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| Author: Catherine Williams West Marion High School |
The meeting began with each participant taking a moment to type a sentence or two in a shared Google Doc about what they were thinking or feeling. Next, in typical writing project fashion, participants engaged in a Writing Into the Day activity, which was pulled from the SMWP Share Your Writing website. Each participant responded to a prompt in which they were asked to analyze the things that they miss about face-to-face teaching and which of these losses they were grieving the most; an excerpt from “Be Our Guest”, a song from “Beauty and the Beast”, served as the anchoring text. Participants then engaged in the typical sharing session, but an additional vein of sharing and discussion was added: what did we retain and/or lose in completing this activity online?
After the conversations, it seemed clear that, even though the structure was maintained, the connections and relationships between participants suffered from distance sharing. This realization led the meeting into the inquiry questions for this summer session: how do we make something that helps others to make something? Can we/ How do we create and/or retain community in online spaces? To guide us in this inquiry, we examined an idea from Paul Lemahieu’s work Learning to Improve: How America’s Schools can Get Better at Getting Better —“disciplined inquiry”. In order to ensure that we are improving as practitioners and that our work itself is improving in quality, we will use his principles of Plan, Do, Study, Act, which means that we will use rapid cycles of creating, sharing, evaluating, and refining in order to learn quickly from our own failures and, in doing so, help others using the knowledge that we have created together.
With these principles in mind, we transitioned to examining our ultimate product goals, which include adding teacher writing to the Share Your Writing website, creating an online or hybrid Invitational Summer Institute, building a Canvas course for the C3WP launch (and possibly some fall work) in Covington County (our i3 late start district), offering a website for the Covington County work that links students and teachers in both Covington and Marion (our i3 early start district) counties in order to build capacity and relationships at both schools, and publishing the SI anthology, which will include personal writing and participant blogs. Each product will also work towards creating a larger footprint for both SMWP and NWP, which is an important goal of the national organization.
To end the meeting, we discussed the article “Moving Teachers to the Center of School Improvement” by Edit Khachatryan and Emma Parkerson, which was published in the March 2020 issue of Phi Delta Kappan. Participants had already engaged in asynchronous reading and annotating of the article in a shared Google Doc, so we began the reading by revisiting the article and reading everyone’s comments in order to decide on our biggest takeaways. We used the Written Discussion/Block Party protocol in a Padlet to each copy and paste our biggest takeaway, write the reason that we each chose this quote for our takeaway, and then respond to the choices and insights of others. For the debrief, we mostly examined the impact that technology had on this protocol and our discussion of the article. This again led us back to our original inquiry questions, and we ended the day’s meeting pondering and brainstorming ways to address some of these considerations.
Seeing fellow TCs and collaborating together like the “good old days” was a breath of fresh air during a time of uncertainty and change. It is exciting and professionally invigorating to work with my colleagues again on these new projects. We have all experienced the transformative power of the SI and the writing project network, so we are in a unique position to analyze how technology impacts our experiences and how we can preserve our core principles while adapting to this new normal.
It was clear from the start that we are all grieving over many of the same “losses” in this transition to distance learning— classroom culture, face-to-face interactions with students, and simply writing in a room with others, just to name a few. However, just the act of putting these feelings on paper and then voicing them aloud to each other helped to reinforce the professional relationships that we had already made. Through writing together, we learned to properly name and address these concerns, and we built up stamina and dedication to tackle some of these issues together. While I desperately missed the coffee, breakfast, inside jokes, and physical presence of my colleagues, I felt a warmth just knowing that we were working in the same digital space as a team once again.
Our group understands the importance of personal relationships and classroom culture, so we are all dedicated to ensuring that these facets of education are not lost in times of social distancing and digital connections. While bureaucrats push to move more learning online and into pre-packaged programs, we recognize the importance of the face and heart of a teacher in all aspects of work with students. I am excited about the process of adapting protocols to meet online needs and creating a new set of routines. Our focus on failing and adapting quickly in this new space will push us to create modules and learning options that embrace the true spirit of good teaching. When teachers teach teachers, great things are sure to happen.
Trying out “new” protocols in a digital space (and adapting to occasional lost links and network connectivity problems), makes it clear that, while we still have much to celebrate in our ability to retain the spirit of learning and collaborating, there also come several new losses to grieve. However, it is comforting to know that I am not in this alone. I know that my colleagues will be there to support me as I fail quickly in order to learn quickly. Because we have all been part of the writing project before, we share in its unique collective identity. We all find hope for the future of education because we are part of a network that ensures teachers like us are always a central part of improving the practice and education at large.
Catherine Williams is a South Mississippi Writing Project fellow and has been teaching for five years. Currently, she teaches 9th grade English at West Marion High School and is a co-sponsor of the Art Club.
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