Like I imagine most teachers have had to do for their districts, I have recently had to respond to an unusually large number of surveys. What is working? What isn’t? What would you like more information about? What is your number one concern? And like most of the teachers in my district, I answered that I am highly concerned about student engagement. We’ve lost so much valuable time with our students that we want to make the most of what we have.
I can’t speak for the other teachers, but I’ll bet when they answered in a similar manner, at least some of them were thinking like I was: this is a fishing expedition for ideas for professional development. Maybe they could give us some real-life examples of techniques that have worked to engage students. Maybe they could give suggestions for connecting better with families and motivating parents to make sure their children are logging in every time there is an online class. Better yet, maybe they could arrange a make-it/take-it (for those of you who don’t know, that’s where you make some type of craft or project to take with you that you can turn around and use in your classroom).
What we got at my school today during PD was anything but helpful. It started with our instructional specialist presenting us with slides naming “hooks” that we could use to get our students’ attention, then assigning the teachers to breakout rooms where WE were responsible for coming up with our own examples of each type of hook to share with the rest of the faculty. That was not particularly helpful except to get us thinking about what we already knew and reiterating it to each other.
Then came the plunge to a depth of torture previously unknown to me. My new boss has started coming into our classrooms on a weekly basis and just hanging out for quite a while, taking her observation notes on her device and regularly interfering with the learning I’m trying to cultivate. I say “interfering,” not to be mean, but as an accurate description. Every single time she has entered my classroom, my principal has stepped in, undoubtedly thinking she is helping, and completely undermined the very thing I was trying to teach a particular student. However, that’s a whole other story for another time.
As if that weren’t bad enough, the instructional specialist announced today that now she and the principal and the paras and the title teachers and the SPED teachers and any other adults who happen to have the time to roam the hallways of our school now have an open invitation to just walk in to our classrooms unannounced whenever and observe us to see how “engaged” our students are. The instructional specialist and principal were positively giddy when unveiling the signs they had made for the teachers to complete and hang outside our classroom doors, specifying the behavior to look for, and welcoming one and all to come #OBSERVEUS. They’ve even made comment sheets for the observers to fill out and turn in.
We, in the meantime, have been told to figure out what we’re going to do to get our kids to “buy in” to this new campaign. No, I’m not joking. We were actually told to do that. We weren’t told HOW to do that, just to do it.
Our reward? Besides, of course, somehow magically coming up with the solution to student engagement on our own, for every piece of feedback returned on a certain teacher, that teacher gets to go drop a Plinko coin and win a prize. We were told this prize is intended to make us feel “appreciated” for all of the things we do to meet the needs of our students.
Funny, I don’t feel appreciated. I feel like crying. Who would add this to the already (I hate to use this word anymore) unprecedented amount of stress and workload teachers continue to experience in the nightmare of this pandemic? Furthermore, am I the only one who thinks her students will be a lot more focused and engaged without unannounced visitors dropping in and staring at us, waiting for us to perform like a well-trained circus act? And is it just me, or has anyone else noticed that we were just “professionally developed” without actually being taught anything? Nothing was developed here except my stress level and anxiety.
To what new level of hell have they dragged us down today?