Charting new territory

This month has been a whirlwind for me. The last week of 2020 I decided to change trajectory and start a new venture.  I am taking all of my knowledge and expertise and putting it into a business.  As with most new things, it has evolved and is currently in its infancy stage but I have a plan, a place, and a purpose.
Wired for Success is for all students of all abilities. I started my career as a special education teacher, and I have continued to teach with that in mind. Not every student is going to “get it” the first time around. We know that, adults know that, how many times have you re-read a sign, or a page, or watched a scene from a movie again. “Oh, now I get it!” These things happen under normal conditions, when everything is perfect, when we have no stress, when the classroom is calm and quiet, engaged, and the teacher is totally on her game (or his of course). We also know children may have external stressors and learning disabilities impacting learning and those lead to learning gaps.  This is under the best conditions, textbook classroom, you know, the fantasy.
At this point, I’m just going to jump to spring 2020. I won’t rehash the year, but I will reflect on what I experienced as an educator and the impact for both students and teachers.
Technical skills: I think there is a widely held belief that children, by virtue of being born with electronic devices in their hands, are tech savvy. There should be no problem shifting children, of ALL ages, to online learning. It will be seamless. They can edit a TikTok video, add music, text, animation, use filters, why wouldn’t they be able to use a computer for school? No big deal. Easy peasy. Marc Prensky coined the terms “digital natives” and “digital immigrants” in 2001. The idea that digital natives were born into the technology age (millennials, Gen Y, Gen Z) and digital immigrants adopted technology as it evolved (Gen X and prior). I will skip the academic jargon and simply say, old people learned how to use technology to be productive and discovered the fun stuff later. Younger generations learned the fun stuff first and struggle with competency. Don’t jump on me about the “old people,” I am a proud Gen X-er, but I digress.
Spring break 2020, I was scheduled to go to DC, tour the White House, Capitol, Supreme Court Building, and have a private tour of the National Archives. We know how that ended up. Instead, I was conjuring how to prepare my content for online learning, not right away, it was a painful progression of stops and starts. I thought, hey, I’m totally ready for this. I already use technology in my classroom, I can totally integrate what I already use. It will be AWESOME!! For some kids, absolutely, totally awesome. Amazing. I had some students do better than ever with no distractions of a classroom, peer influences, drama of 7th grade, they were doing everything, showing up for live lessons, and turning in every assignment on time and perfect. But in general, I had more of the opposite happening and they fell into a couple categories: students who never logged in (ever), told their parents they had completed everything (hit submit assignment with no assignment), and students who were simply lost, struggling with the technology so desperately, they couldn’t do their work.
I promise teachers tried to make it work. I had daily chat sessions with my colleagues in Teams, we had a chat room, and we also practiced sharing our screens and supported each other with our tech knowledge, what we figured out, new ideas, all of it. I literally could not have done it without this amazing group of teachers.   If we were struggling, you must know the kids and parents were struggling. Students who were at home with their younger siblings, many who couldn’t get their work done because they had been put in charge. These kids have parents who are front line workers, variety of jobs, but medical, truck drivers, EMT, etc. and they were either unable to help because they were home, or because they also did not know how to manage the technology. This is not a criticism, no way, this was just a tiny piece of what we all faced.
October 2020 our district was fortunate to acquire laptop computers for all students, grades 4 to 9. Brilliant! I can move to a digital platform, not more paper, awesome-sauce (you realize I am a middle school teacher, yeah?).  This is the fun part, where it all comes clear as a face to face teacher. Our Digital Natives do not have the computer literacy to tackle what comes second nature now to the Digital Immigrants. I may need a teenager to show me how to use a filter on TikTok, but I can definitely download a file, save it to a folder, edit it, and submit it for a grade. My Aha! moment as an educator was the realization that our kiddos could not do what we expected them to know how to do. This specific learning gap has caused undo frustration on students, parents, and teachers.
Mental health: Here is an area where I am not an expert and in light of my role as an educator in a large school, I will not discuss what I have seen. Instead, I’m attaching scholarly articles about mental health. What I have seen, makes me sad and frustrated as a teacher, I feel like I can only help so much. Just know, many of our kids are having a hard time.
Safeguarding Student Mental Health 
Mental Health in High School Students at the Time of COVID-19: A Student’s Perspective

Face to face & virtual learning:  I wanted to go back to school face to face, maybe an unpopular opinion, but I miss the kids.  The year has progressed with many obstacles: simultaneous classes, completely online classes, and quarantines to name a few. Teachers cannot teach how they used to which is difficult to describe if you haven’t been in the classroom. Our best pedagogical practices are being challenged every day with social distancing and masks. Those two things may seem like no big deal, but I will explain. Social distance has restricted our ability to group students, feel comfortable circulating around the room, pulling kids into small groups for specialized instruction, allowing freedom of movement for “gallery walks,” and jigsaw activities. I am less inclined to circulate the room to facilitate appropriate classroom behavior. I have difficulty understanding children wearing masks, who may already fear responding in class. Asking those children to repeat something makes them go silent, thinking they were wrong, but I just couldn’t hear them. I spend my day saying, “fix your mask” and worried about the well-being of my students if I do something wrong.
          In creation of this new socially distanced classroom we have created, for lack of a better phrase, an unintended consequence. Our students, who have always been put in groups because that’s what our best practices have taught us, can no longer work in those groups, not really. We have not prepared them for this kind of learning and we, as teachers, were not prepared for what this means in our classrooms.
           As far as distance learning, I believe, through personal experience as a parent and educator, certain children thrive in the virtual classroom. These children are independent learners, would like to do the group project alone, are self-starters, finish first, always have a book to read, and are often frustrated with the behavior of the students around them. The majority do not fit this model and that is totally unscientific data, just my opinion through years of observation. So, where does that leave us?
          My new tutoring model hopes to fill many of the gaps I mentioned. Success Tutoring is individualized instruction designed to support academic learning in the broad sense, as opposed to focusing on individual subjects.  In other words, figure out where the child is struggling while also uncovering academic strengths. Utilize those strengths, find and fill the learning gaps, and apply learning strategies to be used across all of their academics. I believe children who are coached by someone who is NOT their parent and NOT their teacher, becomes more academically motivated and independent. My goal is for the child to not need me anymore, learn how to use everything in the strategy toolbox, and not need me anymore. Frankly, it’s a really poor business model to have your clients not need you anymore, but it is a goal for me to see my former students thrive because of my tutelage.