Teachers have been at the center of the COVID-19 epidemic since it began. Perspectives shifted from praising the work they do to forming the conversation around reopening around them. As students moved from in-person to online learning, teachers offered a sense of stability in a world that was constantly changing. City Forward Collective which helped initiate the COVID-19 School Support Fund to finance the National Summer School Initiative (NSSI) here in Milwaukee. The NSSI seeks to connect teachers with resources and mentorship while providing curriculum and professional development.
When schools moved to online learning, Carmen teachers and administration Carmen Schools of Science and Technology, a Milwaukee charter school, worked hard to minimize the COVID Slide. Chief Executive of Carmen schools Jennifer Lopez sees her commitment to her students as a moral issue. Joining the NSSI this summer, Carmen became a part of the collection of 800 students and educators across the Milwaukee era school to benefit from the program.
“We didn’t skip a beat in terms of supporting our students, because I do feel a moral imperative to ensure that our students continue to learn,” says Lopez.
Lisa Garlie, the mother of a Carmen Middle School student Cam'ron Adams, recognized the commitment the school's administrators and teachers have put in to make her son’s experience positive. “I think they learned with those trials and tribulations during the spring,” says Garlie… "It’s getting better and better and better,” she adds regarding to Cam'ron’s experience with summer school.
It is this commitment that made the decision to be a part of the NSSI easy for Lopez. She saw the program as a way to remove stress from her teachers and students without asking too much from them or parents during a time that requires leadership, creativity and consistency. While also giving teachers the opportunity to improve their online teaching skills.
“This is a time where we can be innovative and creative,” she says. “It is going to be important for us to make sure that we can lean into organizations or partners that are doing great work that we can learn from and not try to reinvent the wheel.”
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Lesson Plans
The program follows a set schedule with lesson plans created by experienced educators across the nation creating a sense of normalcy for the students. They have time in the morning to build community, a math class and an English language arts lesson where the students engage in a novel.
“Not only are we becoming more effective educators remotely, but our kids are gaining that added benefit of having an established routine daily,” says William Richter a teacher at Carmen Middle School. “They are self-advocating. They are communicating their needs with us even though they are operating remotely and I think that all these skills are essential to a well-rounded education.”
“One thing I do like with Carmen is consistency,” says Garlie. “Cam'ron knows that he can talk to one of his teachers if he wants to about anything that is going on and not be judged by what he has to say. I definitely think that Cam'ron has a lot of feelings going on... This is a lot on him and I think the school really deals with that by saying, ‘Hey, how are you doing?'”
The students are at the center of the program which lets them adjust to online learning before the fall while receiving support from teachers and peers. “They were doing work but the priority was, ‘Let me check in with these kids during these calls,'” says Garlie. “I am working from home, so I can’t always be there to hold his hand. I appreciate that he is engaged in the class.”
Having a pre-made curriculum allows teachers to spend more time focusing on the students. There were also few worries about the quality of the curriculum among the teachers at Carmen. They trusted the experience and skills of the mentor teachers in the program who helped the participating teachers with skills while also creating a curriculum that works for students at the end of each school day. “Nobody is teaching a lesson without getting coaching and support the day before,” says Lopez.
Mentoring Teachers
“The teachers who are doing it, our mentor teachers, are phenomenal,” says Richter. “The professional development setting has been very eye-opening in terms of all these strategies not only from a remote perspective but also from an ELA perspective, gaining that insight, learning how to teach literacy, utilize cognates that I wouldn’t have thought of and all these culturally relevant practices that they are helping us gain insight into have really changed my scope and focus for the upcoming year.”
For Richter having a mentor teacher provide cultural context was valuable while teaching a novel about a young Latina woman. This was a major factor in Lopez deciding to participate in the NSSI. According to her they have positive results educating low-income students and students of color which was one of the reasons she gave for her choice to be a part of it.
“Given the fact that Carmen is an organization where 90% of our students are from a low-income background,” says Lopez. “The fact that about 70% of our student body population is Latino and about 30% is African American, that is a similar demographic that this energy has supported in years past and showed really incredible academic results. I know the training and support that they provided their teachers to help drive those results. Which is why I thought it would be really great for our teachers to be a part of that. To learn what this organization is doing and be able to refine practices and learn for that and refine our fall school reentry plan to make sure we can incorporate those practices which we wouldn’t typically be able to because we live in Milwaukee.”
The program connects teachers from across the country while offering them resources and support. “(This program) has really helped to bring all of the teachers in our network together with a common focus. The teachers I am working with are not just from our building. They are from our network, and we are on the same path together. We are communicating over emails, via text and to me it has been a great experience to pull everybody together with that vision,” says Nicki Houghton, a math teacher at Carmen Middle School.
The format of the classes focuses on spending class time discussing work that the students have done independently allowing for one on one, small group and full class communication. “It (the National Summer School Initiative) has changed the way that I think about the structure of my lessons for sure. When we are doing this digitally, we really need to do even more to keep kids engaged, because they are not in our classrooms—captive. They are somewhere else and there is a lot going on around them,” says Houghton. “I think that that structure is something that I am going to keep coming into the next school year.”
Both the Carmen teachers and Lopez see students’ resilience and willingness to learn going forward into the fall. Their focus is on logistics and giving teachers the skills they need to succeed through professional development. Richter also mentioned the need to help parents to be a good resource for their students while providing necessary support.
“It is something that is weighing on me. It is something that I think about all the time,” he says. “If there are ways that we can reach families and reach teachers to be able to adapt to this, we are going to be successful in the upcoming school year.”
Lopez is open to moving forward with a similar platform to NSSI in the fall. The NSSI provided support to teachers, freeing them up to be there for their students this summer while also expanding their resources and abilities regarding online education for the fall.
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