Why Teachers Matter Now More Than Ever
Pamela Lamcke, the Founding Executive Director of the Marshall Teacher Residency, reflects on how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the teacher-student relationship. She shares observations from her home-life, as well as from her work training teachers through the Residency. Her reflections underscore why we need student-centered teachers now more than ever.
When I picked up my son, Patrick, from his first day of Kindergarten, he sat stone-faced and silent in the backseat of the car. Five minutes into our drive home, he finally uttered as if shell-shocked, “I don’t understand anything my teacher says.”
We had enrolled Patrick, a native English speaker, in a dual immersion program, where his teacher spoke Spanish for 90 percent of the school day. Those first weeks of Kindergarten were hard. Patrick was working to grasp a new language, a new school, a new teacher, new classmates, new expectations, and a brutal school start time of 7:45am. It took him months to adjust — months of pep talks, meltdowns, and difficult drop offs.
But it was Maestro Anaya, Patrick’s teacher, who really turned things around. Even though Patrick couldn’t understand much of what Maestro said in those early weeks, they built a relationship. Patrick came home with stories about Maestro’s silly hats, the songs they would sing and dance to in class, the garden they planted, and the games of lotería. And he would tell me about Maestro’s expectations in the classroom. Patrick had a hard time concentrating when sitting in a group, so Maestro created a space where Patrick could move himself if he needed to focus and so he wouldn’t distract others. With care and intention, Maestro helped Patrick build a connection to him and to school.
And then in March 2020, school closed. Patrick came home to finish his first year of school with a Chromebook that he barely knew how to use. I felt the loss of Maestro Anaya so deeply.
I am an educator myself — I was a teacher, instructional coach, and school leader before moving into my current role as the Executive Director of the Marshall Teacher Residency. My job is to develop great teachers like Maestro Anaya — teachers who center students in their classrooms, who differentiate to meet each student’s needs, who see and attend to the whole child. Teaching at its core is relational and, suddenly, all of us — teachers, students, parents — were thrust into a world that disrupted the relationships we had carefully cultivated and leveraged.
“Brain development is shaped by consistent, supportive relationships; responsive communications; and modeling of productive behaviors. The brain’s capacity develops most fully when children and youth feel emotionally and physically safe; and when they feel connected, engaged, and challenged.”
- Lisa Flook, “Four Ways Schools Can Support The Whole Child”
Patrick and I muddled through as best we could. We watched and rewatched the videos Maestro made of himself, as we tried to recreate the magic of his classroom at home. But it wasn’t the same. Patrick blossomed under Maestro’s encouragement, care, and challenge, and the virtual learning environment didn’t allow for the same level of attention and insight.
At work, I watched this challenge unfold from the other side; at the Marshall Teacher Residency, our Residents spend a full year deeply immersed in a school community, working alongside an experienced Cooperating Teacher, as they observe, learn, and practice the many skills it takes to be a student-centered, data-driven, whole child, anti-racist educator. But this past year with schools closed, all of that learning and practice happened virtually.
Similar to many educator preparation programs around the country, the majority of our 2020–21 cohort of Residents completed the residency program without ever stepping foot into their school building and without ever having met their students in-person. Although this cohort of Residents persisted through a global pandemic and learned so much about virtual teaching and learning, they also felt deeply the challenge of connecting and engaging meaningfully with students through a screen.
According to a survey conducted by EdSource, 82 percent of teachers report that distance learning has not been effective or only somewhat effective in meeting the social-emotional needs of their students. A study from EdWeek finds that only 37 percent of teachers have interacted with their students daily. How do you build relationships with students when their cameras are off and all you see are black boxes on the screen? How do you connect your lessons to your students’ interests and passions when you have limited opportunities to get to know them outside of class time? How do you support student collaboration and groupwork when students are struggling to be present and engage virtually?
A handful of Residents, however, were given the opportunity to work with their students in-person this spring, and those experiences reaffirmed how impactful teacher-student relationships can be for the teacher, as well as for the student. Cat Vazquez, an English Resident placed at Design Tech High School, had the opportunity to work with small groups of students in-person in April and May, as the school worked to bring students back onto campus.
When asked what new opportunities this in-person teaching experience gave her, Cat shared the value of “seeing live-time reactions of students when I am explaining a lesson to them. It helps me check for understanding when a student looks confused, disinterested, or engaged. I have also been able to have meaningful conversations with students about their personal life which has helped me build relationships with them.”
This spring whenever Cat would share about her experience meeting her students and working with them on campus, her entire face would light up. It was so clear that these in-person opportunities were not only in support of student learning, but also helped Cat to reconnect with why she wanted to become a teacher in the first place — “I didn’t realize until college how understaffed and under-resourced my high school was. I became more passionate about being the teacher I didn’t have growing up.”
Cat is off to a strong start to her teaching career, and she has learned to be incredibly adaptable this year. And yet these relationships with students are what will sustain Cat, and countless educators, through the ups and downs of teaching, and what will retain them in the profession.
We have an opportunity right now, in this moment, to recenter the educational experience around relationships. Our teachers need it, and our students need it. Students across the country experienced a disruption in their learning — whether it was for a few months or for 13 months, as was the case for Patrick.
As we reopen our schools this fall, our students need, and deserve, teachers who will see them as whole students — who will recognize the social and emotional toll the pandemic has taken on them and their families and who will re-engage them with love and compassion. They need teachers who will see them as individuals — who will recognize their individual strengths and growth areas and will meet them where they are as learners. They need teachers who will not shy away from difficult conversations about the world we live in and its injustices, who see and embrace the many facets of our identities as true assets in the classroom. They need teachers who create learning environments that place students at the center, transforming school from what it has been to what it can be.
At the Marshall Teacher Residency, we are fortunate to partner with excellent schools across California who strive towards student-centered classrooms where students grow and thrive as whole people. We have urgent work to do when schools open again in August, as we work together to transform the educational experience of our students.
Pamela Lamcke is the Founding Executive Director of the Marshall Teacher Residency, a one-year educator preparation program that is opening the door for talented, diverse educators who are committed to transforming education through student-centered, innovative classrooms.
Formerly known as the Summit Learning Teacher Residency, the program has trained over 100 educators in public schools across California. Interested in joining the Residency? Learn more about the program and apply.
