PRISM - #OneWord2021 - January 6, 2021

 PRISM 
#OneWord2021
By, Michael Earnshaw
January 6, 2021
@MikeREarnshaw

PRISM - noun - a glass or other transparent object in prism form, especially one that is triangular with refracting surfaces at an acute angle with each other and that separates white light into a spectrum of colors.

2021 will be my third year adopting the #OneWord approach to improving myself throughout the 365 days rather than setting unrealistic resolutions. For my #OneWord 2019, I went with BELIEVE and left my comfort zones, both personally and professionally, more so than I ever even dreamed! If it wasn’t for BELIEVING, I would never have begun writing and sharing it with the world, speaking at educational conferences, or talking about two of my loves, Punk Rock and Education with my brother Josh Buckley on our podcast Punk Rock Classrooms. By living 2019 through the word BELIEVE I was able to move myself to be the husband, father, educator, leader, and the person I knew I was destined to be but had always lacked the confidence to get there. 

Building off the momentum from 2019, 2020 started off amazing! I was flowing through the first few months, just like the word I had chosen to live by, WATER. I was able to break down even more barriers that stood in my way to make me better and stronger to help inspire others to work together to change our world for the better. By adopting WATER as my #OneWord2020 I was able to accomplish a goal that I have had since elementary school, to have a book of my own published. In January of 2020, I am proud to say that I was able to sign a contract with Edumatch and will be able to share the EduCulture Cookbook: Recipes and Dishes to Positively Transform School and Classroom Culture in the Spring/Summer of 2021! 

Everything was on track for 2020 to be one of my best years yet! WATER was freely flowing and I was living my best life until a dam was built out of nowhere. The WATER was stopped and everything in my life began to overflow and flood out in every aspect. At first, I felt that the Covid-19 Pandemic was to blame for building a dam that was stopping my positive flow, but after months of living through a non-stop flood, I realized that it was me that had built the dam. 

I was seeing the world through one lens. Everything that was happening, school shutdowns, quarantines, no toilet paper on the shelves, I only saw the negative in every situation. This had a horrible effect on me to be the leader my staff and students deserve, the husband my wife chose to spend the rest of her life with, and most importantly, the strong father my kids needed. My self-care slowly declined. Runs and weight lifting sessions were sporadic, I’d be lucky to get in two a week. Diet, I guess if you mean eating everything and anything I wanted. I wasn’t reading, wasn’t connecting with my crew, my PLN, and spending way too much time just zoning out in front of the TV every night with nothing good fueling my body. 

Whenever something went wrong at home or school it wasn’t my fault, it had to be someone else’s. All of the goals I had set for the year were put on hold because the Pandemic wasn’t allowing me to reach them. I became depressed and self-destructive but of course, it wasn’t my fault, there just wasn’t any other way, it’s because of the Pandemic, right? 

I only saw the world, my world, through my eyes. 

I chose the word PRISM for my #OneWord2021 because I now understand that everything I mentioned above was because of me. I chose to use the Pandemic as an excuse. I wasn’t taking responsibility for my actions and took the easy way out. It took many months living through this to understand I was the cause of my own struggles, but I am grateful to have found see the light from a different lens. 

I chose the word PRISM because of the simple, yet awe-inspiring job they do. PRISMS bring in one bland ray of light, one view, one perspective, but project a plethora of beauty, colors, and a rainbow of amazement out of the other side. PRISMS help us to see more than what is there, other perspectives, alternate avenues. PRISMS help us to see that there’s more than meets the eye, that there is light in the darkness, beauty in catastrophe. 

PRISMS help us to see that there is so much to be grateful for even amidst our world being flipped upside down. 

I will live 2021 looking for the light when everything around me is dark and bland. I will continue to BELIEVE and flow like WATER, and that will lead me to the rainbows that surround us all of the time. I will stop only seeing my ray of light, I will listen more than I speak. I will show gratitude daily because there is so much beauty that has come out of this pandemic and to truly move forward we mustn’t revert to how things were.

I will see the beauty in every situation. 

I will see the beauty in others. 

I will see the beauty in myself. 

Homework Helper - December 2, 2020

 Homework Helper
By, Michael Earnshaw
December 2, 2020
@MikeREarnshaw

I am very fortunate to have a PLN, my crew, that spans the United States and even crosses our borders. I get to speak to educators from all over, with different backgrounds and experiences, to help me learn and grow. I hope they would feel the same about me. We’re able to collaborate and help solve each other’s problems, share stories of successes and laughs about funny times, and also shed tears for situations that may not have personally affected us, yet being in the game we know exactly what our comrade is going through. Throughout all of these conversations, there is one topic, one issue, that always comes up. 

“These kids are not completing their homework! 2020 and remote learning have made it worse than ever! You can’t believe how many kids are failing simply because they’re not completing their asynchronous work!”

I know, you’ve been part of this conversation, we all have. It doesn’t matter what coast you’re from or if you’re educating young minds over the borders, another pandemic the field of education is facing is that many students are not completing independent work. Much of this plague is happening for those students that are learning remotely. It’s not only remote learners, but the majority of our students either have been, currently are, or will be learning remotely at one point of the 2020/2021 school year. This non-completion of homework virus, much like the Covid-19 virus, is something we as educators must try and combat even if we do not have all of the answers. We can put some things in place to help our students, our future, understand the importance of asynchronous work. 

First, the homework debate has been going on for years and we’re not going to get into that with this blog. Every educator has their own differing opinion on the value of homework and honestly, I don’t see the argument coming to a consensus while I’m in the field (I’ve still got about 30 years or so). What we need to look at is the situation our students are currently in. For over a decade now educators have been stating that kids aren’t learning at the rate they used to, that engagement and attention are almost non-existent because we are competing with the technology at kids’ disposal when they’re outside of school hours. Hell, we’ve been competing with this DURING school hours with cell phones serving as mini-computers in the pockets of every child at every grade level. 

So the argument has been that today’s students are disengaged in school because they have too much screen time. Now with the Covid-19 Pandemic what have we done? We’ve added about seven MORE hours of screen time for our students with remote learning. Look, I understand this had to be done, how else could we reach our students when it’s not safe to bring us all together within our walls. We will never be able to combat or lower the amount of screen time students utilize when they’re not with us. If we thought that they had too much screen time before, the 2020/2021 year has now grown insurmountable! Screen time is screen time. It doesn’t matter if it’s video games, movies, Youtube, or remote learning, staring at a screen is screen time. 

Like I said earlier, we can’t control or limit how much screen time a student partakes in when they are on their own time. What we can do is limit how much screen time they utilize when they are with us, whether that is synchronous or asynchronous learning. We already know that during our instruction and class discussions they will be with us via a screen. Educators need to take inventory of how much time there they are requiring. Regardless of the grade level, students, and the educator, must take movement and mindfulness breaks. There’s no perfect formula, but personally, I would need one about every 20 - 30 minutes. 

Now we must look at what we are assigning students to complete for their asynchronous learning. I’m pretty positive that it’s going to include more screen time, especially if we are in a remote learning environment. I’ve talked to many educators and have also seen first hand that much of this asynchronous work is basically a digital worksheet. Let me ask you this, after sitting in a virtual classroom for even an hour, how exciting is it to complete more time on a screen with a worksheet? We knew that when our classrooms were full of students that worksheets weren’t engaging so what makes this time any different? 

Before you assign asynchronous work, or homework as many are calling it, stop and evaluate it yourself. Would it draw you in? Is it engaging? Is it going to assess and enhance what was learned that day or is it simply compliance? Is there any other way this same assessment could be given that wasn’t staring at a screen? Think back to all of the various, out of the box activities you used to use when school was “normal.” Dioramas, poems, songs, artistic paintings or drawings, interpretive dance, podcasting, blogging, and the list goes on and on. Why can’t we still utilize these assessment approaches even during remote learning? The answer is we can, and we must! By having students partake in an activity that is THEIR choice and focuses on THEIR strengths I’m sure we would get more “homework” returned. Plus, it’ll take students away from a screen for a while. Yes, they’ll have to get back on to submit or record what they’re doing, but the focus isn’t simply staring at a screen completing a digital worksheet. 

I don’t know if this is the solution, but I know that I can’t sit around any longer and just complain. I’m willing to try something to see if it will help. If it does, great! If not, then we try another approach. I hope you will too. Now it’s time to get up and take a walk around before I visit a virtual classroom.