This summer, I went hiking, running, walking, bicycling, met with friends, spent time with family, and discovered joy was still possible. After the indignities of post-Covid teaching, I was delighted to realize it. This is not depression; this is not a midlife crisis: this has become a demoralizing job that has been taking a dump on my state-of-being.
I’m back
at school and have just completed three days of professional development. The
gist of all back-to-school teacher training and this year too is ice-breaker,
ice-breaker, work harder, care more. This year, same urgency: Ice breaker,
ice-breaker; if you really cared about SFFEJ—that is, students furthest from
educational justice—you would do more and work harder.
The theme
for this year is “Authentic Inclusion.” Inclusion refers to the integration of general
population students with those formerly set apart in dedicated Special
Education or multilingual classrooms. When I saw “Authentic Inclusion” as the
year’s theme, I sparked with the phrase, because, for the first time, I’m going
to be co-teaching a couple of ninth grade English classes with a Special
Education instructor and an especially high concentration of Special Education
students, in what our building is calling an inclusion block.
Here’s
how the school has supported authentic inclusion so far: I’ve never co-taught an
inclusion block before; neither has my Special Education partner, who was given
the assignment yesterday. Neither has the Social Studies teacher, who also has
never taught Social Studies before. So, we’re new to the model, but we will
have no training and no guidance and no word from administration. We will have
no common planning period during the day and no dedicated collaboration time,
and neither will there be any expectation that we should, in fact, meet to
collaborate. Meanwhile, both 5th and 6th periods of the ninth
grade block have the chockfull 32 students, of which a quarter have substantial
behavioral and learning needs. This is just to say the inclusion block is no
less packed than my other classes (which add up to 160 students). My co-teacher
will also be co-teaching a tenth grade class, but the students on her additional
case load are eleventh and twelfth graders. She coaches too, and will need to
be at games on Friday afternoons.
For these
reasons, I was feeling nervous about the school year and prickly about the
year’s theme before I arrived at the professional development days this week.
Session
one: MTSS. Multi-tiered Systems of Support. This included all the ways that we
should be intervening when students are not successfully engaging—building
routines, welcoming culture, then conferencing, communicating with families and
school support teams, and warehousing each step as “data.” All this is fine.
And here’s the data that show how we’ve been failing SFFEJ—students furthest
from educational justice. The session devolved into pleas from teachers who
last year tried asking for help from school support teams—administrators—but
received no response nor follow-up communication.
Session
two: CSIP. Continuous School Improvement Plan. Roosevelt’s plan for improvement
is to improve attainment and belonging among SFFEJ—students furthest from
educational justice—especially in 9th and 10th grade.
Seattle’s superintendent has added language called guardrails, which are marked
by the phrase, “The superintendent will not allow,” as in guardrail number 5, “The
superintendent will not allow any district department, school building, or
classrooms to provide unwelcoming environments.” One teacher responded, then
several more, about “inclusion,” and specifically the way our school has been
ramping up inclusion blocks without forethought or training: If we really want
to support our improvement goals of SFFEJ in 9th and 10th
grade, then show care for these new blocks. Give their teachers training and
time to meet.
Session three:
RP. Restorative practices. Restorative practices seem to mean building healthy
communities and trust, and that, when harm falls within a community, starting
with such trust to address the harms together. I believe in this. We were shown
a chart with four quadrants falling along a Y axis of action and an X axis of empathy:
Bottom left, low action, low empathy: Neglectful. Bottom right, low action,
high empathy: Permissive. Top left, high action, low empathy: Punitive. Top
right, high action, high empathy, the sweetest of sweet spots: Restorative. With
restorative practices, we should care and we should push—what had previously
been called warm-demander.
Punitive |
Restorative |
Neglectful |
Permissive |
A teacher
asked, Are you saying we should do this in the classroom, and in the building
as a whole? The administrator said she had to think about that one. But for us
teachers, much of what has changed in both the culture of students and
administrations’ demands to it are plain: They have not been “restorative”;
they’ve been permissive at best. And teachers think and feel this
administrative permissiveness—occurring in action and explicit policy—has made
our jobs more difficult, often oppressively so, and has degraded habits of
communal behavior.
Last year,
a group of students gathered in the lunchroom for hours at a time,
and we pleaded with administration to help us get them to come to our classes.
All-staff emails piled on; and in a faculty meeting last December about
teachers’ responsibilities to MTSS—multi-tiered systems of support—a teacher
was cry-shouting from the back of the room, saying, What will you do? We’re
just letting these students fail. The word from our principal was that these
are students who’ve been traumatized by school, and that we must turn to restorative justice over models
of disciplinary punishment or alienate them further. This is excellent,
heartful mission thinking—except that restorative justice and effective
dialogue didn’t seem to be happening either, and those students continued
wandering the halls and staying for hours in the lunchroom all year. High
empathy, low action. It’s little surprise that Black students’ surveyed sense
of belonging fell once again.
And the district policies are
likewise permissive: Students, by policy, can retake any test or redo any essay for full credit; and if
they cheat, likewise, see retakes and re-dos. There are no longer zeroes. Participation
and absences in class are not permitted to affect class grades. All of these
are rooted in an idea of “grading for equity,” where mastery of skills is the
focus and anything that translates as behavior is bias-skewed. The theory is
okay, but it means that community engagement and readiness aren’t skills or institutionally
demanded of our graduates. Teachers suspect that the people who will most use the
equitable grading practices of retakes and rewrites will be white, privileged
students who further learn that they can bumble forth and other people will adjust
to their ease in service to a customer-is-always-right bottom line—in
this case, the grade.
Administrators
talk about restorative justice. But they’re talking about it as though their
own permissiveness is simply equitable and just policy, even as they call for
us to dialogue towards accountability.
Teachers have been harmed by the lack of support coupled with the
you’re-not-doing-enough message, as a result of which, teacher’s climate survey
was so low in the Fall and worse in the Spring. We need to address the harms
within the teaching community, too.
Here’s
how I think this professional development should have started three days ago:
With an apology.
We have so much we need to do to serve our students, and it’s especially important that we address and counteract systemic inequities within and outside of our schools. And you don’t have all the support you all know you need to do this work near effectively. Your class sizes are too big. You have too many demands on your very limited time, which we administrators tend to treat as a vast and generous resource. But we come together as a teaching community before school starts because we know this work is important, and together, we’re going to do what we can.