Professional Development to Start the School Year

                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.