COVID has added more personal touches to Pinelands North

 As I complete twenty-five years as principal at a local primary school in a completely ‘different’ year, I have been reflecting on how hard it has been to hold on to the ethos of a school this year. This comes, by and large, from the way the principal and staff interact with school families, the children and each other. 

Many ‘normal’ social school behaviours have had to stop such as face-to-face parent meetings, new pupil and staff interviews. To create the ‘personal’ touch via Zoom and other online platforms is much more difficult, and so schools have had to be creative about keeping the ‘gees’ alive!

Drop off and collection time has become very important for family connection. Staff have said that they are seeing more of their parents this year, and that the little chats and interactions shared in the mornings and afternoons have definitely made them feel closer to their families.

Some families and children have become much more anxious this year so creating a safe place to support children who arrive and struggle to detach from their families really helps: a toy from home, wearing civvies to school and having their teacher meet them at the car door has definitely made a difference. The classrooms have also become more homely, incorporating blankets, pillows, beanies and soft toys. The animals have also played their part in dampening anxiety: if an anxious child arrives, the staff take the child into the quad with the bunnies and a warm stroke of a compliant white rabbit often makes them forget their unsafe feelings. Restricted movements at breaks and in classroom spaces, have given children more time to get to know their teachers and their peers too.

Sending Whatsapp personal messages out of school hours has also proved a success for children and staff. A ‘thinking of you’ sent on a Sunday can just make the next week seem do-able! FaceBook and Twitter have become much more important because celebrating children’s achievements can still be done this way. Parents like to get a glimpse of what their children’s days look like. It gives them peace of mind knowing that their children are safe and celebrated. Having this insight overcomes fears around social media usage.

Staff have been challenged to create a good vibe for children and each other. Dancing the Jerusalema with children at break time is one example of how this is achieved, making the disappointment of missing out on soccer at break, much more bearable. I am hoping that schools take the learnings from 2020 and add them to their daily operations in the future…. School communities will certainly benefit!

 

The Role of the Principal in leading a school towards Inclusion

The principal is pivotal in creating and promoting an inclusive culture There are huge social 

 benefits for both ‘regular’ and ‘exceptional’ children in an inclusive classroom.

Where do you begin the process?

Understand inclusive education yourself. 

Find good examples of inclusive schools to visit and ensure you take along the staff ‘influencers

Spend time learning.... on site, on the web, speak to people

Connect effective school practice with inclusive school practice

You can become an inclusive school without adding money to the mix

You need courage to deal with skeptics 

We must be the change we want to see.... Mahatma Gandhi

Focus on change!

Understand the change process

Develop a broad plan of action with as many stakeholders as possible

Realize that not all your staff will 'love' the idea!

Support all efforts to change.... provide time to visit schools, money for attending courses

Accept that you will not have all the answers at first, and that you will always be changing, adapting, progressing

Create a safe space for people to 'risk'

Create a culture that encourages 'learning by doing'

Real change takes a long time!

Create your team!

Find people to support you, the staff and the school

Identify champions of inclusion and invest in their training and growth

Ensure your leadership team feels empowered to assist staff

Include people from the district office as much as possible

Find volunteers to assist staff.... counselling, reading, group work

Involve parents in their children's learning

The path of progress

Solve practical problems, one at a time, with creative ideas.

Encourage experimentation amongst the teachers.

Celebrate all progress, even small steps.

Realize that your goals will keep changing as your school grows.

Keep asking and learning from those further down the path.

Share successes with all stakeholders.

Keep communicating with all in the process.

Trust the children to speed up the progress.

Look at what children can do, not what they can't do!

Replace those teachers who leave with those who believe in inclusion.

Don't lead the process alone, the more people who take up the challenge the better.

Don't follow policy to the letter...change, adapt and develop better policies!

Teach children with exceptionalities yourself to model good practice

Keep evaluating your school practice.

Accept that you won't get it right always and that some children need more help than you can provide.

 

 

Could the COVID pandemic be the lever to change education as we know it?

I am the principal of a privileged public primary schools – based in a southern suburbs ‘village’, with middle class families from the suburb supporting us. Our school was built in 1948, so is part of the old colonial past. Over the years we tried exceptionally hard to break the colonial boundaries but the teaching and learning one we thought was good enough. We had not thought to scrutinize all parts of how we learn and teach, even though our school is seen as a world leader in curriculum change.

Initially the COVID pandemic freaked us all out with little knowledge, departmental plans changing daily and lots of scare mongering in the media. After spending the school closure period fighting fires on many fronts, our school settled into a good rhythm, allowing us to picture a different future education system! Now I think the pandemic could just be the catalyst we all needed to make education the way it could be!

Research says that older children’s circadian rhythms make waking up early very difficult. Our school now starts at 09:00 and ends at 14:00, and we have noticed that children seem much more focused when they arrive at school. This focus also seems to come from a maturity they gained while school was closed for a month or two. Children arrive at school so ready to learn, they sit in their own desk space, with their mask on and suck up all the knowledge and skills we struggled to pass on before! 

Each grade has three individual break times across the day and the children seem to have settled into the fact that they can’t play close up games, so they play tag with their shadows or sit and chat. The grades are partnered with each other so when grade one pupils are at school, grade two teachers manage the grade one break times. This has allowed the teachers to get to know far more children in the school and the children to feel less anxious about the teachers in the next grade.

With children being at school every second day as we don’t have enough rooms or desks for all the pupils at our school to be at school every day, the children seem to value the time they are present, much more than they did before. The fact that they attend school in civvies might also have something to do with it – and the interesting thing is that none of us have noticed children trying to better each other in their civvies clothing. The naysayers about uniform have always said that children will try to better each other and so a uniform allows for conformity, and saves those who can’t afford to buy the latest clothing. In fact, it has been so lovely seeing children arrive in onesies, pyjamas and wellington boots when it is really wet and cold! 

Our parent contact has improved immensely even though no visitors are allowed on the premises! During lockdown our staff met their children using online platforms which meant parents were often in the background. They also had support groups for their parents and met with them once a week or so, to check on how they were coping with being parents and teachers. Now half the staff meet the parents outside every day as if you aren’t teaching that day, your job is to man the traffic in the roads around about, or man the sanitising, temperature taking or movement of children in the playgrounds.

We have adapted our curriculum to focus on four subjects a day only, with mathematics and language every day. On the days the children are at home, they log in for art and music lessons, and only spend another hour reviewing work taught. The amount of time allocated to subjects has been adapted so that we can teach all we believe children should know. Our parents are luckily groomed to expect change at our school! This has helped immensely in curriculum delivery. For the first time, parents and other staff can see exactly how others on the staff teach! 

Only about two thirds of our children have returned to school physically, but all learn every day. The work which will be taught that day is available from 9 daily so that if a family is anxious about the pandemic, they can access all learning. If this was always the way school operated, then anxious children could always be present in learning even though they weren’t necessarily physically present. When the weather is miserable, children can choose to learn from their beds at home! 

Teaching is now a pleasure for staff. On one day they teach classes for a full day but the next they operate from a ‘business hub’ where they prepare for the next day’s teaching. This has helped staff destress because they don’t have to prepare every afternoon, after extramurals. They also can’t mark at home at the moment; checking and reviewing what children are doing is done in the classroom and books are not handed in. This kind of marking has also given children the responsibility for their own learning.

Assessment has changed completely! It is now focused on looking for gaps in learning rather than looking for marks. The focus is on learning for the pleasure of knowing, not for a report or schedule. Small chunks of work are ‘quizzed’ regularly and so children aren’t warned in advance of a test tomorrow, which creates far less anxiety for the whole family. No homework is being set – partly because we’re getting through so much more at school but also because we believe families need ‘play’ time while the world is so filled with anxiety!

We believe this pandemic has helped our school review all we have done and are doing, making us believe that this way of learning and teaching is sustainable. It is amazing that something like a pandemic has turned our school ‘the right way up,’ when it was actually upside down! 

A Lockdowned School!

Never in known history has schooling come to an abrupt end like it has over the past months! Schools were suddenly informed about five days before, that children were to leave the term two days early, and since then children have been ‘locked out’ of the school premises! School staff were also locked out slightly later but have also felt a sense of sudden loss of all of the ‘usual’ and familiar.

Every school community member, at every school, has personally been grieving for what is lost and has been trying to create a new normal for their families and for their schools. These are some of the things Pinelands North has been working on while school has officially been closed:

We have been trying to support our school families. Many families have had to create a new routine which adds the stress of being both parent and teacher. Many have had a loss of income, either for one family member or both so they are now unable to finance usual bills. The school has created a Solidarity Fund, funded by staff and parents who haven’t been directly affected financially by the lockdown. This fund will pay school fees for those families who might struggle to pay them. Weekly letters to parents have been sent and we have been communicating via FaceBook twice a day, in so doing trying to create community in other ways so people don’t feel so isolated. 

Because we had some idea this might happen, teachers started preparing work to give to children during the holidays a few weeks before the holidays. The idea of this plan was to keep children focused and ‘entertained’ to help parents, even though officialdom said, ‘everybody is on holiday’. Regular Zoom meetings have been held with whole classes or smaller groups, either as a check in or for teaching. Children have been telephoned, whatsapp’d, emailed or contacted through other online systems, depending on the needs of the families. Staff have also had weekly online grade and phase meetings to share ideas and concerns.

The teaching staff have been well in tune with families and so have adapted their teaching offerings throughout the lockdown. The school started by providing subject specific lessons for every day, then changed to giving work for two weeks at a time, and then now we continue to provide work for two or three weeks at a time, but focus on a theme which can create fun tasks for all ages within a family. The recent work has revolved around measurement, time, mass and capacity and the tasks have been following recipes, ‘playing’ with water and calculating time in different countries. The school families have been much more settled with this as they now don’t need to sit with children of different ages, each doing something completely different. 

The Governing Body decided immediately to keep paying all staff salaries as every single person was valuable. A Radar Team of four staff has been meeting weekly to co-ordinate calls to all staff, and to discuss those we were concerned about. Many staff meetings have been held online, mainly to discuss work but also to check in on each other because teachers have taken particular strain, having to be parents and teachers of their own children, and to continue to plan and teach. Many have had to adapt to online learning and teaching even though they had never done it before. 

Our school plant has needed support too; we have many animals which need to be fed and cleaned daily, the school site has needed upkeep and we have been keeping check on security. Luckily the Operations staff managed to clean and disinfect the school fully before leaving so when we return, we will just need to arrange the classrooms to maximise the available space for staff and children.

The Management Team have now made plans for the return of staff and pupils, preparing transport for those staff who might otherwise have to travel by train or bus, buying health supplements for those staff who will be at the forefront and preparing systems for children and staff to arrive and social distance. Now we wait for the next directive…

The hardest thing during this time has been the indecision and the changes of plans. Being a ‘plans driven’ person, I like to start working on the implementation of directives immediately. It is so frustrating because every date has changed about four times, every plan we have made has had to change at least once. School parents and staff are daily asking questions which I cannot answer, or if I do answer, the question or answer changes the next day again. 

I believe that good will come out of this time eventually though! We will be celebrating this time in the future. Families have had a golden opportunity to spend valuable time together, playing games, reading books and learning together. Children have had a unique learning experience – some of our children have managed to speak to famous people around the world via online platforms, have learnt to collaborate with their siblings, to be creative, to communicate with older and younger family members and to learn things that school doesn’t always encourage. I believe this generation of children will be stronger, more empowered and more knowledgeable than our previous ones ever were. So, lets’ stop worrying about what our children aren’t learning at school and start focusing on helping them learn as much about the world as they can in this unique time.