Dear GFA Community,
It's only been two weeks since we last saw each other on campus, but those have certainly been two of the strangest weeks I can remember. You and your families have been on my mind, and I can only imagine the range of emotions you've encountered. We miss your kids a lot. We're eager to start school up again next Tuesday, albeit in a different way than we're used to, and begin to reclaim a sense of routine and community.
The purpose of this letter is to help you, as parents, begin to prepare for distance learning next week and in the weeks ahead. I suspect your email inbox is overflowing, so I've organized this communication so you can work backward from the most immediate and practical. I've also offered some bigger picture perspectives that you can review as you see fit.
Timeline
We are adhering to Governor Lamont's "Stay Safe, Stay Home" executive order, and as such, we will not have students and faculty on campus until we are assured by the CDC and other state and local agencies that classroom learning is advisable and safe. While it's difficult to forecast an endpoint with any degree of certainty, we should prepare to embrace a distance learning program for four to six weeks, potentially longer. If conditions improve, we would welcome the opportunity to have students back on campus earlier.
Distance learning resources
So that you can begin to prepare at home, we have designed a distance learning webpage, which features what we anticipate to be the most frequently asked initial questions as well as technology guidance and links for support. This page is designed to offer an overview, and our Division Heads will be in touch this weekend with more specific program detail. By design, we wanted to honor our students' well-deserved break and, with limited exception, we have not been in touch with them. However, feel free to share the distance learning landing page if you find it helpful as your family sets up workspaces and begin to establish routines. Our Upper School students will be hearing from Mr. Jones shortly with similar details, and Middle School students will hear from Mr. Meyer tomorrow. Answers to more general questions related to Covid-19 and our school's response can be found here.
Preparing for what lies ahead
Many of you may be familiar with the design thinking problem-solving framework. It begins with empathy and emphasizes a human-centered approach to thinking and problem solving. It's a particularly useful methodology for startups, where one needs to create, test, and (often) fail before figuring things out. As our community prepares to embark on this next chapter, it will be helpful to adopt a flexible "startup" mindset. To do that effectively, we'll seek to understand what this experience will be like for our students, for you as parents, and for our faculty.
Prototype and test
In the weeks leading up to break, I was inspired by the collaborative work our faculty engaged in as they prepared for next Tuesday's launch. Since that time, we have been in close contact with peer schools on the West Coast, who are a few weeks ahead of us with their distance learning programs. It has been enormously helpful to learn from some of their early findings, and we are adjusting our approach accordingly, learning from some of their missteps and benefitting from their generosity in sharing their hard-earned wisdom. Key takeaways have included the following:
- Students will have to adjust many of the academic routines they've been honing throughout the year in this new format. Moreover, they'll be doing this without the motivation and oversight typically provided more directly by peers and teachers.
- Additionally, students may feel stress, anxiety, and a range of emotions related to the current situation, which makes focus for sustained periods more difficult without the natural breaks that a typical school day provides.
- Flexibility is paramount! Well-intentioned early efforts to replicate a typical school day were overwhelming and have not been successful.
Empathy and the parent experience
As parents, we too should prepare to experience a range of emotions and frustrations in the first few weeks. We are all experiencing a lack of control and a sense of uncertainty, and we can expect that to continue for the first couple of weeks of distance learning. The parent-child relationship can be challenging in the best of times and can potentially become even more strained when we are more deeply engaged in the learning process — and likely working at home ourselves. Perhaps you saw this mother's reaction to the distance learning experience? And that clip was after day two! Knowing that going in, as parents, let's aim to:
- Keep expectations reasonable
- Expect that we are not going to get this "right" — as parents, we need to give ourselves grace and extend that to our kids and their teachers
- We are all going to learn from our mistakes
- Take the pressure off yourself. The onus to teach your kids during distance learning still lies with our GFA faculty. We are not expecting parents to become classroom teachers or even sit with their children for long periods of time during instruction or independent work periods.
This will go on for a while, so as trite as it may sound, we'll need positive coping strategies to get through this; social connection, happy distractions, self-care (sleep, exercise), and caring for others. Our school counselors are prepared to provide support to you and your students, so we hope you will reach out to them as needed.
Empathy and the student experience
One of the many things I will miss in the weeks ahead will be greeting our kids in the morning. We'll find new ways to do that, but I bring it up because what I love even more than getting to say hello to the kids at the door in the morning is observing that moment when they get their first glimpse of a friend coming into school - invariably it triggers a smile, and sometimes an involuntary skip in their step. It's a privilege and a joy to observe that connection.
Our kids will be feeling a sense of loss in the weeks ahead - the loss of the moments that they have with their friends and teachers, the visceral sense of community, and the various rites of passage that they look forward to during spring. And while we will be working hard to preserve and reimagine as many of our spring events as possible, it will be important for us to allow them to grieve - to be angry and sad. Our ability to validate where we can and afford autonomy and opportunities for agency will be essential. You can find some practical advice in this area here and here.
We will get through this
GFA has always been about relationships — between people, and with ideas. Those connections will take on different forms in the weeks ahead, but all of us who work at GFA will be unwavering in our commitment to ensure that relationships remain at the center of what we do. We'll need your partnership in that effort. In the weeks ahead we'll ask for your input and feedback as we work through the complexity of the present moment to make this the best possible experience for our students.
In closing, I want to remind our seniors and their families that we WILL have graduation and we WILL have those senior dinners. When and in what format remains to be seen, but those events will happen. I also want to express gratitude for the many members of the GFA community, parents and alumni, who are working hard as medical professionals, first responders, and with a broad range of agencies addressing this crisis. We're profoundly grateful for the work you and so many others are doing on all of our behalf.
Please know that the GFA family is rooting for your kids. You'll hear much more from us in the days ahead as we figure out, together, how to be social from a distance. We're excited to tell this story together.
Thank you for taking care of yourself and each other.
With gratitude,