How do I ask my teachers to work preparing for next year when they've already been working so hard?
Published on May 27, 2020
In my mastermind this week, the hot seat question a principal is bringing forward is:
How do I encourage staff to work on lessons over the summer to potentially start the year with e-Learning or some hybrid of e-Learning and face-to-face? They have been through a lot the past 9 weeks, along with teachers around the world. How do I encourage them to plan for the worst situation (e-Learning) and hope for the best (face-to-face) knowing that they are exhausted from what they have been through?
I’ve been getting questions relating to this a lot!
How do we move forward when there has been so much trauma and challenges?
Well, the reality is that we have to move forward. It is the only way to go. It’s going to take lots of teamwork and support to make it happen!
What are your plans?
To me, the most important thing is to keep it simple. I have heard of many districts asking principals to make multiple different plans for multiple scenarios.
Going back to the mastermind question, how do you ask someone to make five different plans, when you know that only one plan is going to be used anyway?
Most people go through each possible scenario and make a plan for dealing with that scenario. They try to cover all their bases. This doesn’t work because “no plan survives first contact with the enemy”!
They make plans, but they can’t know what is going to happen, so they try to plan for everything.
Imagine walking into the new school year, confident that whatever happens with coronavirus, you will be ready because your plan is clear and simple enough that you will have things in place no matter what happens.
You’ll be able to start the year in any circumstance and know that your plan is going to work.
Here’s the Framework:
*Start asynchronous
*Build culture
*Focus on the most essential!
Here’s how the workshop will be structured:
Week 1: overview of the framework and your specific situation, reviewing local government requirements and plans for reopening.
Week 2: Start building your plan. Apply the framework and combine it with recommendations from your government.
Week 3: Review and critique others’ plans and have your plan reviewed and critiqued.
Week 4: Apply different scenarios to your single plan. August Live Checkin: Make sure our plans are good and have a session to rehash what we are going to do.
Each week, we will meet live (on Mondays at 2 pm Pacific) to discuss things and then have work time to create and collaborate on planning.
I’ll provide templates to help get things started in the right direction, and make sure that you have what you need to be successful.
The goal is to leave the workshop at the end of June with a solid plan of action, regardless of the state of school in the fall.
We also cocreate planning documents and collections of resources to help other people be successful in implementing this in the future.
This is only open briefly, and space is truly limited!