Digital Learning Days Extended Through End of School Year

Dear Friends:

I applaud the decision today by Superintendent Spearman and Governor McMaster to complete the school year on a digital learning platform. It’s the safe and sound choice. CCES makes the same choice out of a steadfast concern to preserve the health and well being of students and teachers and all who interact with them. Rest assured, we make this decision with keen regret that we will not experience the traditional exuberance of May, the most vibrant month on the CCES calendar.

The disruption of school this spring has inspired untapped reservoirs of creative solutions. We have expanded instructional arsenals by gaining digital dexterity. Digital instruction has been a boon for differentiated learning. Socially, we have mitigated isolation by strengthening connections with friends and families and reconstituting neglected friendships. The Weekend Wall Street Journal published a special section dedicated to coping with the pandemic with the header “occasional texts are no longer enough.” The column shares uplifting accounts of renewed friendships: “In a recent survey, 4,103 respondents said the activity they missed most during social distancing was ‘gathering with friends’. . . .There’s an irony emerging amid isolation of social distancing and quarantine: The outbreak has prompted people to grow closer in some ways, as old friends reconnect and neighbors become like family. People have fewer casual interactions, but relationships that remain have deepened.” 

Graphic images of suffering have triggered our latent altruistic genes. News outlets stream reports daily of people all over the world helping others, irrespective of geographic boundaries and indifferent to tribal markers that so very recently polarized us--racial, ethnic, religious, political, and socio-economic differences dissolve in the elixir of common humanity. In the same WSJ section, Alison Gopnik in her weekly column “Mind & Matter,” cites a 2017 study by two M.I.T. researchers who “showed that when we care for another person in [an] altruistic way, we extend our own needs to include theirs, in a process they describe as ‘moral alchemy.’” The exiled Duke Senior in As You Like It earnesty proclaims “Sweet are the Uses of Adversity.” I imagine that Bear Bryant would translate that axiom into “no pain, no gain.”

Hope sustains us through this crisis. It partners with love and faith to elevate humankind to realize the noble lease on existence that God confers on us. To be sure, some of the normal rites of spring have been preempted by the pandemic: our seniors, in particular, are not experiencing the blissful traditions this spring that make being a CCES senior so cherished: prom, signing day, senior chapel, senior awards night and commencement. With counsel from seniors, the school will honor the traditional calendar with digital events to mark the ceremonies and defer the real thing until the summer when we can celebrate the Class of 2020 effusively. We vow to make it up to all 99 of you terrific seniors. Don’t think that I will forgo missing my graduating with y’all.

We approach the final month of the school year focused on our core concerns: academic excellence; strong relationships; health and wellness; the cultivation of virtue; and spiritual vitality. Our faculty have refined their craft and transferred their inherent high-performance standards from the classroom to the screen. Chaplains have embroidered our spiritual fabric with a beautiful virtual weave. Administrative leaders have kept our collective eye on the ball, focusing on quality assurance and teamwork. Our normal operating standards have not wavered in the last six weeks. Our faculty and staff have characteristically planned ahead and provided stimulating instruction and individual attention within the scope of a digital platform. Not content with getting the job done, teachers have brainstormed and innovated as they refined their methods and content. We solicited formal feedback from parents and encouraged informal feedback. The survey completed by 180 respondents reflected a reassuring satisfaction:

In response to the input from this survey, we have improved calibrating workloads in Middle and Upper Schools, fortified connections between teachers and students, and enriched communication between teachers and parents. We have worked through the tsunami of demand on Schoology in the early weeks of digital learning. We have streamlined the use of the conferencing application. From the beginning of our reliance on a digital platform, we have taken a thoughtful measure of the emotional, social, and academic data from our experience. Watchwords have been wellness, patience, and grace. We have made decisions incrementally and collaboratively.

Teachers deserve heartfelt and mindful gratitude and praise for their commitment to their students and honest and empathetic partnership with parents on this collaborative journey. I want to cite a few examples of inspired teaching and testimonials to the remarkable and effective efforts of teachers to maintain excellence: 

The third grade has been studying weather and plate tectonic disasters thus far in our weeks of distance learning. Each class has had wonderful conversations on the daily conferences about the features, locations, causes, and disaster plans for all of the disasters. This week third-grade students will 'step out of the box' for individual design thinking projects. Each student will select a disaster to become an 'expert' on about their selected disaster. 

They will create a brochure about their disaster as their first project. The second project is the creative design project called the "Survival Buddy." The students will apply their knowledge about their disaster to invent/create a tool/object that would help you survive in the disaster. The third project piece is a persuasive writing piece that students will write about their "Survival Buddy" creation. They will have to persuade an audience why their creation is important to have as a survival tool in the event of a natural disaster.

The classes will work on this assignment this week and will present their projects beginning next Monday, April 27th.

On the “hope for better times front,” I share a conviction from the Middle School that I wholeheartedly believe:

“Teachers are learning new technology. Name it, they are trying it and growing more and more each week. One teacher said it best: ‘even though it has been tough, in the long run we know this is going to make us better teachers when we return to the classroom. YouTube, FlipGrid, Schoology, Screencastify…’”

I will close this encomium with student tributes to two Upper School teachers:

The siege of 2020 has reminded us of the blessings of CCES. Everyone matters, we are all in it together, and we will emerge stronger. I look forward to the blessings of being in touch with you for the rest of the school year. Let’s make May 2020 the best May in CCES history. God bless you.

Leonard.