A Million Little Things

Thinking back to March of 2020, I experience a rush of feelings and adrenaline. As a principal, I returned from spring break in Cabo San Lucas and the world shut down. Before I left, one of my well-informed parents warned me of the seriousness of what was coming, and I honestly didn’t believe her. Two years later we continue to deal with the effects of the pandemic.

Our school district shut down but as administrators we reported to work and social distanced so our district office administrators could share their thoughts and pre-planning and seek our input—evidence of a healthy team. As principals, we brought our teachers in and in just one week, new teacher leaders emerged and we planned for quality virtual education. As a principal, I felt a tremendous sense of pride for my teachers as they implemented the AMAZING plan.

Once fall rolled around, our superintendent asked us to present our individual COVID plans for opening our schools to our board of education. We each had seven to ten slides with bullets on each slide. I knew how many decisions went into each bullet on each slide. I think my brain physically hurt at that point. Once all my colleagues presented, I commented that each slide represented “a million little things” to think through.

At my early childhood school, I wanted our children to continue to experience the joy of learning in developmentally appropriate ways so instead of responding with no to questions about existing practices, I responded with, “How can we do it safely?” In posing this question, it stretched our brains to think out of the box and by “our” I mean everyone—admin, teachers, assistants, custodians, cafeteria workers, and parents. As a result, we continued using our playground, manipulatives and other hands-on materials in learning, and promoted social interaction in a healthy way. Thank goodness for sanitizer, plexiglass, masks, shields, and adults who were willing to do whatever they could to maintain our joyful learning environment while being safe. Our identified COVID cases stayed at or below the district level during this time. Again, I felt a tremendous sense of pride in the synergy at work to ensure safety and learning for our kids.

I share this now because I worry that if the response during COVID was to say, “No, we can’t do that anymore,” and we sacrificed best practices that we know are critical to success and learning, where are we now in the fall of 2022? Have we rebounded back to the place we want to be? Have principals adjusted from heavy reactionary leadership to proactive instructional leadership? I especially worry about all the principals who became principals for the first time during COVID, because all they may know or experienced is responsive leadership.

I thrive on proactivity. If I spent more time being reactive each day, I experienced frustration. I used systems, structures, and processes to shift into proactive mode so we could spend time planning for the next week, month, semester, year. But, during COVID, I had to focus on SAFETY and the million little things within each second of each day to ensure we kept kids safe. I didn’t let go of learning, but the scale definitely tipped toward SAFETY, as it should. Ideally, SAFETY and LEARNING would balance, and safety would be addressed and monitored daily through systems, protocols and assigned responsibilities. The principal then primarily focuses on learning. I encourage you to refocus your brain cells on ensuring high levels of learning for all by doing the work that matters. After all, learning is why our schools exist.

Seed: Refocus your priorities on learning while maintaining a safe environment.

Food for Thought: Where are you in your “rebound” efforts as an instructional leader?