Tag: communication

School Online – Journal – Day 26

~ Terry Whitmell ~ Leave a comment

Today we began week three of our online school, and the nature of my email inbox is shifting.

Student Attendance

Our teachers are now pursuing students who haven’t yet arrived.  We ask them to reach out to parents first, then guidance counsellors, and finally to connect with the VP responsible for then student (as determined by their surname). To accomplish the first, the teacher must have access to our student information system, and know how to query it to locate each student’s record. So I spent time today sharing the documentation on our system, and then troubleshooting access to the documentation and/or steps within our information system. Then I shared again how teachers could find the name of the guidance counsellor, and the list of alpha VPs. With some teachers only now gaining access to our information systems, it’s a jagged front, and each query requires an individualized response.

We now have office staff who can assist with corrections to student attendance, and with verification of students who could not be verified by their teachers.  I am not sharing the names of our staff broadly, as I do not know the impact on them of what is essentially a school that is an order of magnitude larger than any other school in our board. I will play “gatekeeper” until we figure out how they will be able to handle the deluge.

Teacher Absences

The past week has been spent letting teachers know how to apply for approval of absences such as holy days or family responsibility.  Although they are still attached to their home schools, we must do the approvals.  And we need to ensure that they enter the absence into another system, and that they do NOT request a supply teacher for the first few days of absence.

Communication

Although we have divided our students into groups by surname, and our teachers into groups by subject area, there are still hundreds of questions each day for each of our teams.  And the master list of “who does what” has traveled down in everyone’s inbox, and needs to be sent again to most who need it.

Professional Learning

Having shared the student information system documentation, I then received a beautiful email from a teacher, offering to provide a workshop for our new teachers.  I know that if I offered a workshop many teachers would see it as a “demand”. And I don’t want to pressure any of them, as they plan assessments in order to have data for next week’s report cards. So this teacher has offered to communicate directly with her colleagues, and I am hopeful that some will accept her offer, and learn the skills they need to work efficiently and effectively with our system.

Technology

While I pride myself on my facility with computer technology, I really don’t have much experience with the tools our teachers need to use.  And as an administrator, I can’t even try some of them out! I really am going to have to practice with both Google Meet and MS Teams, as this seems to be the area of least experience for our teachers as well.  Wish me luck!

Teacher Education

I accepted this role as a half-time Principal, but haven’t yet had a half day.  I teach a couple of classes in the Faculty of Education at Ontario Tech University, and this morning I managed to listen to our guest speaker (an elder, visiting and explaining the Seven Grandfather Teachings: Love, Respect, Bravery, Truth, Honesty, Humility, and Wisdom) while screening board emails. 

When my class met, following this amazing presentation, I had opened the wrong virtual classroom, and only nine made it there.  We figured out my error, emailed the rest, and they finally all arrived.  Then they informed me via chat that I had not enabled their microphones, and a little later that their cameras were also not enabled.  Thank goodness I have been working with them for a full year, and they are giving me the benefit of the doubt as things do not go smoothly. I comfort myself that I am modelling flexibility and a positive response to failure!

They are very anxious about completing the necessary practicum hours to graduate in December.  I have offered to connect them with teachers in our school who might appreciate their support in planning, creation of course materials, and in developing new skills within their asynchronous and synchronous tools. They can log hours as volunteers, without having to complete the paperwork necessary for a full placement.

Time Management

I am priding myself on getting my inbox to zero by the end of the school day.  I scan for emergency emails to ensure I don’t leave anyone hanging for too long, and it’s a positive sign that I managed to avoid working throughout most of the weekend. I know that our teachers will likely find time to reach out to me in the evenings, not during the school day, so I return to email a couple of times each evening, to respond to issues that will impact teachers and students the next day.

I wonder if our families realize how close to 24/7 the job of a teacher has become?

School Online – Journal – Day 19

~ Terry Whitmell ~ Leave a comment

It’s Friday, and our fourth day of Online School.  There are still classes without teachers, and teachers without timetables, and students and families who are awaiting emails. With more than 11,000 students and more than 500 teachers, there are few processes that successfully make the transition from traditional secondary schools to our mega online school.

When a communication is sent out to everyone, there is always a potential that it will be misunderstood.  This past week we sent teacher timetables out via email, and did not anticipate the confusion that resulted.  Where teachers did not yet have courses there were placeholders printed, which made little sense to them.  And at the bottom of the timetable was an explanation about our Careers and Civics courses, which are half-credits, explaining that Careers classes would begin with the even numbered sections, and Civics with the odd.  This was needed because the printing of timetables in Quadmesters left no room to indicate first or second half for these two courses.  So, many of the teachers with no courses appearing made the assumption that this message was for them, and that they were teaching Careers and Civics. Not the confusion we needed!

A secondary school of 1200 students would have a Principal and two Vice Principals, one office manager, and three other office staff.  Ours of 10 times the size has the equivalent of five Principals, seven VPs, and as of yet only a handful of office support, most of whom have yet to gain access to our information systems.

Today marks the beginning of three schools within schools, plus a special education team. So we will have groupings of P and VP, organized by groups of subject areas. I, as .5 P, will work with another .5 P, one full VP, and a .5 VP.  Our team is the largest, responsible for MST, or Math, Science and Technology.

Almost all of us are retired administrators, so once we complete our 50 days allowed by our pension board, we will need to be replaced.  My .5 agreement has in practice been 1.0 for almost all the days since we began on September 1.  So it won’t be long until I, and my retired colleagues, will need to transition to a new team.

The days aren’t like the ones I experienced in the past as a Principal.  I can’t see teachers F2F, so I’m using email and phone (and calls through MS Teams), and everything takes twice as long. I didn’t participate in the hiring of our staff, and haven’t had the pleasure of meeting very many of our teachers.  So each interchange requires much more time, to ensure that communication is clear and that my “need for speed” doesn’t offend.

As I write there remain more than 100 emails in my inbox, arriving this afternoon as I was on the road heading back to Sunny Slope. I responded to the 20 or so that arrived after noon, but will only return to the remaining emails in the morning. I know this will frustrate the senders, but there is little action that they will be able to take on a Friday evening, so I’m hoping that tomorrow morning will suffice.

 

I am looking forward to having our smaller team.  I think that teachers will appreciate it too, having a fewer number of possible contacts.  We should be more responsive, and be able to play to each of our strengths as we smooth out the path for teachers and students.

Tonight relaxing. Tomorrow email. Sunday planning for the week.

I hope all of you manage the first… and leave the other two for next week.

School Online – Journal – Day 7 and a half….

~ Terry Whitmell ~ 1 Comment

Well, you know we are in a “new normal” when emails are sent out at 4:37 on a Saturday, to respond to changes since Friday.

Our teachers received an email, ahead of the posting of a letter to parents on our board’s website, letting them know that our online population has grown from 54,000 to more than 64,000 in the past week, and so additional time will be needed to build a new timetable, to ensure an equitable and successful start for all staff and students.  For our secondary folks this means that their students will work on a cross-curricular independent inquiry project aligned to our core subject, which can then be reviewed by teachers as a pre-instruction assessment, to gauge where students are in their learning.  Students will have access next Tuesday, will receive their timetables by the end of the week, and will join their classes the following Tuesday.

I’m hoping that this additional time will provide a respite for them, following four days of COVID orientation in their community schools.  And knowing that they will have some time to prepare before launching their synchronous classes should offset the anxiety that this uncertainty might be generating.

I’m thinking that, if this trend continues, we should change our language from “excessed” from the community school to “seconded” to the Online School.  I’m also imagining that for some teachers the fully online will have some appealing features missing from the hybrid community school model.  They will see their students every day.  They will be working with a full class each day, rather than half. They will be able to create a scope and sequence and then follow it in a cycle between synchronous and asynchronous. And they will be able to refine their online processes, and develop expertise.

And those in our community schools, where they see half a class on Monday morning, and the other on Thursday morning, with asynchronous between, and a synchronous session on Tuesday and Friday, will have a more challenging planning task ahead of them. Three different learning environments within one class, and not always in the same sequence, will require that they abandon their linear approach.  It’s likely to be unsettling, but I think it will break down some of the routines, and promote creative solutions to better serve our students.

In both settings this promises to be a year of growth and learning, for both teachers and students.

School Online – Journal – Day 6

~ Terry Whitmell ~ 6 Comments

Well it’s almost bed time for me, and I’m having to think hard to remember what my day looked like today. It started out slow, and then ended like a freight train!

As I mentioned earlier, our teachers don’t yet know what they will be teaching next week. So, a survey was designed to be sent out to our more than 400 secondary teachers, to request their input as we begin to assign teachers to classes.

Since we are a new school there are no distribution lists. So, I hand-keyed all the names, and hoped that our Outlook email system would find them accurately.  It did, for the most part, but there remain about 20 teachers whose names on our list don’t quite match their email names, and so they won’t have received the request to complete the survey.

It took me a couple of hours to copy and paste both the subject line and body text, and then to BCC each person. When it was done I breathed a sign of relief…. until I received the “gentle” email pointing out that I had identified this year as 2020-2012!  I must have copied that at least  10 times without noticing.

All I could do was laugh!

The survey will be due at the end of the day tomorrow, and then I’ll work with the resulting spreadsheet to create lists for each of the courses we offer, so that we can do our best to match requests to available classes.

That matching will take place on Saturday (no choice but to work the weekend), so that we can get the information out to teachers.  Fortunately the plan is to begin teaching on Wednesday, so they’ll have a bit of breathing space at the beginning of the week to plan, and to reach out to their students.

In my last post I talked about the challenges I anticipate. The one that is preoccupying me is how we create community for our teachers, so that they don’t feel isolated as they embark on a full year of distance learning.

I find that I do my best thinking in the middle of the night. So, it’s off to bed.

I hope your “school start” is going well, or at least as well as it can in these unique times.