Inconvenient Truth

 

Let's be honest. In education, we've been stuck in a rut. We've had a few advancements over the years in terms of delivery, methods, and technology, but for the most part, education has looked pretty similar for many generations. Yes, family dynamics have changed, social norms have changed, kids have changed, but our inconvenient truth in education is that we have not changed that much and we really haven't been forced to do so. That is, until now. 

The definition of an inconvenient truth is pretty simple. Something that's true but inconvenient. Typically the inconvenience comes down to having to take responsibility for something, or at least in admitting that the excuse you've been using doesn't hold up. Leave it to a global pandemic to really expose this inconvenient truth and challenge us to our core. There are some things that we in education need to take ownership of and others that need to be addressed by the greater society as a whole. We have an unbelievable opportunity to address these issues, but it is going to take some soul searching, reflection, and a significant organizational shake up. We can no longer turn a blind eye to this truth and hope that things will go back to normal soon because a return to normalcy is not the path forward. Instead, we need to embrace the challenge and not throw away a good crisis to really move us in the direction we need to head.

DISCARD OLD ADAGES

The old adages of "That's not the way it was when I was in school" or "When I was in school, we did it this way" are tired and outdated. They are homages to a past era that really don't relate to the current state of schools. I am not saying we need to throw the baby out with the bath water, but rather, I am saying that we need to respect the past for what it was. The Past. How we move forward needs to be more relevant and engaging to our current and future students. Holding on to things because that is the way they have always been done isn't necessarily the answer. Instead, we need to look forward and adopt the philosophy of Walt Disney who said, "Around here, however, we don't look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things, because we're curious… and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths." As educators, we need to rediscover our curiousness to step outside of our comfort zones and challenge the ways we have done things for so long. We can't expect our students to grow if we aren't willing to do the same.

PLACE A PREMIUM ON EQUITY OVER EQUALITY

There is a HUGE difference between equity and equality. While equality means treating every student the same, equity means making sure every student has the support they need to be successful. This is a bitter pill to swallow for many people because the issue of fairness inevitably comes into the conversation. Well, I'm here to tell you that fair is not always equal. We need to understand that kids come to us from different playing fields. Some need more support and guidance than others based on a variety of factors. The pandemic we are currently in has placed a bright light on the inequities of our students (access to WiFi, access to food, access to shelter, etc.) and how some of our students are expected to overcome larger barriers in order to access a better education. Now is the time to shift our focus to the potential that students have and set them up for success based off this potential rather than focusing on the traditional norms of grades, attendance, and behavior. While these traditional norms are useful indicators, they SHOULD NOT be our only metrics. We need to lift up our students so they can see their potential and provide them equity that they have never seen before. We need to remove barriers and gate keeping from our our institutional practices and realize that kids need us to do this for them because they may not have the support from anywhere else.

AVOID THE "NORMALCY" TRAP

I'll be the first to say that I am guilty of referring to our current situation as our "new normal" or our "temporary normal" The reality of the situation is that in the field of education, nothing is truly ever normal. Normalcy is something that is typical, expected, or standard. We define normal as a collective group of experiences that we have had over time and then develop a stereotype of what it means to be normal in an attempt to compartmentalize our experiences. Unfortunately, what we have done in education is take a broad stroke at what being normal is and anything that falls outside of that brush stroke is then deemed abnormal, which carries with it a completely different narrative. I would challenge us to think in different terms and look at people as unique. This may seem like a semantics game, but it isn't. Each of us likes to be viewed as individuals and not lumped into some category that we don't feel fits us. Our country was founded on the idea of rugged individualism and that anyone can succeed regardless of their position in life. If we truly believe this, we need to avoid the normalcy trap and realize that students who do not fall into our own predefined category of normal can, and will, succeed if we give them the tools and resources to do so.

DON'T FEAR CHANGE, BE THE CHANGE

I've heard it often when I am visiting with teachers that if given the opportunity to do something again, they would change it. Well, we are all being given a do-over, so let's harness the opportunity to seek the change we desire. We need to obliterate this notion that we cannot fail because it is a fallacy. As humans and institutions, we fail all the time. How we handle the failure is what defines us. If we continue to do the same thing over and over again and expect different results, the failure is on us. If we learn from the failure and try again in a different way, we can at least hold our head up high knowing that we didn't settle and we attempted to make things right. Allowing ourselves and our students to experience failure and then having an opportunity to make things right is what the foundation of success is built on. We need to stop this paradigm of "one and done" and adopt a more realistic model that is focused on doing something right until it is learned and it sticks. This will force us out of our comfort zones because it doesn't fit our old set of adages (see above) and we will be better for it. 

#OWNYOUREPIC

Each of us is writing a new chapter in our lives, both personally and professionally. We can continue to write a story filled with the same old crap that we always write, or we can write a story that just took a major plot twist, full of new adventures and experiences, that actually contributes to a journey we are proud to travel. Each of us has to discover what our epic is and then make it happen. If we don't at least attempt to write this new chapter in our epic, we will have gone through this pandemic for not and succumbed to the realization that we cannot do better when given the chance to start with a clean slate. I for one, wouldn't turn the page of that story, so I am opting to switch the narrative and give something else a try.