by Leah Tuckman 

Leah Tuckman is a newly hired senior associate at the Great Schools Partnership. We’re proud to share her first blog for our organization.

The Urgency

It’s January, 2022, and I’m in the medical waiting room at Revere High School. Situated adjacent to Boston Logan International Airport, Revere has struggled with some of Massachusetts’ highest cases of COVID-19 since the very beginning of the pandemic. It is the peak of the Omicron surge and the virus is hitting my students and families from historically marginalized communities the hardest. My school nurses and health aides are also present in the medical waiting room, but with over 2000 students at Revere High School and 49 positive pools from Monday morning’s pooled testing, this requires all hands on deck. My surgical mask is digging into my nose and I’m sweating as I struggle to organize rosters, locate rapid tests, and position volunteers. I feel like I am in a war zone as I delegate, deploy, and suit up. Sick calls are still coming in from teachers testing positive and I’m simultaneously attempting to secure substitutes for the empty classrooms. All of this is on fire. All of this is urgent.

The Balance

There are often urgent fires in a school setting. The last three years have been no exception to this rule. As one can imagine, I was challenged as a building leader by the balance of urgency and strategic planning throughout the 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 school years. We all knew that COVID was a top priority in 2021-2022 as well, but our school’s teaching, learning, and grading systems needed to change and we had to be strategic about how we made those changes. Although the guidance out of the CDC and DPH was still shifting day to day, students were back in person full time and we had new obstacles with which to contend. It was increasingly more challenging to engage our young scholars in classroom activities. They needed more real world connection, more choice, more meaning, and more authenticity after over a year of interrupted schooling and independence.

In addition, high school students no longer bought into the archaic and often racist grading systems that we had in place. The traditional system gave students and families little information about where the student excelled and where the student struggled. The traditional system could be a biased judgment that factors in a student’s behaviors and habits. Revere High School had attempted to transition to a competency-based teaching and learning model prior to March, 2020, but a lack of true strategic planning and authentic community outreach had created a bit of a false start. Our priority focus for the 2021-2022 school year would be the following five competency-based teaching and learning principles:

1. Learning expectations are clear.
2. Assessments focus on complex, transferable skills like critical thinking, problem-solving and analysis.
3. Teachers and students recognize that there are many ways to show competency.
4. Revision is part of learning.
5. Habits of work are essential skills and stand alone.

The Bus

Many of us are familiar with Jim Collins’ phrase, “Get the right people on the bus,” from his book, Good to Great. In order to truly focus on teaching, learning, and grading, I had to prioritize getting the right people into instructional leadership roles. I needed a group of lead teachers who I could rely on to continue with the need to shift pedagogical practices to address the racial inequities being exacerbated by the old system, all while I addressed the very real need to keep the school afloat during the height of the pandemic.

During the summer of 2021, I interviewed and hired ten lead teachers as my school did not have department chairs. These ten lead teachers would run department specific professional learning groups (PLGs). Most importantly, the lead teachers shared the building leadership team’s core values. They were coached by the Great Schools Partnership to be PLG facilitators, they had been trained in restorative practices, and they experimented with competency-based teaching and learning in their own classrooms.

There was nothing easy about juggling the need to put out fires and remaining committed to instructional priorities. I made mistakes as a school administrator when I emphasized one over the other. But being able to delegate to a strong, like-minded instructional leadership team helped me keep teaching, learning, and grading at front and center during what many consider to be the most difficult time in education.