Education Week - August 25, 2021 - 19

Sidelined and Shortchanged:
Inside Hybrid Teaching
I
f spring 2020 can be characterized as the
season of giving grace, the autumn was a fall
from grace. Against a backdrop of national
and local school reopening debates, the focus
for public education shifted from flexibility
and forgiveness to restoring the metronome
of schooling. This included the expectation
that teachers return to their subordinate place in the school
hierarchy-and it is here that many schools stumbled in a
missed opportunity to deepen teacher commitment.
Schools across the country, whether offering in-person,
hybrid, or remote classes, resumed regular start-and-end
times along with requirements for student attendance,
grading, and testing. Reasserting these norms occurred
even as the conditions that motivated
the adaptations of spring were ongoing.
The pandemic continued, students were
struggling emotionally, and teachers were
stretched thin trying to adapt to the everchanging
conditions.
But unlike the spring, when teachers
In our research, nearly all teachers working in blended
hybrid classrooms reported negative effects on student
learning. When teacher attention is pulled in multiple
directions, students find it easier to check out. Students
consequently failed at rates higher than when classes were
all in person but also higher than when students were
all online. Teachers were clear that teaching in just one
mode at a time positively affected their capacity to engage
students and cover more content.
Teachers tried to dissuade local school districts from
By Lora Bartlett
BARTLETT is an associate
felt they were part of a concerted effort,
teachers now felt silenced and blamed
for what others saw as the shortcomings
of the educational response. They
were inundated with a constant stream
of criticism, particularly when they
raised safety concerns. Some parents
seemed to hold teachers responsible for
COVID-19 schooling conditions that
teachers themselves found frustrating.
Too often, teachers were beset by school decisionmaking
that excluded their perspective and often required them to
stick to policies that didn't make sense in the new context.
Emotionally exhausted and feeling unheard, teachers
found it increasingly difficult to sustain the effort needed to
teach students well.
In the pre-COVID world, research established two related
professor of education at the
University of California, Santa
Cruz. Her research focuses
on the teaching profession
and schools as workplaces
for teachers. She is the author
of Migrant Teachers: How
American Schools Import
Labor (Harvard University
Press, 2014). You can follow her
on Twitter at @LoraBartlett.
adopting blended hybrid models. In some places, they were
successful. For example, the New York City public schools,
in conversation with the union, committed to singlemodality
teaching assignments. An Oregon school district
and its local teachers' union eventually
negotiated a move away from blended
hybrid teaching to having each teacher
sometimes teaching in person and other
times online-but never the two at once.
In other places, usually places where
teachers' unions had less influence,
teachers struggled to have their concerns
heard. In Arizona, a state that in 2012 was
considered to have the weakest teachers'
union in the country, one school district
faced a coordinated teacher effort to be
heard. Two-thirds of public comments at
a school board meeting on hybrid models
came from teachers speaking against a
blended plan. The board acknowledged
that such teacher outspokenness and
conviction on an instructional issue was unprecedented
locally. The board nonetheless voted to adopt the blended
model.
Our data include documentation of teachers who
and important points with significance for post-COVID
schooling. First, schools where teachers feel heard and
have influence in decisionmaking are places more likely to
retain their teachers. And second, schools with high teacher
turnover have lower student achievement-and this is true
across student populations.
Given these connections among teacher voice, teacher
retention, and student achievement, it matters that 15 of the
75 teachers we followed in our research-20 percent-have
left or are actively considering leaving teaching. That's in
contrast to the typical 8 percent annual teacher-attrition
rate. And it matters even more that those leaving are
experienced teachers, with none having fewer than five
years' experience and half with 10-plus years in teaching.
Of the teachers considering career exit, each identified a
similar impetus to leave. They feel thwarted in their efforts
to do well by their students and they question staying in a
profession that disregards their professional perspective
and judgment. In fall 2020, more than half the teachers in
our study reported an increased cynicism about their work,
while two-thirds were both exhausted from overwork and
feeling a diminished sense of success.
The struggles around hybrid school models brought
teacher-voice concerns to the forefront. As schools planned
for fall 2020 school reopenings, many teachers advocated
against hybrid models that blend both in-person and online
students in the same classroom. Teaching well in each
mode of instruction requires different teaching practices.
Blended hybrid instruction, they argued, exhausts teachers,
stretching them thin in their efforts to do both well, and it
shortchanges students.
To see a teacher instructing in a blended hybrid mode is
to watch a complex juggling act: multiple devices at work,
students on screens, students in the room, chat boxes,
emails, attachments, Padlets, PDFs, handouts, and hands
in the air.
EDUCATION WEEK | August 25, 2021 | www.edweek.org/opinion | 19
decisively, publicly, and mostly unsuccessfully called for
single-modality teaching. Often, districts first adopted
blended hybrid models only to backtrack later as student
struggles, teacher exhaustion, and family concerns
mounted. The resistance to teacher voice, however, came at
a price of lost student-learning opportunities and depleted,
discouraged teachers looking to leave.
There's a lot of speculation and debate about whether the
pandemic will increase teacher attrition. Some observers
point to the lower-than-normal exit numbers last summer
as evidence the concerns are more noise than substance.
Others attribute those low numbers to the state of the
economy and labor-market challenges of leaving during a
pandemic. The teachers in our sample show there are a lot
of reasons teachers may delay departure. Work contracts,
health-care needs, family responsibilities, and the need
for a transition plan are all reasons teachers identified for
postponing career exit.
Complacency in the absence of occupational
hemorrhaging is a mistake. Given the relationship between
teacher turnover and student achievement, the prospect of
increased attrition should move us to preventive action. The
time to attend to teachers' concerns is now. n
SERIES: This essay is from a series exploring the
working lives of teachers in the United States
during the pandemic. It draws from Bartlett and
colleagues' " Suddenly Distant " research project.
edw.link/SuddenlyDistant
"
Teachers feel
thwarted in
their efforts to
do well by their
students.
Vanessa Solis/Education Week and Getty Images
http://www.edweek.org/opinion
Education Week - August 25, 2021

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Education Week - August 25, 2021
