natasha Esteves: Hey everyone. So my name is Natasha Esteves. I'm a research assistant at the MIT Teaching Systems Lab and a graduate student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. I do want to name that I did not lead, I co-led. I certainly did not do this alone this past summer. As you can see, there's many authors on this report and I just wanted to humbly state that. It has been an honor working on it. And what I've been thinking about this week aside from the massive amounts of course load and work that I have for my classes is I've been looking forward to this webinar and the opportunity to hopefully do justice to all the teachers that I interviewed. We interviewed about 57 teachers for the study, I interviewed about 22 and analyzed 25 of those transcripts. And it's very important to me that we uplift those teachers' voices today. So I've been thinking a great deal about making sure that I do justice to all the teachers that so gracefully gave their time to us and opened up to us for an hour of their week.
Justin Reich: Great. Natasha, can you tell us a little bit about just your experiences doing those interviews? As you were talking to teachers, what jumped out at you as being most top of mind as you were talking to them or what were some of your experiences as you were talking to folks during this period in April and May?
Natasha Esteves: Well, for one, those were the questions we went in asking our teachers. But there are a lot of other themes that emerged throughout our conversations, which were often very organic especially since I'm a former teacher myself. I've kept on saying this all summer and our report really highlights this, but my gut instinct in answering your question is the lack of teacher input in decision making. One thing that jumped out almost across the board, there isn't a single teacher that I interviewed and that my colleagues interviewed that felt heard, that felt see, that felt respected, that felt valued as a thought partner in the decision making processes for how to respond to the pandemic. So that is one big takeaway. The other big takeaway, and there are many takeaways, but the other big takeaway is just how creative teachers got and how hard they were working and how incredibly diametrically opposed that was to the dominant narrative that, oh, teachers just want to work remotely because it's easier, it's easier to work remotely.
Natasha Esteves: Actually, it was significantly more difficult to work remotely and teachers were figuring a lot of things out on their own. I've had teachers even share with me that the most they got was a YouTube tutorial on how to use Zoom but nothing on online pedagogy or there a curricula or learning management systems that were like, here, use this but no training for it. What I got from teachers aside from the emotional strain of having to teach during a pandemic and seeing their students lose grandparents. One teacher mentioning that they saw their student lose, there was 11 like losses in one year and that was more than she had experienced in 15 years of teaching. So on top of all that emotional turmoil, there was this sense of not being respected as degree professionals that they were when decisions were being made in a very top down way. That is something that reoccurred a lot throughout these interviews.
Justin Reich: So Kit, I saw you nodding as Natasha was talking. What of what she was just telling about stories, talking to 60 teachers resonated in your own experience?
Kit Golan: I mean, feeling like I wasn't consulted about anything. I was sort of flashing back to the last week of March, March 13th was the last day that I was in-person with my students pre-pandemic. And I just remember some of the kids being ~like, "What's going to happen. Are we having school next week, are we not having school next week?" And I was sort of like, "I don't know, and I'll share with you updated information when I figure out what's happening. But people are making decisions, and they're changing their minds. So I don't want to tell you something right now and then it's changed by Monday." And so I had to provide that stability for my students because their fears as 13-year-olds are liable to go out of control.
Kit Golan: But meanwhile on the back end, I'm sitting there going, "I have no idea. Are we going to be in school on Monday? Maybe, maybe not." And in fact, we weren't. But we only found out that we weren't going to be on Sunday night. It felt like the people who were making the decisions about what schools were doing were not any of the people who were in schools doing the work itself.
Justin Reich: Maya, you mentioned in your work this week that you were doing some advocacy and some organizing. It sounds to me a little bit like Natasha saying, I don't think people are listening enough to teachers. And you're sort of saying, well, it doesn't matter if they're listening to us or not because we're going to make ourselves heard. Can you tell us a little bit about the advocacy and organizing you're doing? When you say you want to make people more attentive to health and safety concerns of students, what does that look in your practice?
Maya Chavez: That is such a big and complex question, so I might struggle to answer that in any sort of a concise way. I guess similarly to Kit who was just speaking, we went remote in March of 2020. And at that point, I'm like, okay, public health scientists are doing this, this is not something that I need to be super concerned about. And then I saw the first draft of Providence school reopening plan, which did not include a mask mandate, it did not include stable group, it did not include a lot of basic mitigations. And that to me was a red flag. That to me was like, if people are even going to present us with a document that doesn't have a mask mandate, then we need to stand up and make our voices heard and make our concerns heard.
Maya Chavez: At that point I was like, "All right, the epidemiologists clearly are not involved at all in this work because this document is blatantly unsafe even to me as someone with a liberal arts and a teaching degree." So that's when I really started to advocate and speak out about some of the concerns that I had and started looking more at some of the data. And something that was really helpful to me in that is actually connected with someone here in Providence who's a social epidemiologist. And she and I wrote an op-ed together, which no one was interested in publishing, but that's okay. I learned a lot through that work and since have continued to organize whether it was by sharing concerns, documentation of conditions in the schools on social media, talking to local reporters, speaking at meetings of the Rhode Island Department of Education. I've organized teachers, parents, students to speak about our concerns there and at the school board as well.
Maya Chavez: I actually have criticized Emily Oster so much on Twitter that I ended up getting interviewed in the New York Times about it. So I leverage social media a lot to try and elevate the concerns that I have had, but I continue to be disappointed by I think the lack of wider regard and concern for the persistent health issues in our schools.
Justin Reich: Thanks Maya. And Michael for you what have been the venues in your work to be able to ... You talked about a doing a reset right now, do you feel you have open lines of communication with folks in your school, in your district about doing that? Do you feel it's something that you should mostly doing in your own classroom and figuring out on your own?
Michael Machado: It's a great question. And also before I say anything else, I just want to thank you and everyone that was involved with this work for doing this. It felt like the first time I had been heard, the first time I had been seen in a long time. I just want to say thanks, I appreciate that. Look, are the lines of communication open? Yes. At different stages of this I've tried every line of communication I could think of, I've tried speaking to the board of education. Not quite so thoroughly as Maya, so hats off to Maya because that's awesome the work that she was describing. It didn't feel effective, it didn't feel that no matter how eloquent you were or how data driven you were or how many sites or sources you used, it just was irrelevant. It just was not really the metrics by which the decisions were being made.
Michael Machado: And that feels like it continues to be the case. I think that for me in much the same way that you're forced to accept that inequitable conditions outside of the school have a direct and significant impact on your students' academic success, social-emotional success and so on and so forth. Within COVID-19, it felt to me that the only way that I could really create any meaningful impact was to address my students directly and to create an ethos appeal I suppose to my students that was structured around the fact that I have a young son that I can't vaccinate. And that one of the biggest concerns I have is having an asymptomatic case, a breakthrough case of COVID-19 and bringing home. And so that's been effective, not as effective as I would've hoped. I hope that answers your question.
Justin Reich: Yeah, it does for sure. One of the things that we try to emphasize in our work is that organizing is not about the moment of immediately rearranging power or rearranging voices in systems. We did a whole project called Imagining September in which we invited teachers to interview their student. To go and ask them five questions, which were basically what worked really well for you last year? What was really hard for last year? What do you feel like you lost? What are you super proud of, and what do you hope adults will do differently? Now, through a strange set of circumstances, I happen to work at MIT and sometimes if I yell things people will pay attention or will open emails from an MIT address.
Justin Reich: And I also have a bunch of time to sit around and do all this. So I could take their 200 responses with ideas from 5,000 students and publish a report on it and yell about it. And that can be important and helpful. But I think just as important is another thing we told teachers was just go ask your students those questions and really listen to them and tell one other adult. Have that conversation with one colleague, with your assistant principal, with the counselor, with someone else. What organizing is in some respects is just having enough people taking enough small scale, reasonable actions within their sphere of influence to develop a grassroots effort at having more and more people, having those conversations.
Justin Reich: I think the kinds of things that you're doing and the kinds of stories, it would be great if we could have interviewed a thousand teachers. But we could interview 60, so that's what we did. And then we start telling those stories from there. Two of the other themes from the report Natasha about how teachers were feeling were some of what Michael was just talking about, the toll of widening inequalities and society's failure to respond to those inequalities and the toll of public criticism of teachers. And I wonder if you could talk about some of the things that you heard about that?
Natasha Esteves: Yeah. I'm actually reminded of one quote, well, I'll paraphrase it from one of the teachers I interviewed in a rural part of the country. And basically this individual said, "I feel like I'm bearing the burden of a public health crisis failure. Somehow it falls on me as a classroom teacher to deal with the burden of those in positions of power who can actually mitigate the spread of this virus. There's all this vitriol, all this hostility against teachers for wanting to feel safe. And like Michael just mentioned, a lot of the teachers I interviewed also had small children at home who were unvaccinated or not able to be vaccinated or were in intergenerational homes and were living with older folks. This is pre-vaccination because they were reflecting back on the year.
Natasha Esteves: And all of a sudden teachers don't have the right to feel unsafe in a situation where their cities, their municipalities or their states aren't doing enough to mitigate the spread of this virus. So in one anecdote this individual was talking about how nobody wanted to wear a mask in their small town. When football games or baseball games for the school, because it was a very big deal for the high school were canceled, the teachers were somehow blamed. For some reason, teachers became an scapegoat for what was a wider societal failure to curb this pandemic spread. And I think that shows two things. One, there was a lot of failure in mitigating the spread of this virus. And two, we live in a country that does not value teachers as highly degree professionals that they are, that does not value them as even human beings that sees them as babysitters. And therefore teachers became scapegoat for something that's beyond their control.
Natasha Esteves: And what's striking to me is that throughout this year you see a lot of companies and corporations and even non-profits being like, what can we do for our employees? How can we make our employees feel safe? What can we do for the morale of our employees? But there was nothing equivalent to that from the interviews that I did at least for teachers. There was no concern for how do we make teachers feel safe. It was what do parents want? And in hearings with school board council hearings, it's like, we'll listen to angry parents but we're not going to listen to the teachers. This is a theme that I also noticed that was brought up over and over again, there was a public health crisis, somehow, some way teachers were bearing the brunt of it.
Justin Reich: Michael or Maya, are there moments in the last year that you can remember feeling what, what we call the report, the toll of that public criticism? Are there particular events you [inaudible 00:21:08] where you read something in the news or you heard something from someone in your community that stands out at you as, oh, that was one of these things that stung. Yeah Michael or.
Michael Machado: Yeah. I don't have a anecdote to share from my personal experience. It's all things that I experienced secondhand watching the news, most especially recently when boards of education are meeting to discuss, for instance, mask mandates. We had the same situation with our board of education in which, to Natasha's point, we have the tri-county health department in this area of Denver, greater Denver that implemented a mask mandate and then put an exception into it that if you are under the control of the tri-county health department, that you could opt out of this mask mandate, which are school promptly did, our district promptly did for students 12 and older ostensibly because they have access to a vaccine that they're in the midst of watching TikTok after TikTok that spreads misinformation regarding the vaccine, which is something else you're having to combat in the classroom.
Michael Machado: And so it's been immensely frustrating. And I would also add to what Natasha was saying a second ago, it was the whiplash of it. And this is talked about in your report, you go from being a hero effectively, which is language that I'm unbridged with to begin with, to being the scapegoat. And that whiplash effect was really disheartening, really frustrating. This is already a demanding job at the best of times. And so now we're in a situation where the toll from a mental health standpoint is exponentially higher. So it took about a week where we saw massive upticks in case count incidents rate for students between 12 and 18 years old when schools opened without a mask bandaid here. And it took about a week before the district decided to opt into the mask bandaid. Now you have one of the things that's most challenging with students, which is inconsistency. You've got to a rule change a week into the school year and now it's just been a constant battle of please cover your nose, please cover your nose. You explain the science of it. It's a lot.
Justin Reich: Yeah. It was safe last week, and now it's not safe anymore. I mean, you could see a 13-year-old like, "You just told me it was one thing and now you're telling me another thing. Who am I supposed to believe? Who are the experts that are out there?" Kit, did you have something you wanted add?
Kit Golan: Yeah, absolutely. Last year in New York City where I was teaching, one of the options for both students and teachers was a fully remote option. And I was actually co-teaching with somebody who was in-person. And she was the special education math teacher, I was the general ed math teacher and our kids sort of rotated through a third of them in person on A days and a third of them in person on B days, and then a third of them who were fully remote the whole time. And over the summer, there was a holding of the breath to see if a remote option would be offered again in New York. And parents, especially in the Bronx were saying, "Hey, we need a remote option." And teachers were saying, "Hey, we need a remote option." And the mayor doesn't care, he's not listening.
Kit Golan: And I've been a New York City public school teacher for 11 years, and I made the decision that I didn't feel safe going back in-person and I didn't want to not be heard by the people who had the power to make decisions like that. So I went to a private school. And at the private school, the head of the school consults with medical professionals, they overhauled the HVAC system summer of 2020 before they even went back last year. We have a mask mandate, we have a vaccine mandate for teachers and students over 16. We're doing full campus testing after basically every holiday and then anybody who is asymptomatic and has a case is doing test and stay. And I legitimately don't have to worry as much about COVID. I can focus on teaching, I can focus on the relationship building with the students and supporting them and reassuring them that they're not as behind as they fear they might be because of what they're hearing in the news.
Kit Golan: And I'm angry that that's not available for all students in public school, that I had to leave the public school system to go somewhere that I felt like I was going to be able to be safe and my family would be safe and my kids would be safe. And even with the mask mandate, and it's for everybody, regardless of vaccination status. If you're inside a building, masks are on. If you're outside of building, masks are optional. And so we've been doing a lot of eating outdoors, that kind of thing. But students for the most part when you go inside are responsive to putting the mask on. There are definitely a few who are resistant but not to the percent or degree that I saw last year in the public school or that I'm seeing even more so this year in the public schools.
Justin Reich: Natasha, did you want to follow up?
Natasha Esteves: It was a follow up to Michael's point, we can circle back to me. I'd love to know if Maya wants to jump in.
Maya Chavez: Sure, yeah. So I definitely had a number of experiences where I was targeted particularly on Twitter for some of my advocacy. There are enormous efforts to spread disinformation and target teachers on Twitter. What stood out to me was when it was actual parents in the Providence school district who made comments to me like, "Gurl," spelled G-U-R-L, " you're a public health threat," which I'm like, "First of all, Susan, I'm not your girl. And secondly," I'm like, "I have nothing to gain and in fact a lot to lose from this advocacy." And to put an enormous amount of time into organizing people to write letters and make phone calls and give public testimony and speaking with all of these reporters and writing pieces with scientists, to put all of this energy into it and have somebody whose child attend school in my district turn around and say that I personally myself am the public health threat was really deeply disturbing, particularly because this is an individual who considers herself a progressive and allies with progressive organizations here in the community.
Maya Chavez: So that to me really highlighted the extent to which people have been deeply misinformed about the real risks in our schools. The conversation so often is framed as teachers versus parents. Well, parents actually want to keep their kids safe. It's not that parents want to put their kids at risk and want to put their kids' teachers at risk, it's that many parents have been deeply misinformed about the situation in our schools. My school district stayed open in person the entire school year last year even when our per capita rate soared at nine and a half times the rate that was allowed for reopening in the fall. And now leaders point to Providence schools, and they wrote about it the New York Times and other places and say look how we kept schools open, look how we kept going during the pandemic, look at this great sacrifice and this great success. And this proves that really we can keep schools open.
Maya Chavez: But if you look at what the CDC has to say, they looked at national surveillance data from the UK, which showed that for every increase of five in the per capita rate, the rate per 100,000 people of new cases, every increase of 5 there was a 72% increase in the likelihood of a school outbreak for an increase of five. Now, where I am, we had an increase of 850 per 100,000. And we stayed open the entire time. You don't have to be an epidemiologist to understand that that is clearly unsafe and that we were clearly at enormous risk. And rather than acknowledging that there's science and data that show that in-person learning can be a source of community transmission, that it can actually drive community transmission particularly when you have a lot of students who are living in intergenerational homes. Instead of acknowledging science, they turn around and point at all of our lives being put at risk and say what a great success it was.
Maya Chavez: And then when we try to advocate like Michael was saying, when we try to advocate, we are dismissed because we're not scientists, because we're not epidemiologists. And when you say, cool, I have three epidemiologists who are willing to talk to you and elevate these concerns, those are not the scientists who get included in the New York Times article. Instead, it's Emily Oster the economist who is advancing the narrative that we should reopen schools at any cost and that children are not at risk from COVID. It's been a fraught experience for many reasons.
Justin Reich: Thanks for sharing that Maya.
Natasha Esteves: Justin, can I share something real quick?
Justin Reich: Yeah.
Natasha Esteves: I'm reminded of an interviewee of mine that shared something that I found very powerful, especially as a former teacher. This individual said something along the lines of, "I am literally trained to protect your child from an active shooter. We do active shooter drills to literally save your child's life from gun file, which is so prevalent in our country. And I have been through those active shooter drills, which are very traumatizing to be quite honest for students and teachers." And this individual said, "I'm here ready to save your child's life from a bullet and yet you can't empathize with the fact that I don't want to end up in a ventilator." This was around the time where there was a shift from, yes, celebrate teachers to, oh, teachers are selfish.
Natasha Esteves: And back to a few of the points that the teachers here have made, it's been very painful for a lot of the teachers. It's been unanimously painful really, there are very few things that are true across the board. But the hate that was coming from media outlets or from parents especially was extremely demoralizing and painful, especially since teachers were working so hard and remote teaching was everything but easy. It was actually much harder than in-person teaching. But I found that particular quote, that really resonated with me. Teachers have to train to what do we do if there's an active shooter, and yet we're here trying to end up on a ventilator for a perfectly preventable disease and somehow that's too much to ask. And we may talk about this later, Justin, so you can table this. But to Maya's point, returning to school was far from normal anyway.
Natasha Esteves: And a lot of people thought that, oh yeah, we're going to return to school, let's get back to normal. There's no normal, there was no normal in returning to school. And there were things that were working about remote teaching and learning. There was a groove that a lot of teachers found. And then administrators without consulting teachers, this is the trend we found would be like, "All right, we're arbitrarily going to return in this day whether or not the data supports it." But it's like I just got a way of managing my classroom behavior online, I just got a groove going with my class in churning things in through digital formats to then suddenly change to in-person learning meant relearning procedures, meant reestablishing, rebuilding relationships. So the return to in-person learning not only made teachers feel incredibly unsafe, which obviously affects their work performance but wasn't necessarily a panacea for education during a pandemic.
Justin Reich: One thing that I've been thinking about in terms of the public criticism is to try to understand how widespread that criticism is or what sense do we have of how parents and how people in the United States overall feel about schools, feel about their teachers, feel about teacher unions. And a thing that's been really striking to me especially watching survey data come out in the last couple of months from the end of last year is the incredibly stable support for schools. So a weird thing about American survey polling is that if you ask people in the United States what they think about public schools in general, they're kind of so-so on the topic. If you ask them what they think about their local public school, they're quite positive. And none of that was dented in the last year.
Justin Reich: If you look at polling from five Phi Delta Kappan, which is a progressive teacher support organization or Education Next, which is a center right organization that does polling. Both of their annual polls show stable support for your local public schools, stable support for teachers unions. And then the thing that has really shocked me with some of the recent surveys is when parents are surveyed about the quality of their satisfaction with the instruction that their students received over last year. To my mind, it was shockingly high. 75% of parents when Education Next asked them how satisfied are you with the instruction and activities your students have received? Over 75% say they were satisfied or very satisfied. There's another group called Reach that just had a survey come out that asked a similar question and got similar kinds of responses.
Justin Reich: There's something unusual about ... Part of it makes me think, there are some very, very loud negative voices that have been critical of teaching, critical of the positions that teachers unions have taken. But actually overwhelmingly, it may be that the vast majority of parents are actually quite supportive of what teachers have been up to. Now, unfortunately teachers who are just generally content with how things are going in their schools and satisfied with our lives don't write op-eds to the local paper saying, "No, I think things are pretty okay in schools. It's hard, but they're doing their best." And so it's some of these negative voices that seem to shine through. I've been thinking a lot about how to communicate more widely that, yep, there are definitely some really loud voices that have been really critical of teachers in schools during this period, but there's actually shockingly high levels of parental support for their own teachers and generally very high levels and very stable levels of support for teachers and teacher unions and groups like that.
Justin Reich: We spend a bunch of time talking about the one main theme of the report, which is that teachers were closest to these issues, but they often felt insufficiently heard, insufficiently supported, insufficiently valued. A second argument that we make in the report is that there are a series of missteps that in retrospect look pretty straightforward that could have been avoided if we had listened to teachers. Natasha, do you want to talk a little bit about some of the things where in retrospect it looks like, you know what, teachers had a bunch of concerns about these approaches, and sure enough, we tried them and they didn't work very well?
Natasha Esteves: Yeah. Well, it's hard not to tie it back to the lack of teacher input. But basically when teachers who are closest to the, I know you mentioned the instructional core, teachers are in the classroom. One interviewee said like, "Everybody wants to tell teachers what to do, but nobody knows what teaching is like, and nobody knows what teaching is like during a pandemic." So it's a very odd place to be in when you have other people telling you what to do while they're working from home and asking you to return to the classroom or while they're working from home and asking you to teach remotely without sufficient professional development in how to do so. But in terms of missteps that could have been avoided, one example that I think of and the teachers that are on our panel here perhaps could share some as well is a teacher that had spent their entire summer ...
Natasha Esteves: And I'm trying to use gender pronouns because we really wanted to protect the anonymity of all our teachers, and that's part of the reason not all of them are here. Really spent so much time just listening to them describe all the time that they spent over the summer putting together a plan for the school year for remote teaching. Finally got their groove going because even if it's in-person teaching, it takes a while for you to get the procedures get things going, get things flowing. I think it was about a month or three weeks before the end of the school year the administrators decided, well, it's about time to go back to in-person classes, let's do it. It. But it had taken so much time to get to the point where remote teaching and learning was working and learning was happening and relationship building was working out online that when they returned to in-person, not returned, because they hadn't even been in in-person classroom.
Natasha Esteves: When they entered in-person classroom, it was just chaos. You had to rebuild relationships, redo procedures. But the teacher had advocated for themselves to their administration but hadn't been listened to. Another thing that I know at least one teacher on this panel from the transcripts that I read spoke to is how absolutely untenable hybrid teaching was. And those who are outside teaching are like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is it. Hybrid teaching, remote and in-person at the same time, best of both worlds, let's do it." And although there's hybrid teaching in the sense of A day, B days and you alternate, a lot of the hybrid teaching that we heard about from the teachers we interviewed were simu-teaching where somehow teachers were expected to teach in-person students and online students at the same time.
Natasha Esteves: And you basically had to have two different sets of lesson plans. It was incredibly difficult, it was incredibly stressful. And one group of students, there was no way that they weren't going to be neglected because you just can't do it, you can't do virtual teaching and in-person teaching at the same time. So though the idea in some administrators' head might have been like, "Oh, this is the best of both worlds." Had teachers been consulted and there were instances where teachers were saying, "This isn't working, this is untenable," and they were ignored. It was like, oh, okay, but we're going to continue doing it anyway. Then these are of the sorts of missteps that we could have avoided. Better teaching and learning could have happened if teachers weren't forced into arrangements that they know being closest to the issue didn't work.
Justin Reich: Yeah. Hybrid teaching seems the simu-teaching when you have a group of students ... Go ahead Kit.
Kit Golan: Well, I just wanted to speak to this because that was exactly my experience last year. In New York City, my school in particular had us doing the simu-teaching. So even though I was talking about A days and B days, the thing that people didn't really realize is that when the kids who were coming in in-person were there, they were still doing the same lesson as the kids at home. Because in order for us to interact with all of the kids equally, we were luckily using Desmos, which is a great online math tool and I've used it both before in-person and then also while being fully remote. But the kids who were in-person weren't getting your normal in-person school experience. So it was like, okay, great, you're physically in the room but you're not actually able to engage with each other in a one-on-one in conversation because you have to be at two different tables six feet apart.
Kit Golan: And we're still on Zoom except that ... I will never forget the first day that we had all the kids sign into Zoom, the wifi network at our school was like, oh my God, I can't do it and everybody's laptop froze. And so then we were like, "Okay, let's try turning off cameras. Oh, that's not going to work. Okay, let's try projecting the Zoom on the board and then the kid who wants to speak that's in the room comes up to the teacher laptop that's in the room and speaks to everybody but from that laptop." And so then when we tried to do, we called them a chat blast where everybody would type into the chat at the same time and then hit enter and we could read everybody's ideas. That was a pedagogy move that we created on the fly, but it didn't work if the kids who were in=person couldn't access the chat for Zoom because their laptop wasn't directly connected.
Kit Golan: So it was figuring out what's going to work for the kids who are fully remote at home, how do we bridge that with the kids who are in-person but still kind of remote, and how do we make sure that everybody is getting a good educational experience? In New York, we were fully remote for a short period of time. I think it was maybe November through the middle of February, the students all had the same experience. They were all at home all the time. It was a lot more consistent for them, they knew what to do. We got into a groove move and then we came back in-person and they were like, "Whoa, wait, I don't know what to do anymore." And I think that's another example of we were being asked to build the plane as we're already in the air going, "Oh my God, I'm falling out of the sky, I don't have a plane."
Justin Reich: While also sort of saying, look, we just know that this won't work. I think there was [crosstalk 00:44:42] immediate reaction from teachers like it is almost impossible, especially if you're doing any kind of participatory instruction to have half the students ... Actually, about maybe 15 years ago, I was talking to some faculty at the Harvard Extension School. And they had some classes where you could take them on campus and then folks mostly in the military took them from a distance, and they did it at the same time. And the reason why that worked is that the there was a lecturer who just stood in front of a camera, in front of an audience and talked. And if all you're doing is talking to people, it actually works pretty well. But if you're trying to have what you describe of a participatory pedagogy, interacting with other students, interacting with technology online. Teachers sort of said like, "This is going to be impossible."
Justin Reich: And there are certain of kinds of administrative conveniences to having simu-teaching happening. It meant you didn't have to track just as closely who's coming back and who's going to be away on any given day. It was a good plan except for the fact that it was impossible to actually implement. One of the things that had people listened more to teachers and took their concerns more seriously from the beginning, then it was a misstep that could have been avoided. So I want to make sure that we have some time for the third category of things that we found, which is that it was a problem to not listen to teachers and to have them help us avoid some obvious missteps. But there's also some really great things that teachers learned and innovative and developed and created, and we should really make sure that those good ideas get brought into the work of teaching moving forward.
Justin Reich: I'm wondering if any of the panelists, maybe Maya or Michael, if you want to talk about some of the things that you figured out last year that you've been really excited to bring into the work this year? Michael, do you want to start us off?
Michael Machado: Yeah. Justin, I hope you don't mind, there are a couple points I was hoping to make.
Justin Reich: Please.
Michael Machado: The first one I want to go back to what you were talking about with respect to the very vocal parents who are openly critical of teachers. I just want to say any serious analysis of this problem has to include a meaningful interrogation of the fourth estate, and specifically the way that the news media frames problems, frames issues in society. We have massive news conglomerates, it's three or four that control the vast, vast majority of media that people consume. And whether we're talking about traditional media or social media, until we move away from a system that is almost entirely predicated on the ability to drive interactions through controversial content, I think we're in a really, really tough spot. And that the amount of attention that you are talking about to a very small minority, which is of course evidence by the statistics that you reference I think is part and parcel of that issue. Sorry to go back that far.
Justin Reich: No, please.
Michael Machado: I want to turn this over to Maya quickly because I don't have anything particularly innovative to offer except what was discussed at length in your report, which is grace and flexibility. I really think that ultimately the solutions that all of us would likely advocate for are things that are fundamentally not neoliberal, they're not corporate oriented. They don't have to do with your ability to actively implement a new app, a new software suite, a new this, a new that. It has to do with meeting students where they are, with making meaningful human connections and developing relationships.
Michael Machado: All of this stuff is time consuming. And from the standpoint of the district, it's expensive. I don't want to take up too much more time, I know we're short, so I want to turn over. But I think really you basically hit on what I took away, and that has to do with accepting late work. It has to do with emphasizing the fact that I'm not really concerned about your grade, which is not something that a lot of my students have heard before. I don't really think it's always a great indicator of what you have or haven't learned. That's where I live on that piece.
Justin Reich: That's great Michael. Maya, do you thoughts then?
Maya Chavez: Yeah. Actually, I want to kind of build on Michael's point about sort of how these conversations have been represented in the media. Because like Michael was saying, I think that what we see reported in the mainstream news is very far removed in a very distorted version of reality. I don't have parents of my actual students who are on Twitter talking about teachers are bad people, this, that, and the other. They're taking care of their children are working their jobs. But there is this perception that there's this massive backlash against teachers. And it's a very well-funded perception and I think a lot of the folks who are pushing the idea that children don't actually get COVID, that they don't need to get vaccines, that we shouldn't be teaching about critical race theory. A lot of the same organizations are behind all of these narratives, The Koch Institute, the AIER are funding these ideas.
Maya Chavez: And it's really essential that we delve further into the sources of this misinformation. I mean, the former head psychologist of Cambridge Analytica is deeply involved in a COVID disinformation campaign in the UK that has targeted members of parliament, that has worked inside nonprofit astroturfed parent organizations in the UK. I mean, that is the level of misinformation that the we're actually combating. When somebody from Cambridge Analytica or formally of Cambridge Analytica is directly targeting teachers, parents, teachers' unions, members of parliament, that's what we're up against. That's how distorted the narrative is. And until we start to really unpack that, I think it's going to be difficult to address some of the things that are brought up in these conversations because the conversations aren't indicative of our realities.
Maya Chavez: And I think seeing the extent to which a lot of the activity online was fake activity. There were a lot of fake accounts pushing these narratives, pushing these agenda. We need to think about the ways in which that has distorted our understanding of not only the science of COVID safety but also our understanding of what other people in our society think. Because when you open up Emily Oster's Twitter and you see all of these people that are like, "Yeah, open the schools right now, your child is like a vaccinated grandparent." When you see this huge response to that, you think, okay, I must be the weird one, everybody must think that.
Maya Chavez: But similarly to what Justin was saying about when you actually look at the data, parents are very supportive of teachers, they're happy with the education their kids are getting. When you actually look at the data on what people want in terms of public health, they want more interventions, they want more safety, they don't want people to be put at risk. Yet we're acting based on these sort of astroturfed online movements, and we need to really reconsider the ways that we're getting information and the ways in which we're understanding in conversations about schools and teaching and learning.
Justin Reich: Yeah Michael.
Michael Machado: Sorry, just quickly to add onto that. And Maya I'm sure can correct me if I'm wrong on this. But as far as I'm aware, the only traditional news media figure that has engaged with Emily Oster's work on TV is Chris Hayes. Am I saying that guy's name, Chris Hayes, the guy on MSNBC, the young guy? And even he, if you go back and look at his Twitter feed, even he was wishy-washy on Emily Oster and the whole thing, which was pretty disappointing. Just quickly, this last thing. To my mind, the status quo becoming the dominant hegemonic that it is didn't happen by accident.
Michael Machado: Now, ultimately what I think we're seeing here is a reaction to the perception of a threat. If ADA called for a universal teaching strike tomorrow, we now know the kind of power that teachers have economically in this country to bring the entire workforce to a halt. And that is a threat, that's a threat to capital. So that's why we see threats from the side of Koch brothers, we see neoliberals talking about we got to get schools open, we got to get schools open. And ultimately what we're hearing is the voice of capital.
Justin Reich: Thanks Michael. We have a couple of minutes left. Kit, go ahead.
Kit Golan: I just wanted to say Michael was just saying about getting schools open. And I taught fully remote last year, I never met my students in-person. And yet, I still forged relationships with them and supported their math learning. And I think that narrative of schools being closed misses so much. School doesn't happen in a building, school happens between the teacher, the student, and the curriculum. And that can happen regardless of where we physically are. To a point that you raised earlier, Justin, you were talking about the online course that works in college is usually just a lecturer. And thinking developmentally about the K through 12 education experience, a lot of our pedagogy is focused on how do people interact with each other.
Kit Golan: We're teaching kids how to do a turn and talk when we're there in-person. Well, last year we had to teach them how to do a breakout room. What do I do? How do I interact with my peers in this setting? And students learned a lot about how to use technology, and that's something that maybe they might not have in previous years. This year, I have students where the second day of school, I was like, "Great, take out your laptops and do this," and they all did it just fine. Whereas in other years I would've said that and it would've been me going around troubleshooting how do I use a laptop? I don't even know.
Kit Golan: I think that we're thinking about loss or being closed and we're not recognizing that things were different and different things were emphasized or focused on. But kids were still growing, kids were still learning. And if anything, the biggest thing that we lost was this open-purpose social interaction like the hey, hello in the hallway or the conversation at the end of school when they're being dismissed. And not so much the content that you can either calculate or look up or research, it was those human interactions that I think our kids missed the most.
Justin Reich: And what's so incredibly important about trying to understand that stuff is high quality learning builds on where students are at as all of you said. And if students have new capacities, we should be building on new capacities. If they learned stuff starting the year saying, what are you missing and how do you fix what's wrong with you? There's a role to play in helping kids get the things that they need to be successful. None of us want to start our year being told we're learning losers and we need to get ourselves fixed. We want to start by celebrating all the incredible things that we did do and the resilience we showed and how we figured these things out. All right, we're right at the top of the hour. So Natasha, you get the final word to say what you want to say and then we'll say goodbye and thank you to everybody for joining us.
Natasha Esteves: That's a lot of pressure. There's just so much in this report, we really just skimmed the surface. So I dropped it in the chat, I'm going to drop it in the chat again. And I highly encourage anybody on this call to go ahead and take a look at the report. But in terms of this last slide that you have up, Justin, teachers did innovate. And I think that's something that was overlooked. Teachers shouldn't have to be focused on resiliency, students shouldn't have to be focused on resiliency. You should not have to be in survival mode in your job. I just wanted to preface with that because we hear a lot about like, oh my gosh, but they were so resilient. Well, systems should be set in place so that they should not have to practice so much resiliency in the first place.
Natasha Esteves: Nevertheless, the fact is teachers felt strained and felt unheard and felt demoralized in many ways and weren't listened to. That being said, there were a lot of creative ways and a lot of novel just ideas that teachers came up with that they informed us they would be carrying over to the following year. One of them is that a lot of times for IEP meetings or teacher parent meetings we don't have parents showing up because the time, the distance, transportation, buses, that's not a thing. But now with Zoom meetings, everybody's comfortable with Zoom meetings and now you can hold IEP meetings or parent-teacher conferences over Zoom. The growth in technology skills among students is something that also we heard across the board that can continue in in-person classrooms. A lot of people started using scratch for time, which is a coding app developed at MIT in fact.
Natasha Esteves: A lot of teachers realized that they can organize everything around Google Classroom and they're carrying around less papers. So there are certain things about technology, about digital learning that can transfer over back to in-person schooling once this pandemic is over. But every single teacher that we interviewed, almost every single teacher we interviewed said that as much as they preferred remote learning because it was safer, they're in this for the human relationship, for the connection with students, and they miss that very much. And so they're forward very much to a future where you can be back in school and be safe and be respected and be a partner in decision making processes that affect your life in your classroom and your students.
Natasha Esteves: And I think what we need is a paradigm shift, a cultural paradigm shift in seeing teachers as the highly degreed professionals that they are. And a shift at the micro level where there isn't so much of a gap between administrators and teachers, between district level leaders and teachers. It has been very hierarchical with some teachers even complaining that their unions aren't listening to them. So there needs to be a change. Teachers are professionals, teachers are experts, and they need to be seen as such. And they need to be thought partners in decision making processes that affect how their classroom is run. And that's what we hope this paper could do is elevate these teachers' voices and influence policy makers and decision makers to start rethinking how they incorporate teachers into their decision making.
Justin Reich: Well, Maya and Kit and Michael, thanks so much for joining us for a really rich conversation, Natasha, thanks for getting on the soap box at the end to point us in the right direction moving forward and for all of your terrific work along with these great co-authors on this report with Chris and Farah and Aicha and Raelee and Harley. So you can find all of our work at tsl.mit.edu/covid-19. And I hope you have a great rest of your morning, afternoon or night depending on where you are in the world. Thanks everyone.
Kit Golan: Thank you.
Michael Machado: Thanks so much.
Justin Reich: I'm Justin Reich, thanks so much to our teacher panelists for joining us, for being so real with us. Certainly what you got was a taste of what we report on in the whole study, which is that teachers experienced a lot of frustration over the last year, real pain and not feeling listened to and acknowledged. And that was balanced or tied to the frustration that teachers have some really good, really important ideas grounded in the experiences of this moment that can help us move forward. And so I hope if there are school leaders out there listening, district leaders, state officials listening, it's so important for teachers, the people who are on the ground making this work happen to be partners in designing the future of schools, designing our ongoing pandemic response, and also designing what schools should look like moving forward.
Justin Reich: And the passion, the frustration you heard in teachers' voices in that conversation has a lot of energy that can be directed towards the ongoing improvement of schools. Thanks for listening to TeachLab, be sure to subscribe to get future episodes. If you linked into the show notes, you'll find recordings of the full webinar and links to all of our research. This episode of TeachLab was produced by Aimee Corrigan and was recorded and sound mixed by Garrett Beazley. Stay safe, until next time.