One of the things that I have missed the most during our shift to virtual learning has been getting into classrooms on a daily basis.  Of course I’ve had lots of opportunities to jump into virtual classroom sessions, but it’s not quite the same.  One of the things that I love most about working in education is that the human interaction with students is always energizing.  Even when you have a slow morning, as soon as the kids come in it boosts the energy level immediately.  On my first day with students in hybrid mode, I had a chance to visit each classroom on campus.  In some ways I felt like I learned more about our students and the school in those few hours than I had in an entire semester of online learning.  

Admittedly, I am still a big fan of how we’ve added virtual spaces and interactions into our regular work routines.  We have much higher participation in parent meetings and other special meetings when they are offered virtually.  Even on a personal level, it is nice to be able to eat dinner with my family at home before jumping on an evening call with senior parents or a hybrid learning Q&A session with our school community.  I am confident that virtual evening meetings will continue to be an important feature of our parent and community engagement.  I also think there is an important place for hybrid learning on a regular basis.  Perhaps not exactly the hybrid learning that we have had to put into place to meet health regulations and protocols, but rather the idea of students continuing to learn in the virtual space while they also attend in-person instruction.  It’s still too early to tell how the structures of schools will change in the long term due to the pandemic, but I’m always eager to take the best of distance learning and integrate it into our school schedule and design.  

Yet, for all of the positives of distance learning, I have been reminded over the past couple weeks of why I love the classroom so much.  Strong classroom teachers know that meaningful, personalized learning starts with a foundation of strong personal relationships.  Yes, those relationships can be developed through an internet connection, but it simply cannot compare to the in-person experience.  As humans, we crave the in-person experience.   

It’s amazing how being in a classroom for just a few minutes can provide you with so much insight and information about how our staff engage students.  Many of our teachers have a visibilly warm and affectionate energy with students, while some others interact in more structured ways.  While high expectations and respectful regard for students are universal requirements, I believe that instruction of the highest quality often draws on a variety of strategies. I am a firm believer that part of the socialization and growth benefit of schools is that our young people are exposed to teachers with a variety of management and instructional styles and practices.  It is much easier for me to see those expectations and strategies in practice across the school when I can visit classrooms.  Perhaps it’s also a result of my years observing in-person classroom instruction.  Frankly, I’m not as good at seeing the underlying structures and expectation levels in a fully virtual classroom.  Getting a read of the class is especially tough, when students screen aren’t on, as any teacher can attest.  Of course being on screen all day long can be exhausting, and I’ve read plenty of student self-care checklists begging teachers not to be overly strict about cameras, but checking for understanding and surveying the room for understanding can be particularly hard when you can’t see the students.  There are good strategies for quickly checking for understanding in a virtual environment, but they are not usually as intuitive as when you are in a classroom.  

In any case, educators and administrators around the world are making the adjustments as best they can in terms of providing meaningful observations and feedback of distance learning.  I’m very eager to continue learning and improving my own skill set in this regard as an administrator.  But I am also grateful that I have the chance again to be in classrooms and see the magic of learning happening right there in the room.  

Costa Rica is back to school today.  I could feel the energy immediately after leaving the house early this morning.  The traffic in my usually quiet residential neighborhood was certainly at a new level.  My own kids returned to school today, and they were up before 6 a.m. bouncing off the walls excited to go.  It’s been almost a year since my older kids were on campus, and for my 6-year old twins, today was their first day of in-person learning.  Everybody was nervous smiles.  

While our preschool and high school had already been back for a week and a half, today we added elementary and middle school.  I stood out at the drop-off for our smallest learners.  They seemed like old pros already, knowing exactly what they needed to do as they moved quickly from the car to the hand washing stations nearby.  The elementary students, on the other hand, were arriving for the first time in nearly a year.  I couldn’t see all of their facial expressions behind the masks, but eyes seemed plenty big.  Our support staff and admin team were out in full force to open car doors and personally welcome students while simultaneously pointing them in the right direction.  Drop off went smooth, and soon enough, everyone had arrived.

As I walked from classroom to classroom, I was amazed at how well everyone seemed to be settling into the new school experience.  Some teachers admitted to me they were still feeling pretty nervous, especially about how the simulcasting with in-person and at-home students was going to work out.  But after the first hour or two of classes, everyone seemed to be making the necessary adjustments.  I noticed that there was some variation in how the teachers were handling the simulcasting challenge.  Our preschool and early education classrooms that are staffed with assistants seemed to be avoiding a lot of the simulcasting altogether, using dedicated staff and a rotation schedule to allow the teacher to focus either on in-person learners or the students meeting virtually.  It also helps that our preschool and kindergarden, unlike other grades, are here every week and there are not as many students who have opted for distance learning at those grade levels.  

Quite a few of the teachers had figured out quickly how to project the screen of at-home learners to the front of the classroom.  I think this could prove a good strategy for creating a stronger sense of community amongst in-person and at-home learners.  In some cases, however, the teacher laptop is still the primary camera for looking into the classroom, which means that students at home can’t necessarily see students sitting in the classroom.  For this, I think my favorite strategy were those classrooms where the teacher had set up a tripod with an ipad, to function as an additional student in the gallery view, but one that reflected the students sitting in the classroom.  That way, students at home can see students in class and vice versa.  With both an iPad and a computer, those teachers can still share their computer screen. The ultimate would be perhaps to have two projectors in the room, so the teacher could project both their screen and at-home students to the class.  Since that is not a technical possibility in most of our classrooms, having the iPad on a tripod with the students at home looking back at the class seems like the next-best possibility.  

In any case, it was wonderful to be in classrooms to say hello to students and teachers alike, and it was good for me to be able to see the different technical solutions and set-ups that our teachers seemed to be favoring.  Our principals have already been creating collaborative spaces and conversations for our teachers to share their strategies and build the collective capacity of the team to design their new systems.  I loved hearing people say things like “we’re figuring it out,” and “it seems to be working well, and I’ll be making some adjustments.”  For many of our staff, we’re still in the midst of day one, and their will undoubtedly be adjustments – which I consider to be a good thing as we get better each day at providing a strong hybrid learning experience for our students.  

I believe that the single most challenging aspect of most hybrid plans is the need for classroom teachers to simultaneously instruct students in the classroom and students online.  In other words, you are teaching two separate audiences at the same time – one group of students in the room with you, while other students join from home.  Obviously simulcasting of instruction presents some challenging.  The first is a technical one, related to the availability of the hardware, software, and adequate internet bandwidth to pull everything off.  When you walk into one of our classrooms, you tend to see the teacher’s laptop open in Microsoft Teams, broadcasting the lesson to online students.  Many of our teachers are using the projector to project the students at home onto the front screen, so that the students sitting in the room can see those who are at home.  This is also done in classrooms with a video screen available, so that students in the room are aware and can interact with students who are at home.  Our teachers are also equipped with an iPad, which allows for further flexibility.  Some teachers are using the iPad as their lesson plan and notes, something they can hold close to guide them through the lesson.  Other teachers are using it as an additional camera, so that the students at home get an up-close view of the teacher – instead of just the far away take provided through the laptop.  In the most sophisticated practices, the teacher can use the iPad like a tablet, sharing his or her iPad screen to both the students online and through the projector to the students sitting in the room.  There are a lot of different configurations, and it has been really incredible to see the creativity and ownership of our teachers in solving the problem of simulcasting their classroom instruction.  

Admittedly, attending to students both at home and in person can be physically demanding and draining.  Teaching all day, under regular circumstances, is both intense mental and physical work.  Broadening the scope of the teacher’s attention across virtual and in-person modalities at the same time only intensifies that work.  Of course, with time, our teachers will develop routines that allow their brains and senses to back off from the initial intensity of all new systems for engagement and interaction, but it is still a heavy lift.  

To address this transition to simulcasting, we strategically made two structural shifts to our daily schedule.  First, we decided to move to a 4-day week for in-person hybrid instruction.  This leaves us Fridays for virtual only learning.  Having one day during the week in 100% virtual mode not only allows us additional time for a deep clean of the campus, but it provides teachers with a sensory break and time for additional instructional planning.  The other shift, perhaps even more significant, was to shorten our instructional day.  In essence, our in-person instructional is a half-day in length, with students being released a lunchtime each day.  We offer additional support, tutoring, and coursework in the afternoon.  Our teachers have the option to leave the physical campus (which we encourage to limit physical interaction to the extent possible) to work the remainder of the day from home.  We have given this first 9 weeks of hybrid learning the title of “transitional period” as a way to communicate that we are indeed making ongoing transitions and structural shifts back to in-person instruction and services.  But of all the adjustments, the biggest is the teacher shift to simultaneous instruction.  

There are some schools and systems that have founds ways to avoid simultaneous instruction altogether.  To do so, schools have basically had to adopt one of two strategies.  The first strategy is to restructure the teaching staff into completely different groups, so that students learning virtually are attended to exclusively by teachers working virtually, and in-person students work with in-person teachers.  On the surface, this strategy may seem ideal.  Of course at the high school and intermediate levels, this may not be possible at all due to the complexities of the master schedule.  Simply stated, it may not be possible to group students in all of their electives and unique schedules into entirely in-person or virtual classes.  Those teachers certainly would have to teach both in-person and virtually anyway, although they might avoid the need for simulcasting.  The other, perhaps unintended consequence of approaching the division of the school in this way, is that it also divides the staff into in-person and virtual camps.  I’ve heard not so pleasant stories of staff lobbying to stay virtual, while colleagues are forced to teach in-person, with correspondingly higher levels of health risk.  Contract negotiations and collective bargaining are usually not far behind.  

The other strategy to avoid simulcasting, much less popular it seems to me, is to platoon schedule the entire school, with all in-person learning happening in the morning, and then all virtual learning happening in the afternoon, using basically the same teachers to do both.   We also explored this possibility, but even if we moved to an exclusively 4-day work week, the four days would be incredibly long and still tight for our high school courses in terms of instructional time.  In other words, it’s hard (although not impossible) to fit two schools days into a single day.  

In the end, like most schools, we opted for simulcasting.  It is a trade-off we discussed at length as a leadership team.  We mocked-up different scenarios to see what the other possibilities might look like, and decided in the end that a shortened day initially will allow our staff to build their capacity as simulcasting, and then grow from there without having to significantly interrupt the typical school day or week calendar.  We’re just a week into it now, but I’ve been really impressed by the degree to which our teachers have worked collaboratively to support each other in designing and implementing their systems for simulcasting instruction.  It’s perhaps the biggest variable in hybrid learning, and our teachers have already been attacking the design challenge head-on.  

This Wednesday we begin our first attempt at hybrid learning at Lincoln School.  With most schools coming back hybrid in February, we are one of the first schools in Costa Rica to come back to some form of in-person learning.  Our leadership team has worked incredibly hard to iron out all of the logistics and details to ensure that we maintain appropriate safety measures and protocols.  Our teachers have been working diligently to put everything in place to offer both quality in-person and distance learning.  Our maintenance teams have been working around the clock to ensure the physical campus is ready to go.

On one level, I’m very pleased with the degree of preparation and planning.  You begin to realize just how many small details go into the day to day operation of a school – from drop-off and pick-up, to recess and lunch, to classroom transitions.  With COVID protocols in place, every single one of those details has undergone some important shifts and adjustments, and the communication challenge of sharing all of that information with families and students is intense.  We’re holding another round of information sessions today, specifically to try to review all of the processes and protocols we’ve designed and will be putting into place.  I joined the meeting with our preschool families this morning, and it became apparent very quickly that there are still a lot of questions – all of which need to be addressed so families know what to expect.  

Yet, despite all of the preparation, the information meetings, and Q&A sessions, I think at this point the most important thing is to start.  We’re calling this next quarter a “transitional period,” and that is by design.  We’ve tried to communicate and remind all of our stakeholders that we will have to learn and adapt and improve during this time of transition.  Pick-up and drop off procedures have been adjusted, daily schedules are adjusted, and teachers will be trying to simultaneously teach in-person and distance learning students – all for the first time.  That’s a lot of change to manage.  

To help us manage that change, we’re trying to stagger our formal return dates.  This week we’ll start with preschool and high school.  Within two weeks, we’ll have everyone back in the rotation.  We’re also starting with a 4 hour shortened day schedule – again with the idea that we’ll be learning quickly about what works and what needs further adjustments as we go.  

As I mentioned in my blog post last week, my main goal is to stay close to what is happening in the classroom.  How are teachers managing the challenge of simultaneous in-person and distance learning?  What strategies are they using that seem to help, and what challenges are they facing that we can, as administrators, work to address quickly?  I’m hoping to make those questions the focus on my blog entries in the coming weeks.  

Like the rest of the world, I’m heading into 2021 with a whole lot of hope and enthusiasm.  After such a challenging year behind us (and frankly, an intense opening to 2021), I’m excited to dig back into the work of providing meaningful, personalized learning for all of our students.  My hope this year is that I can focus my writing and reflections more on the practical work and strategies I’m seeing in classrooms and less on the broader administrative concerns that often occupy my attention and energy.  Of course the logistics of hybrid learning will continue to demand our ongoing attention – especially for administrators like me who are just now making the transition from fully distance learning to hybrid configurations.  Our students come back next week, and it will be the first time we’ve had students physically on campus for learning since last March.  I’m deeply excited for students’ return, but we already know, having watched so many other schools in the transition to on-campus learning, that the transition will not be without its challenges.

I’m particularly aware of the challenges facing our teaching staff.  Despite our best efforts, our hybrid model is going to rely on teachers simultaneously engaging in-person and virtual learners.  We know that this will present serious challenges, despite our confidence in the ability of our teachers to continue to engage with our students regardless of the mode of instruction.  I’m hoping to stay close and connected to those herculean efforts.  I know that understanding the experience of teachers and students in the classroom is key to making good administrative and leadership decisions. 

So, that is my commitment as we prepare for the return of students – keep my eyes close to the classroom.  Plus, I’ve now been working in a school for 6 months, and I’m incredibly eager to connect personally with our students and staff in ways that I simply could not have done when everyone was at home.  I’ve told staff and parents alike that Lincoln will continue to be a distance-learning majority school for some time – certainly for the rest of the 2020-21 academic year, and so we will have to continue to work to provide the highest quality distance learning as possible.  Yet a return to campus and the launch of hybrid learning allows us to add an additional layer of interaction – a personal touch – that has been sorely missing.  

We’ve had the added luxury of being able to learn from schools in other countries that have already been making that transition – both to hybrid and a full return to school.  I’m not so secretly grateful that Costa Rica decided to keep schools in distance learning mode for the entire fall semester.  But I also agree it’s time to get back on campus.  We’ve been able to learn from some of the early mistakes of others that are natural in testing new systems and solutions.  There are also still many unknowns with regards to COVID-19, and how testing, vaccinations, and temporary restrictions will impact our plans.  In any case, we are optimismtic that we can build on the early learnings of others and move quickly towards a focus on high quality learning experiences and environments for our students.  

This is my last blog post of the 2020 year.  Our students finished their semester this week, and today is the last day for teachers and staff.  It feels good to make it to the end of what will surely be an unforgettable semester of 100% distance learning.  

This was also the first year since I began my blog that I stuck with my initial goal of posting every week.  Perhaps it was working from home that provided that little additional time I needed to put my thoughts to paper on a weekly basis.  Almost without exception, my early morning Monday routine included enough time to gather and share some of my thoughts about what I was seeing happening around me in the world of education.  Of course this week things came off the rails a bit as I find myself scrambling to finish up all my tasks before taking a few weeks off (including from my blog) for vacation – it’s Thursday and I’m still trying to get a post up.  

Rather than an in-depth and sobering reflection on the unprecedented year we are finishing, I thought I would share a few thoughts about those elements of education that I think will be changed significantly as we head into 2021 and continue to emerge from pandemic restrictions over the course of the coming year.

Parent Engagement

Our engagement with parents was perhaps better in 2020 than it had ever been in the past.  Our efforts to gather parental input and perspective were genuine and ongoing.  Our virtual meetings, from open house to parent university to college counseling, were exceptionally well attended.  When we convened parents to share our initial plans for hybrid learning, we had nearly 600 families on the Zoom call.  Schools will have a hard time justifying in-person only gatherings in the future, and why would they when virtual and hybrid options garner such better participation?  At the classroom level, teachers began to see students in their home context.  Siblings, pets, and home surroundings came into clearer focus.  Even when parents were not directly participating, they were listening in on conversations, and asking better and more informed questions about the academic program.  Virtual learning has prompted shifts in patterns of parental participation that will hopefully be with us for the long term.

Essential Workers & Industry

Nobody, that I am aware of, is out protesting that Apple or Google employees come back to the office to work.  Many industries made a hard shift towards tele-commuting without much public attention. In many cases they will stay that way for the foreseeable future.  Schools, on the other hand, found themselves at the center of an intense debate and ongoing struggle.  In many ways, the work teachers and schools do to supervise, educate, and care for students during the regular work day is foundational to economic sustainability.  Frankly put, parents need to work, and schools often make that work possible.  Back in March, the thought of closing schools was unheard of.  Perhaps more than any other aspect of our daily lives, closing schools communicated that indeed, COVID-19 was the crisis of a lifetime.  

As the pandemic wore on, parents too began to recognize for themselves the enormity of the school dilemma.  It turns out that ensuring the learning of your children – consistent instruction, engagement, feedback, and supervision while you are also trying to meet employment responsibilities – is incredibly challenging.  Even for those who can give more time and attention to the task, daily instruction turns out to be a tough assignment.  I’m an education administrator, and yet one of the most difficult aspects of the pandemic was supporting and managing the distance learning of my own children.  Hopefully, the long term outcome for education will be a broader recognition of the formative role that teachers and schools play in sustaining and supporting our economic and social welfare.  

The futurists were perhaps right to predict that education would make a strong pivot towards virtual learning.  But in some important ways, education will be one of the industries to snap back quickly.  In-person schooling is not going away.  In many cases, the appetite to get students to the school campus is stronger than ever.  In my own school, even amongst a relatively cautious community of families, 75% of students are planning to return in-person to campus next semester, while the pandemic still rages on.  Kids want to be at school.  Parents want schools open for in-person learning.  

Hybrid Learning

Despite the strong pull towards in-person learning, hybrid learning will continue to play an important part of our school experience.  Hybrid learning has taken on a specific meaning in the context of the pandemic – some students on campus physically some of the time, while others remain at home to connect virtually. The idea is to lower student numbers in order to meet social distancing and safety protocols.  Of course the concepts and emerging practices of hybrid learning have existed for many years prior to 2020.  Some of the most forward-thinking reformers and innovators have been pushing for increasing access to technology and distance learning tools for years.  While we know that hybrid learning will likely be the primary mode of instruction around the world in the year 2021, I believe it will take on a critical role for much longer into the future.  Snow days may be a thing of the past.  Periodic virtual learning days could very well be built into calendars.   Sick or absent teachers may be leaving asynchronous virtual lessons for students indefinitely.  The entire educational workforce has been forced to learn and adopt the tools of distance learning during the past 9 months, and those skills will undoubtedly be put to use in creative and interesting ways.  

I’ve been making my way through the book “Teaching Entrepreneurship.”  As I mentioned back in November when I began reading, the first section of the book is a theoretical overview of what entrepreneurship is, outlining the broad characteristics of an entrepreneurship mindset.  The authors settle on five key components for entrepreneurial thinking; play, empathy, creativity, experimentation, and reflection.  This 5 pronged approach to teaching entrepreneurship then informs the structure for the rest of the book, which is to provide an overview of instructional strategies associated with the 5 major components.

What is perhpas most refreshing for me is just how practice-oriented the book is.  It is, at its heart, a collection of instructional strategies.  There is a broad variety of activities.  From encouraging students to play by learning improv and building marshmallow towers, to building empathy by practicing and analyzing negotiation simulations and exploring the impact of unfair pay schemes with imaginary monkeys , the examples are varied and most importantly, fun.  

The strategies and activities tend to start from more abstract, and move towards more concretely related to specific skills involved in business creation and venturing.  Exercises designed to build empathy might start with a general activity observing “users” or “clients” engaged in a common practice – like using an ATM machine.  Then they move to more specific cases, like developing a fictional customer persona for the type of person who might use the service or product related to a business plan that the student is currently developing.

What strikes me as a common element of these activities, is the need for students – our would-be entrepreneurs – to develop a truly flexible mindset towards their work and the market or social settings within which they intend to create and venture.  In such uncertain conditions, and with so many shifting variables, it is essential that students don’t get bogged down in too linear of thinking.  It’s as if we need students who take the work very seriously, but don’t take themselves or any specific solution too seriously – they don’t become overcommitted to any one solution.

This type of thinking and practice is in many cases the opposite of what we teach in schools.  Typically, we ask students to apply algorithms and rules to determine a single correct solution.  A commitment to teaching entrepreneurship will help our teachers and classrooms move increasingly away from this type of linear problem solving.  Indeed, the challenges in how we teach math and science are particularly well-documented.  We would do well to encourage play, empathy, creativity, experimentation, and reflection across all of our subject areas.  

Our team is deeply immersed in the design challenge of our lives – hybrid learning that meets the needs of all learners, is cost neutral, and doesn’t require teachers to simultaneously teach distance and in-person students hour after hour.  Ever since the Ministry of Education in Costa Rica outlined steps for a return to school next semester in 2021, we have been meeting regularly to outline out plans and systematically communicate details to our students and families.

I remember when we first moved from in-person to emergency distance learning (aka crisis teaching) back in March.  Back then, as a member of the Executive Cabinet of SAUSD, we moved from a weekly cabinet meeting to a nearly daily huddle to work through the endless decision-points that needed to be addressed.  Everything was unknown, and every 24 hour cycle brought new developments, new news, and changes to our decisions.

Over 8 months and a new job later, we’re quickly approaching an end of our exclusively distance learning model.  We’re making the transition into hybrid learning.  I told my leadership team at the beginning of November that we all needed to embrace the fact that we would again be meeting regularly, if not daily, to work through endless details and decision points that will give our hybrid learning plan its substance.  

This time, the uncertainty and relative panic of last March has become a much more clear-eyed and deliberate design process.  At the very least we have more time to work out the details, despite ongoing uncertainties.  We have the benefit of learning from the decisions, successes and mistakes of other systems who have already been in hybrid learning mode.  From conversations with people in those systems, we’ve come away with a few big learnings:

First, and perhaps most importantly, well over 50% of our students will still be learning remotely on any given day.  That means that while we are working with hybrid learning, our predominant mode of instruction will continue to be distance learning.  With that being the case, we need to continue to prioritize high quality distance learning throughout the spring semester.  Second, the plan needs to be flexible enough to deal with unexpected challenges – quarantines, sick teachers, lack of staff.  We realized early on in our hybrid plan that expecting 100% of our teachers to be available every day would be poor planning.  We needed a plan that assumed 20-30% might not be available in person on any give day.  Third, if we were down adults, we needed a substitute plan and extra professional skill in the building to provide slack to address needs on the fly.  We’re still trying to work those details out, but having a corps of on-call adult staff, as well as ensuring an “all hands on deck” attitude amongst our professional staff is essential.  Fourth, we needed to be careful about handing out special privileges to certain teachers and not others – including permission to work from home.  Teachers and administrators alike from other systems reported on rifts between those teachers who have to report physically to work, and those who continue to work from home.  We want to be united as a staff.  Fifth and finally, we would love to avoid simultaneous in-person and distance teaching to the extent possible.  As many schools have discovered, without a significant increase in the number of teachers available to teach, that last one will be very difficult to manage.  

Of course this is all still hypothetical.  Students don’t come back to campus until late January for us.  We have the next 3 weeks to work with our families to pin down our cohort assignments, make final physical preparations, and communicate our systems and protocols over and over again.  Each time we make good progress in our planning, another wrench gets thrown into the system to cause us to pause to go back into problem solving mode.  It has been one of the most demanding design challenges I have confronted in my time as an educator.   

The world has learned a lot during 2020.  We’ve virtually all learned to Zoom, and most of us have learned to wear masks.  We have learned about the challenging social dynamics of a pandemic, as well as the fascinating world of toilet paper supply chains.  During this challenging year, the world has also learned how much it depends on teachers and schools.  As we close out 2020, it is not difficult to share a genuine thank you for our educational professionals.  

This Wednesday would normally mark our annual Teacher Appreciation luncheon, sponsored by our school governing board.  With distance learning and social distancing still in full swing, we’re foregoing the in-person tradition with the delivery of a gift to each of our teachers and other educational staff.  Our leadership team spread out all around San Jose on Friday afternoon to deliver thank-you baskets and a little dessert.  It was a small but heartfelt expression of our appreciation.

I am thankful for our teachers, who back in March made an overnight shift to teaching online.  Many have pointed out that this quick adjustment was not really distance learning, but rather was crisis teaching.  While that may have been the case initial, our teachers – and teachers around the world – quickly set about building their digital skills and capacity in order to design increasingly student-responsive learning environments online.  They taught each day while simultaneously mastering a new suite of online tools and software platforms.  

I am thankful for our teachers, who throughout the physical school closure have made extra efforts to make themselves accessible and available to students and parents who were either struggling with the content, or struggling with the technology to access that content.  Whether it was impromptu phone calls, one-on-one teleconferences, or small group help sessions or chat exchanges, our teachers made themselves available.   

I am thankful for our teachers, whose typical summer break was a somewhat more anxious retooling of their curriculum and instruction in anticipation of an undetermined extension of distance learning.  Crisis teaching in the early months of the pandemic were transformed into legitimate distance learning, as our staff deepened their familiarity with and confidence using digital tools to create increasingly student-centered and student-accessible content and learning environments.  

I am thankful for our teachers, who have been both digitally and emotionally present for students as our young people navigate their own anxieties, grief, and mental and emotional challenges associated with a worldwide pandemic.  When parents lost employment, when loved ones and family members passed away, or when the uncertainty of it all closed in around them, our teachers, counselors, and support staff were there to support and to love our students.  

When I listen to my mom or sisters talk about the challenges of teaching in-person and distance learning students simultaneously, or watch our Lincoln teachers huddled over their laptops teaching class while also passing out learning materials to parents in the pick-up drive-thru, I can’t help but feel a sense of appreciation.  It’s an appreciation for the sense of professional commitment to the educational well-being of young people.  Indeed, of all of the things that we have learned during 2020, one of the most important and most poignantly felt has been the powerful commitment our teachers have towards serving their students, regardless of the obstacles.  

I have long believed that teaching students the practice of reflecting on their own learning is one of the most important elements of personalized learning.  If we want students who are aware of their own academic identity and learning strengths and areas for growth, they have to practice reflecting on their work and progress.  

Perhaps this belief is why the chapter on the practice of reflection in Teaching Entrepreneurship resonated so powerfully with me.  Indeed, the authors point out unequivocably that “the practice of reflection is arguably the most important of all the practices for entrepreneurship education.”  But why would this be the case?  

The primary point the authors drive home is that entrepreneurship education has to blend both theory and practice.  In other words, learning about entrepreneurship will never be enough.  Students actually have to experience it, with all of the intellectual and emotional learning that goes hand in hand.  They cite Alfred North Whitehead, who reminds us that we have to experience things in order to better think about them.  In other words, our practical experience informs our conceptual understanding of those same things.  The practice of reflection, therefore, becomes an essential bridge between what we experience and how that experience informs our developing understanding.

This is a connection that I am passionate about.  As a high school principal with Envision Education, we employed a portfolio assessment system that held reflection at the pinnacle of our educational practices.  Following each major project, students wrote a reflection, drawing conclusions about both the content they had mastered as well as the leadership skills they had applied along the way towards completion.  Both the final drafts of their work plus their reflective writing on their learning process were then systematically uploaded into their student portfolios.  As students approached the conclusion of the sophomore and seniors years, they reviewed their work and assembled what might be considered as a meta-reflection, that sought to synthesize their learning and growth into a single document (we called it the “cover letter” to their portfolio presentation in 10^th grade, and their “academic identity” paper as they approached graduation).  The cover letter and academic identity formed the foundation of their portfiolio defense presentation – a 90 minute presentation and Q&A experience in front of a review panel of teachers and community partners.  

Everything about the Envision College Portfolio was designed with reflection and self-awareness as a primary goal.  And it worked.  I was constantly amazed not only with the content and academic content knowledge students had learned, but with how they developed in their ability to articulate their own unique journey.  Our graduates were intensely familiar with their strengths and weaknesses as learners and students.  They had many explicit conversations about the leadership skills, strategies, and routines that helped them be successful, and where they needed further attention and development.  This type of reflection proved to be hefty emotional work, as students confronted the challenges that stood in the way of achieving success, including how personal and family adversity both enriched and complicated their personal journey.  It was no suprise that tears were often shed during the public defense, with parents and other loved ones in the room to share the experience.  

With that rich professional experience in my mind, I smiled as I read the first line of the conclusion in the chapter on reflection in Teaching Entrepreneurship: “Reflection is one of the hardest things we ask our students to do.”  As the authors point out, entrepreneurship is deeply personal, and venturing requires navigation through tremendous uncertainty.  Having an awareness of who they are and why they are doing what they are doing has the power to sustain students in their entrepreneurial endeavors.