Today is the final faculty meeting for the 2018-2019 school year! Other than celebrating the imminent end of school, I am also celebrating the culmination of my Internship. To wrap things up, I took some time to sit in the Crossroads, where our face-to-face faculty meetings take place, and reflect on what worked, what crashed, and what needs to happen for next year.
These 4 Things I Know
By the culmination of the Professional Learning Series, 4 things were painfully obvious: the majority of teachers still did not know/feel comfortable with Schoology, morale was at an all-time low, pockets of innovation were at risk of burnout, and the Series pushed the High School teachers outside of their comfort levels. While the latter isn’t always a negative outcome, the formers certainly were.
In sitting down with teachers throughout the course of the Spring Series, comments were consistently made about the confusion of Schoology’s layout, not knowing the correct selection choices, and the frustration of trying to mirror the same types of activities from the Series into their own classes. It became clear that the Schoology rollout at New Oxford High School was not successful, and that future trainings were vital to teacher (and student) buy-in of the LMS. Teachers seem to either love Schoology and have classes completely built out on the platform, or they only use Schoology to hours documents and a link to their Google Classroom pages. To effect substantial change in the use of Schoology, sessions for Schoology must be planned and offered frequently at the beginning and throughout the 2019-2020 school year. This ties in directly to the article from Elizabeth Trach concerning modeling your LMS; while the Spring Professional Learning Series modeled the use of Schoology, simply interacting with the platform was not enough for the teachers of New Oxford High School. They need consistent sessions and trainings to help grasp the possibilities of Schoology and to feel confident enough to try new things.
To tie together the lowest and highest points, part of the reason the morale of the school was so low was due to the number and intensity of the challenges that were placed on the High School faculty this year. Looking outside the realm of the Professional Learning Series, changes in Administration, room location, schedule, after-school duties and curriculum have put a strain on the general morale of the faculty. These challenges, while individually may have been met with an attitude of ‘buck-up and bear it’ in other years, all combined to make a veritable cocktail of poison, leeching decay and infection into the hallways and faculty lunch rooms. When we added the new concept of the Professional Learning Series to the mix, the consequences were loud and unavoidable. While half of the faculty continued with the flow and bit back their vitriole, the remaining half of the faculty broke into splinter groups of Union-fueled self-righteousness, burnout, avoidance/denial, and petulant disobedience. There were a few members of the faculty that chose to voice their concerns to members of District Administration, and others who wisely sought us out to discuss their concerns in a mature and constructive manner. These discussions, while extremely uncomfortable, led to some positive progress that resulted in a restructuring of the initial Professional Learning Series expectations and activities. To put it bluntly, we realized that we had been ignorant of the amount of stress that the Professional Learning Series was placing on their faculty’s already-full plates, and we realized that the solution was to further streamline and pare down the litany of requirements and assignments. Circling back to the positives of the PL Series challenges, the activities that were deemed to be too important to cut out did seem to be paying off in impacting teachers, their classrooms and their students. Faculty members could be heard using Blended Learning terminology in regular conversation, the Learning Coaches were being booked to help plan and facilitate Lab and Station Rotations, and several curriculum partners collaborated on multi-room Rotations to help with classroom management and flow. These effects will be fully known during the last weeks of the school year as reflections for end of year meetings conclude, but current levels of engagement and concept understanding appear to be positively influenced by these pedagogical shifts in instruction.
When the Spring Professional Learning Series began, we consistently called on several members of the faculty to showcase their strengths and be ‘guinea pigs’ for some of the activities. While these teachers responded positively to the requests, and provided thoughtful feedback and raised legitimate concerns regarding activities, it became clear by the end of March that burnout was on the horizon. Several of these teachers found themselves stretched too thin between teaching their course loads, facilitating small group discussions, leading showcase lessons, and juggling their own lives and interests. This was a wake-up call to us, as we had stomped on one of our personal goals for the semester: to be more mindful of teacher responsibilities and expectations placed on them. This must be addressed in next year’s Professional Learning plan, and extra caution must be taken for those teachers that always say ‘yes’ when asked to do for others.
Open Your Mind
Something that I have written about previously to battle stress and burnout is the inclusion of mindfulness into my self-care practice. As I work with the Professional Learning Committee for next year, I already plan on including as many mindfulness practices as possible. If it is engrained in the fabric of the Professional Learning opportunities in the District, hopefully we will be able to make a difference with our teachers in more realms than just stress management. I recently found an article in the Journal of Educational Psychology about mindfulness and its positive effects on teachers. The benefits that the authors discussed went far beyond my initial assumptions of reduced stress and general happiness; according to the article, mindfulness opens the doors to "investigating the implications...not only for the health and well-being of the teachers but also for outcomes such as district health care costs, classroom climate, and student engagement and achievement" (Roeser et al., 2013).