Author: all4sc

Teachers need social and emotional development as much as their students do, says Veronica Thomas, a mathematics teacher and STEAM coordinator at Fairfield Central High School, in Episode 5 of the ElevatED4SC video podcast. The latest episode is now available with the video and audio versions on YouTube, ITunes and Spotify. 

Thomas says it is important to provide days for teachers to focus on their mental health needs. “Our teachers already have, just like children, lots of burdens and things that they carry at home. When we come to school, we leave our things at home and we take on the load of our students, so they don’t have to worry about things for that hour and thirty minutes they’re in our classroom.”

In the vodcast, Thomas focuses on three necessities for teachers to feel supported so they can, in turn, support their students. Along with mental health support, teachers need relevant professional development opportunities, with the chance to see how other teachers innovate in their classrooms.

The ElevatED4SC episode also features a student perspective. Linda Funkhouser, a senior at Lexington High School, shares the opportunities she is able to access through her school district, Lexington One. Linda is involved with the Center for Law and Global Policy at River Bluff High School, as well as with the school’s Historical Preservation Society. 

Funkhouser is able to explore her passions for law and policy as a high school student due to the career-building opportunities the  school district provides. When asked how she sees the future of education in South Carolina, she points to these job-based classes. 

“Not only is there a law center, but students have access to a medical center where you can get a CNA certification while still a high school student, or become certified in welding, or cosmetology. These certifications lead to success later in life,” says Funkouser. “I think these classes are important to implement in every school district in South Carolina.” 

One major step forward, according to Funkhouser, would be providing programs like these in every school or district in the state. “We need to advocate for these opportunities. Internships are everywhere. They just have to be shown to everybody,” she says. 

Funkhouser is joined by Merrit Jones, fellow at ALL4SC and adviser at Student Voice. Jones was also part of River Bluff’s Center for Law and Global Policy when she was in high school. She shares that the “work-based experience for me was vital. I got to have access to internships during the school day – and we know that that access piece is so important.” 

Jones goes on to describe her recent experience working with students in Fairfield County several of whom are students of Veronica Thomas. Jones says, “Students want access to education that is related to their interests where they get to explore different job opportunities; where they get to start thinking about and exploring passions before they ever go on to enter the workforce or go into higher education.” 

These opportunities should be available to students across the state, no matter where they live. The key is providing access to all students. “Experience in high school really should allow you to explore and figure out what you like and what you don’t like,” says Jones. “For Linda to know that she cares about history before she ever goes off to college is great. We want to give students some exposure to careers before they have to try 12 different majors.” 

Read more about what Jones had to say about the importance of student voices in this Post and Courier article.

Jones and Funkhouser agree that providing this access has to begin with local businesses offering partnerships to support and grow their communities. Jones says, “Innovative partnerships are happening across the state, and there are businesses and organizations that want to work with schools. We just need to create systems to help this happen statewide.” 

ALL4SC is the producing partner for the ElevatED4SC vodcast series. ALL4SC – Accelerating Learning & Leadership in South Carolina – is a University of South Carolina initiative advocating a whole child approach to education. Other partners in producing the vodcast series include UofSC’s College of Education, UofSC’s College of Information and Communications, and Tri-County Cradle to Career Collaborative.

ElevatEd4SC features success stories illustrating how education transformation is already happening in some South Carolina schools. Two 18-minute episodes are released monthly. Previous episodes and show notes are at ElevatED4SC.com. Viewers and listeners can also learn about what other states are doing to meet similar challenges and find out what a whole child, cradle-to-career approach to education would look like. The series host is Roshanda Pratt, a Midlands-area veteran broadcast professional.

Bridging the digital divide means more than just bringing the internet to a home’s front door, says Jim Stritzinger, director of the state Broadband Office. Stritzinger says it’s important to talk about broadband access in two ways. One is physical infrastructure. The other is adoption that folds in affordability  and digital skills.

Stritzinger focuses on these topics of digital literacy and digital inclusion in an interview on the ElevatED4SC video podcast that  drops on Thursday, March 17. The video and audio podcast versions of the episode are available on YouTube, ITunes and Spotify. 

Stritzinger says it’s often the students who bring home the technology knowledge to their parents and caregivers. While students need the technology to succeed in school, adults also need to understand it in order to apply for a job, pay bills or participate in medical appointments. 

“The thing that keeps me up at night is thinking about our six-year-olds who have no internet access at home. Because if we adults don’t get this done fast, we’re going to  wind up with 16- year-olds who are unemployable,” says Stritzinger. “There’s a fierce ‘urgency of now’ to really connect and get it done.”

One major step forward, according to Stritzginer, is knowing where the gaps in broadband availability are, down to students’ individual addresses. 

“State agencies are working together like never before,” says Stritzinger. “We map very accurately where we have broadband coverage and where we don’t. With the South Carolina Department of Education, we’ve actually mapped every single school student. That’s 785,000 street addresses on this map. So we know exactly where the kids live and where the infrastructure doesn’t exist.”

Bridging these gaps and building a resilient community depend on families having access to both high speed internet and the right types of devices to meet their needs, says Phyllis Martin, CEO of Tri-County Cradle to Career Collaborative which works to ensure all children reach their full potential in school and in life, cradle to career.

In this ElevatED4SC episode released during Digital Inclusion Week, Martin lays out the insights gathered from a community-wide survey that took stock of the Tri-County region’s needs related to bouncing back from the pandemic. 

“We looked at what was most on people’s minds when it came to resiliency and how would we, as a region, ensure that kids and families were going to come back better,” Martin said in the ElevatED4SC  interview. “Through our qualitative and quantitative data, the issue of access to broadband and digital inclusion rose to the surface.”

Martin points to four specific needs uncovered in the research. First, access to high speed internet is a must. Second, families must have the right number and the right types of devices in their home. Third, digital literacy is necessary for people to know how to use and troubleshoot with the technology. Fourth, advocacy is necessary to reach the goal of digital inclusion for everyone in the community.

To hear more of the interviews with Martin and Stritzinger, listen to or watch the 18-minute ElevatED4SC vodcast and learn more about what they have to say about digital inclusion and the critical need to get broadband – and the necessary devices  –  into every South Carolina home.

Barnett Berry and Patrick Kelly dive deeper into the need for teacher leadership after Episode 3.

Hardly a day goes by without another headline on the challenges facing South Carolina’s teaching profession.

The state’s public schools are facing worsening teacher shortages. Now after almost two years of pandemic-induced disruptions in teaching and learning, a December 2021 news report  portrays South Carolina teachers exhausted by “unmanageable workloads” and demoralized by “lack of respect” from parents and policy leaders.

While the number of teacher vacancies is reported to be “dramatically rising,” Barnett’s SC-TEACHER research has shown that policymakers and practitioners do not have access to the most accurate data. This often leads to rehashed solutions for misdiagnosed problems facing the state’s teaching profession.

Unfortunately, the scope of the teacher shortage was growing before the pandemic began. As Patrick asserted in a 2019 blog, the house was on fire as teachers took home low salaries (with a state median of $49,000 at the time) and faced daily challenges resulting from the lack of professional autonomy.

Over the last decade or so, South Carolina’s political leaders and teacher groups have debated teachers and teaching. This includes a failed 2019 bill that addressed a wide range of policies from school governance issues to improving student job-training to raising starting teacher pay.  While the proposed legislation would have removed a few state-required standardized tests for students, it did not include a number of teacher concerns such as large class sizes.

Too often, proposals to address teacher shortages are just not grounded in the evidence on what matters most. The modest salary increases, slight shifts in student testing, and recent proposals to guarantee 30 minutes of unencumbered time for elementary school teachers represent important policy steps to take. Yet they are not sufficient.

As Patrick pointed out poignantly, “simply put, the expectations and requirements for great teaching have changed, but the basic structure of the work day has not.” We could not agree more with Sen. Greg Hembree (R-Horry) and Chair of the Senate Education Committee, who told us recently, “It is time to stop nibbling around the edges” of school reform and the teaching profession.

The evidence is compelling, grounded in studies conducted locally, nationally, and globally. Recent research from SC-TEACHER reveals almost half of South Carolina’s teachers who their schools in 2020-21 did not leave the profession. The research team, led by Tommy Hodges, found that teachers moved to another district primarily because they sought stronger administrative support.

Other research including this 2019 study by the Learning Policy Institute have shown that the right kind of working conditions — most notably time for teachers to learn from each other and opportunities to lead (while still teaching) — have the greatest impact on retention as well as school performance.

Now a new SC-TEACHER paper, written (by Barnett, Linda Darling-Hammond, and Tony Mackay) for the 2021 International Summit on the Teaching Profession, points to evidence on how teacher leadership has accelerated student learning in the midst of the pandemic. It also addresses how school systems across the globe develop and use teachers as leaders. Lessons from across the globe spell out how schools need to: (1) redesign teaching schedules and school structures; (2) rethink professional learning for the spread of teaching expertise; (3) create more space for innovations from teachers; and (4) reconsider how teaching expertise is recognized, utilized, and valued.

We can do this. A 2020 study from SC-TEACHER found that a significant percentage of our state’s teachers had discovered innovations in student assessments, project-based learning, and family engagement during the pandemic. They were ready for more leadership in the return to the new normal of schooling. We could:

• Apply state-of-the-art technology and tools that save time not only to help teachers problem-solve instructional challenges but also to teach students across schools;

• Use micro-credentials and other performance assessments to recognize and reward teachers for learning and leading in areas that have clear relevance to a teacher’s specific job duties and areas of expertise;
• Reinvent the calendar (the school day and/or year) as teachers work on different contracts to create expanded and more personalized student learning as well as more opportunities for educators to lead;
• Reduce teaching loads for some of the state’s top teachers (including over 6,000 who are National Board Certified) so they can lead without leaving the classrooms (e.g., teacherpreneurs); and
• Rethink the teacher salary schedule to include opportunities for additional pay for increased responsibility, leadership roles, and expanded impact as well as a menu of financial and non-financial incentives to work in priority schools, subjects, and grade levels.

All of these proposed actions are already implemented somewhere in the U.S. and around the globe – and yes, even some in our state. Three school districts — Charleston, Fairfield, and Pickens — are collaborating with SC-TEACHER now to reimagine the education profession in South Carolina. With support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the UofSC team is working with district leaders, teachers, and principals to better understand  how people, programs, and dollars can be reallocated to reimagine the education professions to accelerate deeper, more equitable learning for students in the aftermath of the pandemic.

More teachers could have time to lead if the many non-teaching educators taught students at least some of the time. Teachers could have more time to lead if our school systems drew on student teachers, paraprofessionals, and instructional coaches and specialists more strategically. We could accelerate student learning in the aftermath of the pandemic if we begin to think of teacher teams — moving beyond the “one teacher per one classroom” model of schooling. (See the ground-breaking work of Arizona State University’s Next Education Workforce.)

Public schools everywhere are facing a future of rapid change, intensifying complexity, and growing uncertainty. Research advances in neuroscience and the developmental and learning sciences point to new forms of educator learning that require teachers to learn more from each other.

Now more than ever, it is time for teachers to lead the transformation of their professional learning and their profession — and for policy leaders to help them do so. The young people of South Carolina deserve no less.

Columbia, SC … A new video podcast series releases its third episode this week to elevate the conversation around education transformation in South Carolina. Dropping on March 3, this episode of the ElevatED4SC vodcast series focuses on teachers’ innovations and creativity in leading their classrooms during the pandemic. 

The video and audio versions of the series are available on YouTube, ITunes and Spotify. Two 18-minute episodes are released monthly. Previous episodes and show notes are at ElevatED4SC.

ElevatEd4SC, launched Feb. 3, features success stories illustrating how education transformation is already happening in some South Carolina schools. Viewers and listeners can also learn about what other states are doing to meet similar challenges and find out what a whole child, cradle-to-career approach to education would look like. 

ALL4SC is the producing partner for the vodcast series. ALL4SC – Accelerating Learning & Leadership in South Carolina – is a University of South Carolina initiative advocating a whole child approach to education. Other partners in producing the vodcast series include UofSC’s College of Education, UofSC’s College of Information and Communications, and Tri-County Cradle to Career Collaborative.

Two returning contributors join the first segment of the vodcast to share stories of teachers leading their classrooms in creative ways. In Segment One, Merrit Jones, ALL4SC fellow and advisor to national nonprofit Student Voice, shares initiatives that several teachers are leading on their own. She continues to discuss how strong teacher leadership depends upon hearing student perspectives on how they learn best. “Good teaching relies on good communication with students and responding to that feedback in real time,” says Jones.

Contributor Christina Melton is a veteran educator with more than 28 years of experience ranging from classroom teacher to district superintendent. She says that in order to implement the idea of  whole child education, a whole community must work together. 

“I would call upon our community members,” says Melton, asking the community to consider “what resources do you have available that you could contribute to the work of a district where you live? So often there’s so many great things happening in districts and communities where maybe the school district doesn’t know about it. Or maybe you tried one time, four or five years ago, and it wasn’t successful…. Come back, give us an opportunity because the needs being revealed now are so much different.” 

Speaking on teacher leadership during the pandemic in Segment Two, Barnett Berry shares research that surveyed every South Carolina teacher. Berry, a regular ElevatED4SC contributor, ALL4SC founder and UofSC research professor in the College of Education, notes that these teachers “were highly stressed, but they were also highly innovative. One out of three teachers reported they found new innovations and project-based learning, new forms of student assessment, new ways to engage parents…. We have not capitalized enough on the enormous assets in the brilliance that so many teachers have.” 

Additionally in Segment Two, National Board Certified Teacher Patrick Kelly of Richland District 2 joins Berry to share stories of how teachers have become innovative leaders of their classrooms, exploring how educating the whole child relies on strong teacher leadership. 

“By any metric, teachers are the backbone of South Carolina, whether we are looking at economic growth and development by training and preparing the next generation of workers, whether it is socially by providing students with a safe environment – and oftentimes, access to the only real social services that they have in their life,” says Kelly. “Since I teach AP US government, I would also say civically that we’re preparing the next generation of citizens for active and engaged citizenship.” 

Berry and Kelly also discuss a recently released paper for the International Summit on the Teaching Profession that Berry wrote to address how teachers lead in classrooms and schools around the world.
The series host is Roshanda Pratt, a broadcast journalist with 20 years of experience and a trusted voice on local television, radio, and podcasts. In each episode, regular contributors engage with guests who will include students, classroom teachers, policy makers, parents, and business and community leaders.

After each episode, we hear from one of our guests giving a little more perspective about what education looks like from where they sit. Here’s what Christina Melton reflected on following Episode Two‘s conversation.

I’m an educator with classroom experience as well as experience in leadership as a principal and district superintendent. I have a daughter who teaches. I have many family members in education. I’m a grandmother. I have a grandson in school already. I have many lenses sitting in this seat. 

The stories and challenges we’re seeing in today’s world now aren’t necessarily new or unusual. Our schools operate in much the same way they did in the agrarian and industrial eras. Not much has changed from the 60s, 70s, and 80s. 

Now, because of the COVID pandemic, we know now we’ve got to approach this conversation about education challenges in a different way. The opportunity is available if we choose to elevate our vision and elevate our imagination. 

Our conversations need to start with teachers in our classrooms. Teachers are leaving our classrooms – but not because they have lost the desire to teach. They are leaving for a variety of other reasons that could lead to innovation if we choose to listen and dare to change a system that has served its time. Teachers can identify resources they need. Some of the requests that we have heard from them are directly aligned with their ability to do their work and their interest in supporting the individual needs of each student.  

We need social workers. We need mental health personnel. We need guidance counselors in schools working directly with students individually and in small groups. We need time for our teachers to prepare lessons, materials, and resources.  We need time for our teachers to collaborate with one another. We need resources readily available to break this agrarian cycle that goes back decades. 

Last fall, an ALL4SC research project explored the experiences of teachers on the front lines thanks to a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. More than 70 district Teachers of the Year came together for the annual Teacher Forum conference in Myrtle Beach where our team heard these teachers’ deep, raw, and true stories.

Our ALL4SC team interviewed many of these teachers, and they were so honest with us. One of the most powerful examples came from a teacher who saw a child falling asleep in class. For this teacher, it wasn’t about punishing this student. It was about understanding this child’s home environment and her emotional state. 

This teacher said, “One child is not sleeping…she’s not sleeping at home. She sleeps in my class every day. I let her sleep. When she wakes up, it’s lunch time because she’s hungry. So guess what I do during lunchtime? We sit, we eat together, but I teach her while she’s eating, because that’s when she’s paying attention to me. The teacher goes on to describe how many school personnel are involved with this child’s situation but the need is to look at the child mentally and physically in addition to academically. We’re doing that whole guidance counselor thing and trying to do that. But the ball gets dropped, but that’s not an excuse.”

This is one child, one teacher, one classroom, one school. One story that needs to be heard and one conversation that needs to extend. 

Listen to Episode Two of ElevatED4SC to hear more of these stories and listen to this full conversation where Roshanda Pratt, Barnett Berry and I share the words from more teachers and discuss how a whole child approach to education can make a difference for our system of education in South Carolina.