Caring in the Age of Coronavirus

— by Greg Chalfin

On March 10, 2020, I turned in my dissertation to my graduate school committee at the University of Northern Colorado. Three days later, our school, Stanley British Primary School in Denver, Colorado, closed for the rest of the academic year. Like everyone else, we had no idea what exactly to expect on the roller coaster to come.

A few weeks into the pandemic, I successfully defended my thesis on Zoom. Entitled “Caring about more than grades and test scores: The work of reputationally caring teachers,” my qualitative research study examined the narratives and experiences of four teachers in four separate educational environments spanning the worlds of independent, public, and charter schools. The participants of the work were those teachers in a school that everyone can’t stop talking about. When you ask a community member about a teacher who goes above and beyond in having a positive impact, students, parents, colleagues, and administrators repeatedly bring up the same names. Over time, by reputation, they earn trust in a community, and trust begets immense impact on student learning, social-emotional health, and in becoming a joyful, lifelong learner.

When I began the study, I expected to find that the teachers had some special method of how they assessed their students. One does not often find ideas of care intermingled with assessment practices, and I sought to learn more about how these teachers navigated the world of metrics and measurement that has enveloped much of K-12 education.

What I found, however, was that the way reputationally caring teachers approached assessment had little to do with assessment at all. In practice, these “reputationally caring” teachers approached all aspects of their work as empathic mentors. These teachers aren’t just teaching, and they aren’t parenting our students. They are doing something in between. Caring for their students is as central to them as breathing, eating, and sleeping. They understand boundaries, but they see themselves as more than only a student’s math teacher. Frankly, for these teachers, it’s the only way they know how to orient themselves to their work.

As the pandemic has raged on, I’ve been thinking about teachers like my study’s participants and about how hard it has been and will continue to be for so many teachers to feel fulfilled through a screen. When caring for the whole person, when believing relationships between students and teachers are immersive and continuous, when taking on the emotions, weights, and even traumas of their students, teachers struggle to sleep at night under the best of conditions. A pandemic like this one only exacerbates the weight on those caring individuals’ hearts.

When you are a caring teacher in a world of COVID, you also need to be provided the space to immerse yourself in those relationships. Online, that requires a new orientation to the way schools work. Instead of giving teachers a student load of 60, 80, or 100 students, schools should focus on allowing teachers to immerse themselves in getting to support fewer kids, really understanding who they are and how they learn. Instead of having students become experts in executive functioning skills, learning to juggle a litany of classes and activities, school should allow students to immerse themselves wholly in doing fewer things well.

This fall, my school, Stanley British Primary School, embraced a new model of education in our middle school. Inspired by schools like Colorado College and Cornell College (IA), our students will be taking a modified version of the block program, engaging deeply with two classes for an approximately four-week block. Teams of teachers will teach part of the day alone and part of the day together in a cross-disciplinary fashion, intentionally bridging disciplines in ways we have not been able to before. We’re using this pandemic as an opportunity to further align our practices with our school’s mission, vision, and values, and while we are all nervous about returning, we couldn’t be more excited to delve deeply into curriculum and meaningful relationships.

As we began the school year, we keep coming back to our philosophy to guide our school and to fulfill our vision of a community of joyful, lifelong learners prepared to make a positive difference in the world. But how can joy happen in a world so fraught with hostility and fear? I draw inspiration from the work of Tom Little and Katherine Ellison and their book Loving Learning: How Progressive Education Can Save America’s Schools.

As Little and Ellison write, there are foundational progressive strategies that have been passed down from philosophers like John Dewey, Francis Parker, and others that can help guide us to a more inclusive, caring, and thoughtful vision for all kinds of schools, whether we’re in-person or online. These are simple strategies. Set in motion, they can help guide educators through this inflection point moment. These strategies include seeing the whole child, relying on students’ interests to direct learning, focusing on deeper learning instead of testing, grades, and class rank, studying topics in an interdisciplinary fashion, and perhaps most importantly, providing “support for children to develop a sense of social justice and become active participants in America’s democracy” (Little & Ellison, 2015, p. 52).

If we’re going to truly care for our students, whether in-person or online, tenets like these principles can help us all become caring teachers and our schools to become caring institutions. We have owed it to our children for a long time to not view them through the prism of numbers and metrics. Now is the moment to make that caring approach a reality. Let’s use this opportunity to show our students how much we truly care.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Greg Chalfin is the middle school head at Stanley British Primary School in Denver, Colorado. e-mail: greg.chalfin@stanleybps.org