Phoenix Group Podcast finale!

Educators discuss the challenges they faced during the pandemic when education shifted online. They struggled with lack of training, technical difficulties, and societal criticism. Students faced social and academic struggles, with a particular focus on math and social-emotional skills. School closures disrupted academic instruction for millions of students. Educators are now finding innovative ways to engage students, such as using universal design for learning and offering hybrid programs. Some educators are reconsidering their careers due to increased stress and pressure. The pandemic has exposed the lack of funding and resources in the public education system. However, there is also an opportunity for improvement and evaluation of current practices. Educators express the need for support and understanding from the general public. It was online. It was online. It was online. Everything was online. It was online. It was online. It was online. This is Phoenix Group, and today we will be talking about how the pandemic forced education to move to strictly online. What struggles are educators facing post-pandemic as we've transitioned back to the traditional classroom? My name is May Scroggs. I'm the principal of Lincoln High School and Seaview Academy. Hi. I'm Mark Harris. So I've been the principal at Squin Middle School. This is starting my, well, now in the middle of my fourth year. My name is David Jones. I am the head of the music department, and I teach the history of rock music, I teach music appreciation, I direct the jazz band, I teach music theory, and I've been teaching here since 2008. My name is Kaysa Dabb. I've been teaching for nine years now. So right now I'm a general education teacher at an elementary school, and I teach second grade. I'm Angela Tammes. I am a teacher at the Port Angeles School District, and I have a master's in education. I'm almost done with a master's in history. When the pandemic hit, many educators struggled with their new role when the entire education system went completely online. During the pandemic, we had to, you know, almost overnight shift everything into an online curriculum, and that was really difficult. We didn't have any training on it. It was a steep learning curve. I mean, imagine your old-fashioned PE teacher, and now you're telling him or her, hey, you're going to teach online. Mm-hmm. They didn't have the technical capacity to do it. I had never taught online, so I taught myself how to teach online. My frustrations weren't with the kids or the families. My frustrations were that teachers were working as hard as they possibly could, and it didn't feel like society was recognizing that, and there was a lot of criticism, and that was, I felt, very hurtful. According to one online source, many teachers indicated that they were not prepared to teach online, and many students did not log in to complete assignments. We spoke with a variety of educators, from elementary through to college professors. When asked where they felt children struggled the most, they all agreed on one similar deficit. However, they still faced a variety of other challenges. But I think the biggest problem with COVID wasn't academic. I think it was more social-emotional. Students were missing basic social skills. So there are struggles socially. A pause in that emotional-social development. I think it's different in math. I know that the math departments are having more of a challenge because it's kind of more linear, like the knowledge acquisition is more linear. Even being able to hold a pencil was difficult for students, so, you know, in my perspective, I'm getting second graders, and they're actually kindergarten level, and so I'm having to fill those gaps, and, you know, all within a one-year time span. Their ability to write formally, yeah, that definitely dropped off, but that was, I don't think that's always been the case anyway, since texting came into being, trying to teach kids, okay, this is formal, so now you have to write this way. So there's a little bit of that. Mathematics has struggled more so, because as a parent, you might read, you might write with your kid, you can definitely talk with your kid, you create an environment where there is communication happening all the time, but parents don't really create math environments. You know, there's a huge discrepancy on student learning, depending on kind of the support systems that they have in place at home, and what was going on during the pandemic, you know, if they had the supports to really push the kids through learning the material that they needed, or if they were in a situation where the kids kind of had to, kind of had to fend for themselves. According to online sources, school closures resulted in disruption to academic instruction for about 124,000 public and private schools, affecting approximately 55.1 million students nationwide. Post-pandemic, educators are finding new and innovative ways to teach their students and keep them engaged. And the other one that we are now implementing is what's called universal design for learning. And that is, every teacher goes into every task or assignment that they would ask kids to do, with the mindset that they have to provide options. They have to provide options like the reading a book, reading a tablet, or how to get read to you, you have that choice, or when it comes to the production of how they show that they've learned. So, do I have to write a paper, do I have to record a video, can I do a podcast? Those are all options for kids now, and the teachers will present them with at least two, so they get to work from, you know, multiple choices, but they don't give them every choice in the world. So, for example, like Seaview Academy, we have our online component, but we were also able to secure some different types of grant funding to create some more creative options for families. So, we do a hybrid program where students are able to, we have a K-4 group that's able to do a nature school one day a week, and then they come in to do person learning, either kind of extension activities, or getting more one-on-one tutoring with their academic subjects. They're able to do things with music, and art, and stuff that is kind of hard to deliver in an online-only program. So, you're able to get creative in that way. Hey, the interesting thing with academics, I am noticing, whether they were censored or not academically, they are making intellectual growth at a much quicker pace, but with ELA and world history, it's not as based on previous knowledge. So, they're making this amazing intellectual growth. Like, in my world history class, they went from not even being able to write a topic sentence to just in 12 weeks being able to write a five-paragraph essay. I've never seen growth like this in my life. Not all educators are finding it to be a smooth transition back. And then coming back, it's made it really hard, too, because of the social skills and lack of parent support and things like that. So, it's had a complete shift of teaching in general. And so, everything's kind of marked now before the pandemic and then post-pandemic. Because even now that we're on year three of the pandemic, students still have huge gaps in social skills. And so, we're just really struggling to fill those gaps and also fill the academic gaps. So, did this rapidly changing education system caused by the pandemic have educators reconsidering their careers? I felt like our role during the pandemic, it was extremely stressful because things were changing so quickly. There were so many, not only concerns with the health of students and staff, and then the mandates by the state to consider and what was going on in the county. So, I never thought about changing my career because of that. But I did look at it as a situation that was extremely dynamic that could lead to different ways to approach education once we got to the other side of it. I've always wanted to be a teacher since I was like eight years old. It was my dream career. And after the pandemic, it's made me really reconsider, you know, do I really want to do this for the next 15 years? It's become extremely stressful. There's huge pressures for, you know, testing. We're constantly testing students. There's pressure for test scores, data on top of, you know, parents and their requests and what they want. And now, teaching has become more of like customer service towards parents, which has been a huge shift where with public school, you know, it really wasn't that. And so, now it's more catering to what parents want and those kinds of things. So, it's getting harder. And so, it's definitely making me reconsider where, you know, pre-pandemic, I didn't really consider having a different career. I really enjoyed it. So, did the pandemic make the educational system or did it break it? You might be surprised to hear what our educators had to say about that. To be honest, I think we're watching the collapse of the public education system, lack of funding. You know, for example, my district's going to be cut. Like, there's a $4 million budget cut coming up and we already are running out of paper. We don't have enough supplies. I have to buy pencils. I have to buy snacks for students every month. We run out of food sometimes in the cafeteria. And, you know, we've cut staffing to a point where there's bare bones staffing, those kinds of things. So, unless there's, like, a huge societal shift and we start, like, really just putting a lot more funding into education and helping teachers and supporting, I don't see any changes really happening. I think there's always a couple different lenses you can look at a situation that was through. We can look at it through the lens of, you know, saying, okay, you know, this has hurt us and the damage is going to take a long time to recover. Or we can look at it and say, you know what, this provided us an opportunity to evaluate the way we do business, prepare for the next big shakeup, and come out better. From my perspective as an educator, I think I probably worked double my contractual obligation during the pandemic. And I think that there's also burnout across the board for educators because we've been just, like, in this sort of survival mode that was pretty impossible for a really long time. And schools are sort of, I'm just going to sound awful, but, like, expected to be the for every problem in society. And there's just so much that we cannot fix. And, I don't know, I think the voices on social media are really hard to digest. They're just not coming from a place of, like, being informed. And it would be so nice if the general public could just come to a school, see what's happening in them. The state of Washington, I think, has an excellent, I think Chris Weistel, who is our superintendent of public instruction, does an excellent job. And he's very aware of the problems with how education's funded and how certain populations are impacted or don't kind of lean well into traditional learning standards. So, I think they've added a lot of waivers. They've made graduation more accessible. Thank you for listening. And remember to appreciate your teachers. It's been quite the journey. The roads have been rough, but through it all, both students and teachers persevered and made it through. They continue to pass unseen obstacles and do things they wouldn't have thought possible, going places they'd only imagined.