Why most reopening plans are doomed to fail.
Why your plans are doomed to fail!
Here’s the problem that I am seeing with reopening school questions on Facebook and social media.
These are the types of questions that are being asked:
Has anyone in the group devised a system for screening staff and students daily for symptoms, health, etc? Seems logistically impossible to do temps for everyone with one school nurse per building. Anyone utilizing an app that folks self report symptoms?
And
This question is for everyone who created a reentry plan already. If a student in the classroom gets Covid, does the entire class get quarantined?
All these details, right now, two months before school starts. They’re missing the mark.
These are the small rocks. I don’t know if the people asking these questions have already put in the big rocks.
I’m sure we have all heard the adage that you need to put the big rocks in first. If you haven’t seen Stephen Covey’s presentation on this topic, it's classic 90's!
You can’t work on all those details until you have the big rocks put into your bucket!
What do you really need to focus on? What really matters in your school? If you don’t have that, then all your little plans mean absolutely nothing.
Let’s look at this a different way.
In my reopening schools workshop, Bill determined what was most important to him.
Three things stood out (in no particular order):
- Strong academics continue to move forward/IEP/ELL
- Kids Mental Health
- Keeping staff connected
When Bill started working on his reopening plans, he had a solid idea of his three big rocks.
When it came time to make a decision about taking temperatures or quarantining a whole class, he looked at it through the lens of his three big rocks.
What you find when you adapt this approach is that your priorities change.
So, let’s go through this process:
Screening at the door. Our values are strong academics keep going, kids mental health, and keeping staff connected.
Bill could determine that since kids’ mental health is so important, he would have check-ins with all students on a regular basis. This check-in would focus on their mental health, but could include screening questions for physical health as well.
Here are some questions to ask each day:
- How are you sleeping?
- What are you excited about?
- What are you nervous about?
- Has there been any change to exposure to symptomatic people, including yourself?
Regarding the question of quarantining everyone in a class when one gets infected, he uses the same approach.
Someone gets sick: Our values are strong academics keep going, kids mental health, and keeping staff connected.
When someone gets sick, Bill will switch that class to virtual only instruction and continue the private check-ins with students each day. As the principal, he will check in with his teacher each time the class meets to see how the teacher is doing and see if they are any students who need support while quarantined.
Your big rocks are different than Bill’s. You may have these big rocks, like Aida did in our workshop:
- Safety, SEL, Communication
Or, maybe your values are like Sonny’s:
- Anti-racist teaching, Increasing Authority, Agency and Identity for students, Trauma informed practices - SEL
Or, your values are likely different even from those.
Your approach is going to be different because your big rocks are different. But if you are asking the question without determining your big rocks or making a plan without establishing your big rocks, your plan will be disjointed, confusing, and will fall apart.
Join my Reopening Schools Workshop and let's get those big rocks taken care of!
