​At One Schoolhouse lately we’ve been busy refining our ideas of best practices for online and hybrid learning. Virtual schools have existed for many years, but not until March of 2020 were there virtual districts; not until then did distance learning for early childhood and lower elementary become an actual thing; not until then did online performing arts, physical education, and laboratory science classes have to exist at scale. Everyone is new at this. We have the advantage of more experience in some areas than traditional schools—whether public or private—but we’re feeling our way along, too.
 
Schools have been putting a stupefying amount of effort into plans for opening for the coming school year. The listservs are frothing with threads relating to classroom cameras, microphones, telepresence devices, plexiglass shields, temperature sensors, and other technological interventions to make on-campus or concurrent learning safe and equitably accessible for students and staff. I have to admire the countless hours and creative thinking that have gone into these elaborate plans and stratagems to foil the COVID-19 virus.
 
It’s hard to ignore the political and cultural backdrop against which all this has been taking place. Everyone, everywhere wants the world to be “normal” again, with cheery yellow buses on the streets, homework a nightly routine, and teams and bands all practicing and playing—enacting the rituals of school as we have known it. And we have officials at all levels exhorting us to put this kind of “Richard Scarry’s Big Book of American School” in action, or else.
 
It really is scary. The public health picture is grim and growing grimmer; states that tried to rush back to “normal” now top the daily new-case charts. Teachers are saying that they don’t want to get sick and die—or to sicken others—from having gone to work. Parents are thinking the same about exposing their children and thus themselves to situations that will inevitably involve sickness.
 
More and more, the elaborate plans are looking more like designs to please the eyes of those who just want this all to go away so things can look “okay” again (if everything really ever was as great as people think). But might the time and energy being invested making things “look like school” be better spent figuring out how to adopt and fine-tune effective approaches to another round of online learning?
 
In making plans to gather people in a school building or tent we are flying as blind as we were when we sent the kindergartners home in March; how many prospective “return dates” came and went as April stretched into May and June? We don’t know how to do this, and doing it anything less than perfectly will cost human lives.
 
Cynics use the term “security theater” to describe the screening processes in place at airports, and part of what we’re seeing from schools now appears more than a little contrived. But the TSA actually takes weapons away; a COVID-carrying child or teacher doesn’t even know they’re armed.
 
Increasingly it looks as though schools will need to start 2020–21 in distance mode. Teachers must prepare and schools have systems in place to make “virtual school” look and feel as much like face-to-face as possible—without putting lives at risk. It’s time to dial down the delusional “best optics” and focus instead on best practices.
 
In our interactions with thousands of school leaders and teachers this spring and summer, we at One Schoolhouse have learned a lot about what works when “school” moves online at scale. Every school did, even if these lessons were sometimes learned the hard way and in converse—as in, Okay, THAT didn’t work, so we won’t do it again. We need more focused analysis on the experiences of the spring, not more magical thinking about the coming year.
 
Instead of promulgating imaginings of a fall that will all be fine, fine, fine, we need to learn from what worked in Spring 2020’s “worst-case scenario” and explore tools and ideas for doing things even better. Politicians and exhausted families may be visualizing campuses with kiddos cheerfully social distancing (with perhaps a few stragglers at home) as happy teachers hold forth in snug little classrooms, but as educators we must accept and admit that an all-online opening scenario may not be just the safest option but could be, if we work at it, a truly great option educationally.

Events in 2020 have forced us all as educators and humans to consider not only issues of public health but also, far too late, issues of equity and justice. At One Schoolhouse we are part of that reckoning.

Part of our stated mission is to empower learning, and cultivating student choice, agency, and self-advocacy are core learning objectives in all of our online courses. Students can even take their personal interests and values to a very sophisticated level by choosing the “Activism” track in our semester elective course program. We understand the need to promote these skills and values across our programs.

Most independent schools’ missions and values, taken at their word, make huge promises and offer visions of a better world for everyone. Right now we have the opportunity to start teaching and running schools as if our work truly is what our missions say it is: the quest for a more just and equitable world.
 
We may be social distancing for a long time, but that must not stop us from using our classrooms to end immediately the socioeconomic distancing that has nourished the lethal plagues of prejudice, injustice, and income inequality whose results we see all around us, every day. Teaching that can respond to a medical crisis must also be crafted to respond honestly and passionately to the pandemic of systemic racism and injustice that has been staring us in the face all our lives.​

Independent schools can do better. But, where does “better” start? We can do better in our hiring, training, retention, and promotion of teachers and administrators. We can do better as we balance what we know to be the right thing against the temptation to do the expedient thing. We can do better when we make choices to give our students confidence and strength, every day and on into the future. We can do better when we opt to support and affirm students who struggle to access learning fully.

We join school communities because we believe in their missions and values and want to further them. Designing, building, and delivering an education that truly flows from these missions and values is how we can demonstrate and live our shared faith in students, in the power of learning, and in ourselves.

As we prepare for the uncertainties 2020–21, let’s start by embracing our missions and values not as interpreted by history, expediency, and brand-building but as words of promise to our students, our communities, and our world—a promise that is ours to keep or break. 

And then let’s keep this promise.

As we have had literally hundreds of conversations and other interactions with academic leaders this spring and now into the early summer of this plague year, we at One Schoolhouse continue to be inspired by the deep, deep desire of educators to step up and do the hard, hard work required to finish up the 2019–2020 academic year and plan for the next. Through successes and failures, experiments that have worked and others that haven’t, and the multifarious frustrations of students, families, and colleagues, school folks have carried on.
 
Through it all (so far) we’ve encountered a few new terms: quaranteenagers, sync and async, and social distancing, not to mention COVID considerations, COVID contradictions, and COVID casualties (in multiple, generally tragic forms). And hybrid, a word that in my life once meant abundant crops of corn and then cars with some electric power available—and that now means education that can switch back and forth between online and on- campus. For us at One Schoolhouse, hybrid is not just a term of art but a term of hope, predicated on our belief that on-campus learning will be back, and not just back, but better.
 
One of the strategies that we’ve been recommending to schools is to take this opportunity to do some difficult work around aligning their curricula to their missions and values. Nothing we’re suggesting is new: analyze your aspirational and foundational statements and work backwards from this analysis to build a learning program that will prepare students to take the school’s ideals out into the world. What seems new is that we’ve offered a schema for this learning program: a set of standards to guide teachers in designing, building, and teaching this mission- aligned curriculum built for their very own students in their very own schools.
 
We believe, strongly, in curriculum built around goals for learning and understanding and not around the exigencies of content coverage. And we believe that such a curriculum, mediated by mission and values considerations, can liberate teachers and teaching. We believe that such curricula foster cultures of teaching and learning that give more than lip service to the actual lives of students. Within such cultures, real-world considerations—of relevance, of social justice, of insistently urgent current issues—may take their places in classrooms not as “tangents” or distractions but as central to the learning and teaching enterprise.
 
But enough about what we believe, because we have also become aware of a special kind of challenge facing school leaders and academic administrators, a challenge that has been around all along but has been revealed in some of the responses we have encountered to our recommendations.

Existential fear.
Will our school survive or not? Will less than stellar performance in the dispersal to distance mode this spring plus uncertainties around the return of international students and the nature of the new school year’s opening—on campus, online, on hold—spell doom for the institution itself? Will the school become another COVID casualty?

Fear of faculty.
Teachers have busted their humps since learning went home in March, and for many the struggles to adapt have ravaged their sense of competence and confidence. The looming necessity to make far more fundamental adaptations—by following the One Schoolhouse recommendations, for example—has put many already disheartened teachers in a hard, fearful, and defensive place. Being asked not only to spend a summer of regrouping and preparation but also a summer of learning and re-learning is a heavy, heavy lift. And some teachers are inclined to dig in their heels.
 
Add words like “standards” to the conversation, and some anxious teachers begin to unravel. Recommend ways to streamline and regularize communication to reduce student (and family) confusion and stress, and the unraveling accelerates.
 
Many of us at One Schoolhouse have led faculties through a process of change. One of our past administrators, Lorri Palko, is now a consultant on change management, and she has offered a webinar for us on the challenges of change during the current crisis. Change, like grief, is a process with certain predictable stages, and it can be led and managed in ways that minimize disruption and distress. It’s not easy, but it can be done.
 
The changes of the summer of 2020 are epic in scope and substance, and as we work with school administrators and instructional leaders, we encounter fear in various forms. Fear of faculty predominates in our how-to conversations, and we have heard expressed in many ways and in various degrees a deep anxiety about having to adopt practices that might infringe on a faculty’s traditional “autonomy” as well as teacher creativity and individuality. These anxieties, when expressed, are often code for “We are afraid to ask our faculty to make any significant changes in
any aspect of their practice.”
 
We have to look to school cultures to fully understand this. We know that in far too many independent schools— despite or even in opposition to the waves of change that have been sweeping through schools in the past three decades and the clear and even strident calls for more forward-thing curriculum and assessment that takes into account new understandings of how children learn and grow—past practices have insulated faculties from the imperatives to change and develop. I have been asked to come to schools to present to and sometimes work with faculties that had remained more or less untouched by the hand of professional development for years.
 
But no school can be insulated any more in the age of COVID-19. If we've allowed "professional distancing" from unsettling new ideas to get in the way of doing better work here and there, let us embrace the reality of social distancing and its causes and meaning as a potentially powerful albeit sometimes painful impetus that might move us all forward.
 
It’s not just the usual doom-sayers who are pointing out the existential threat to schools posed by COVID-19; we’ve already seen closings happen. Schools that have been teetering on the brink have gone over the edge, sometimes for demographic reasons that may have been inevitable. Even so, now there is danger for every school.
 
The present opportunity: being fearless.
There is also opportunity. We are all too well aware of the degree to which pandemic isolation and dislocation has pushed us as individuals to anxious reflection, and I am sure I am not alone in the internal vows I have made to be better about this and that. (Whether I keep all these vows will be another story.) Schools, too, as collective bodies of spirit, belief, and hope, need to start doing the same kinds of reflection.