Northwestern University Alumni

Transcript:

HELEN KIM: Welcome to a new season of Northwestern Intersections Podcast where we talk to alumni about how key experiences and intersections propel them in their life's work. I'm your host, Helen Kim, with the Northwestern Alumni Association. This month this October, which means schools have been back in session for about a couple of weeks now. 

So the Northwestern Intersections team is kicking off our latest season with a four part back to school miniseries where we'll speak with Wildcats at the intersection of education and the pandemic. Discussing how they are approaching their work in our ever changing virtual world. Our guest for today's episode is Tim Dohrer. 

Tim is the Director of Teacher Leadership in the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University. For 30 years he has worked as a teacher and a teacher leader. And then as a principal of New Trier High School in Winnetka, Illinois. His major areas of research include social and emotional learning, school climate, curriculum theory, teacher education, and leadership. Tim, thank you so much for being here today. 

TIM DOHRER: So glad to be here. Very excited. 

HELEN KIM: So where are you calling in from right now? 

TIM DOHRER: So I'm in Mount Prospect, Illinois, which is a northwest suburb outside of Chicago and about 35 minutes west of Evanston. 

HELEN KIM: Is that where you've been working from during the whole pandemic, since March? 

TIM DOHRER: Yes. In fact, we just had moved here in November. and then a couple months later this all changed. And so I joke that I've been broadcasting from my basement and not being at Northwestern's beautiful campus. But I actually grew up out here. So this is close to home for me. 

HELEN KIM: Great. So as the Director of Master of Science in Education program, SESP. What does your role entail? And what are the responsibilities that come along with it? 

TIM DOHRER: Well, it's really about a combination of visionary leadership, and then nuts and bolts leadership of making sure the program happens every day. And so I told people it's a lot like being a department chair in a high school where it's this great combination of working with teachers, working with students, working with curriculum, and also getting to teach a little bit because I also have a role as an assistant professor. 

So I get to teach three classes a year. So it's this really cool combination of all those things plus the chance to do some thinking about how we should be preparing teachers in a bigger picture kind of way. So I really love that it encompasses all the things that I enjoy about being an educator. 

HELEN KIM: So your area of research is teacher education, teacher leadership, and schooling climate. So right now you're educating future teachers and current TAs how to teach in an environment like this. But you also weren't prepared to teach folks during a pandemic. So how have you prepared yourself for that during this time? 

TIM DOHRER: It's been a real pivot for us to go from what we've all known as being how schools operate, and how teaching and learning is supposed to happen. To what up till now has been a real niche kind of teaching and learning work, which is teaching in remote learning. Very few teachers did full time remote teaching, and very few students have done full time remote learning. 

So for us to go from in person kinds of approaches to this now very remote, distant kind of situation has been a real challenge for both K-12 educators, as well as professors and instructors in higher education. And it was done very quick. I mean, this wasn't like we knew in a year we were all going to be remote, right. 

This was literally in the spring things shut down. And every one of us had to make this amazing pivot, and become online instructors. So that's been a lot of our work. 

A lot of my work has been supporting teachers, supporting instructors, in our program who have had to go from the way we've always done things to something really brand new. And it's important for everyone to remember that it's not like you just take your lesson and do it now on Zoom. If you're going to do remote learning really well, you can't just take what you've been doing in person, and then put it online or record it, and put it out there. It's much more work than that. 

And if you really want to do it well, it means starting from scratch. It means starting over again. I joke that we all kind of did remote learning 1.0 in the spring quarter. And then I think we kind of went to remote learning 2.0 in a lot of ways this summer and this fall, at least here at the University. 

And I think in our K-12 schools we're still figuring out remote learning 2.0. I think we're still in that moment. But we did survival teaching, I'd say, in the spring quarter. And then had some time then to think about the deeper changes we would need to make to a course in the summer and fall to make it really effective. And I think we're doing a pretty good job of it. 

HELEN KIM: So in your opinion, what makes great remote learning standout from just a regular remote learning that you would do on Zoom? 

TIM DOHRER: That's really the trick, I think. Students are always the first ones to give you feedback on those kinds of distinctions. And I think what we learned was that-- to me, the remote learning 1.0 is recording my lecture and putting it up for someone to watch. That's not very different than much of what I might do. 

Although, when you're in person and you're lecturing, you can interact with the audience so much easier. You can pick up on things. And I think it's less canned, if you will. 

But we can pretty much take those lectures and put them online. Or we can take presentations and PowerPoints and do what we would normally do. That's just taking it and putting it in a new format. It's not really changing the instruction. 

When we really think about changing the instruction to get to something deeper, it's thinking about not just what we do live with each other in a room, in a classroom that's teacher centered. It's really thinking about what do we do that's student centered. 

And how do we rethink different aspects of our lessons or what we're teaching so that somebody could go off and actually do, maybe, some independent work. Or how do we do breakout sessions in a way where we're doing much more collaborative work. Or how do we leverage some incredible resources that are maybe available on the internet that I would not bring, actually, to my classroom, maybe, but I would bring to this environment. 

But I think the other piece is that it's not just about remote learning. It's about remote learning during a pandemic. There's a difference there as well. 

I think the remote learning during a pandemic means that we also have to rethink how we teach because the person on the other side of the screen might be dealing with trauma, might be dealing with their own illness with COVID, or with something else. We have students who have children, and significant others, and people they're supporting, connectivity issues, the digital divide that we're certainly seeing in a stark way right now. So there's a lot of other considerations that come along with remote learning during a pandemic or during a crisis. 

HELEN KIM: That's a really good point because remote learning is not something that's new to our world. But in the past, it's a choice that you can make to take remote learning instead of going to classes in person. But right now, for most of us, that is the only option that we have. And people, like you said, come with their own circumstances, own trauma that are going on in their household. 

TIM DOHRER: So what we can expect from students is a little different. So again, that's that consideration that I feel like all teachers need to really be in tune with their students, and create a student centered classroom. However it's being delivered, it needs to be student centered. And I think when we're teaching during a pandemic that suddenly shifts and changes the kinds of things we might have done a year ago. 

If we were just talking about remote learning, we would think about that remote classroom and that experience differently than what it is right now. Which is really-- we are still in the midst of a crisis. We are all experiencing stress, anxiety, and trauma. 

Likened it to a slow motion car accident. That we are still in the car. We are still in the process of going through this traumatic experience. And we have to keep that in mind when we're teaching and learning remotely. 

HELEN KIM: And what are some creative ways you've came up with to teach your students or teach colleagues and whatnot? 

TIM DOHRER: We've had a lot of practice now. And we're seeing a lot of interesting things being done. One is the use of time. 

So I think one of the things that's interesting about this conversation-- about synchronous and asynchronous. So synchronous is when we're teaching live and in person. Asynchronous is when someone could watch a video later or do something. 

And by the way, I've kind of joked about this at the beginning of the pandemic. But I mean, we've been doing remote learning, teaching and learning, forever. It's called homework. 

We've always had moments in our classrooms. We say to students, hi, the bell's going to ring. The class is going to end. I'd like you to go off and do something on your own. And come back tomorrow, and we'll talk about it. 

So we've had students reading. We've had students writing. We've had students creating projects. We've had students even meeting with other students on their own outside of class time. 

So this class time, non-class time thing, asynchronous, synchronous, we do that all the time. We've been doing that for hundreds of years. So that's not changed. 

What's changed that I think has been really useful is thinking about when we are together, how are we using that time. So that time is valuable. We also know that that time is fleeting in the sense that we don't want to be on Zoom calls for three hours. That's mind numbing. 

So what we've done in our classes, which tend to run three hours, is we're having a lot of instructors who are playing with-- let's get together at the beginning of class, talk, do some things together. And then let's break out, and do either small breakout rooms, or you guys go off and I'll see you in an hour. Come back in an hour. 

We're seeing some creative use of time where we're breaking things up into 45 minute chunks. We're giving people longer time, longer breaks. Go take a break, get outside, go see some daylight, go for a walk. Whatever it is, come back. So we're thinking about it that way. 

I'm seeing a lot of creativity in leveraging the tools that we have in Google Hangouts or Zoom to have breakout sessions. To use the interactive whiteboard to do some things. There are a lot of apps that I'm seeing us use. 

I used Jamboard, Google Jamboard, in my class that I was teaching earlier this year. It's a great way to get students putting ideas up on a board and being creative and interactive with each other. We're doing a lot of online polling and using those polling services either that are embedded or external. 

Here's the other that's kind of exciting. When I was a classroom teacher, one of the best things that I loved to do was to give my students the chalk and have them come up to the board and write on the chalkboard. And they thought that was so cool. I get to write a chalkboard. I thought that was just for teachers. 

I'm really dating myself because it's a chalkboard, rather than a whiteboard. But that was always a great moment. I always loved having students come up and write on the board. 

We can do that so easily now. We can just give one of our students the control of Zoom. And they can show their screen. And they can show what they're looking at. Or they can show what they're thinking in this really interactive way. So that it's not just one person who's doing all the work. it's everyone in the room who can get involved and be engaged in that way. 

So I think there's some real creative teaching that's going on, and some really cool things that we're trying. And seeing what works, and then seeing the stuff that doesn't work. And then saying, well, I'm not going to try that again. But we're trying it. And we're starting to create a community where we're sharing with each other what works and what doesn't. 

HELEN KIM: You know what's fascinating? Something that I realized while you were talking, it sounds like educators are using what they had in the past, like whiteboards, chalkboards, and a bunch of apps that were already there. But they're being resourceful, and using those as creative ways to educate their students. And I think the word resourceful is the best way to describe how educators are using these resources to their best advantage right now. 

TIM DOHRER: I agree. It's actually one of the things that we don't talk enough about, why it's amazing to be a teacher. I mean, one of the words I've been using quite a bit during this last six months is flexibility. I mean, that's the same thing-- resourceful, flexibility-- teachers are so flexible. 

They have to be because every day the students going to walk in and their hamster died the night before. Or they've got a question about how something works in the world. And you never know what's going to come out of the mouths of these kids. It's fantastic, right? And so you have to be flexible in thinking about that. 

The other word I've used a lot is creativity. And we don't talk about this with teachers and the teaching profession. Teaching is this wonderfully creative enterprise. 

And something that I don't think I was aware of, how often I was going to tap into my own creativity. I have a background as a writer and as a poet. And you think about that-- the most creative thing you can do is write a poem-- I mean, my goodness-- or create a piece of art. But teaching is like that. 

Teaching is about taking the world we have around us and fashioning something new out of it. Whether that's how to learn about math, or it's a new way to understand biology, or how to write a beautiful poem. We're constantly inventing, and reinventing, and being creative. 

And my goodness, that is something we don't talk about with the teaching profession. We think about it as like, oh, I got to manage the kids, or these kinds if things. I've got to grade papers. But there is this creative act that happens daily when I'm interacting with kids. But also the creation of lessons, and assignments, and really interesting ways to assess kids and how they're learning. 

And then in the moment-- teaching a lesson-- we always joke, it's the lesson that you planned versus the lesson you taught versus the lesson that's learned. But I mean, the one you plan versus the one you taught is often very different. Because in the moment, as teachers, we make these decisions to change the lesson a little bit. Or go off on a tangent from the plan that we had. 

All of this at its core is about creativity, resourcefulness, and flexibility. It's really what it means to be a teacher. We sometimes talk about it as the art of teaching, as opposed to the science of teaching. And I don't know sometimes about what those terms mean. 

But for me, there is this sort of needing to go in and improvising. Whether it's in the act of teaching, or the act of interacting with somebody, or the act of designing a lesson, or an activity, or whatever, that I just love about being a teacher. 

HELEN KIM: There's no right or wrong answer to this question. But how do you envision the future of education will look like in, let's say, in the next year following these radical changes that are happening right now? 

TIM DOHRER: There are several. Number one, teaching in a remote fashion like we are is going to be absolutely not only accepted, it's going to be expected. Especially for those of us living in areas where we have things like snow days. 

I hate to tell this to students, but I think the days of snow days might be over because we've shown that we can educate kids when we're not in the school building. So I think that there are some changes that are going to happen in terms of how we think about where school can occur and when school can occur that will begin to shift and change things like snow days. 

I think there's going to be a change in how we think about the calendar. When school happens, either during the day, number of hours and minutes, and things like that. We've always talked about seat time in schooling. And I think seat time is going to go out the window because we're showing that we don't have to have butts in the seat. We can have kids out learning at a lot of different times and a lot of different parts of the day. 

I think there's going to be a huge change in teacher education. We no longer can only assume that our teachers are going to be teaching in physical spaces. We now have to teach teachers how to teach in person and how to teach remotely. 

That's going to double the amount of work we need to do in teacher education, both pre-service, which is learning how to be a teacher the first time. And in-service, which is once you're a teacher, learning those things. We're all going to have to get better at being able to do both of those things. 

I also think one of things we talked about earlier, which I think is really wonderful, is that some of these educational tools-- and these are apps, and software programs, and websites-- that were maybe being used as a side gig by some teachers, are going to be used throughout the school day. And I think the digitization of teaching, as well as the digitization of learning, has happened now. And is going to not go away. And so we're going to continue to leverage those things. 

I think it's also exposed some of the weaknesses. Certainly, the goal of one-to-one devices for a student has taken on gigantic significance right now. And we have exposed the digital divide between the haves and the have nots. 

And the haves and have nots are not just students and families, but schools. We've had to find ways to get, literally, thousands, and thousands, and thousands of kids devices that didn't have those devices a year ago. And we continue to see that there are families with four or five kids, or parents and kids, who have one device that they're all trying to access. And that just doesn't work. 

We've got to have more of those devices being available. And schools and others have to figure that out. So I think we're going to see more devices being available to kids at home as well as in schools. So that boulder is going to continue to roll as we continue to get to the more digital side of teaching and learning. 

HELEN KIM: And Tim, so far you've done a lot of hard work trying to be creative, resourceful as an educator yourself, but during this time how have you been taking care of yourself at home, after work, just with your family, and trying to raise kids during this time at home? 

TIM DOHRER: Well, I think about this a lot because much of my work with teachers and administrators is around teacher self-care and educate self-care. And that was before the pandemic. Let's remember the life of a teacher is hard. 

I mean, it is physically demanding. It's emotionally demanding. It's intellectually demanding. 

We don't oftentimes talk about, are we taking care of ourselves as educators. It's a helping profession. Just like nursing is or medicine, you can burn out very quickly. 

And then we add, now, the layer of a pandemic and this pivot that I was talking about. I really struggled the first two to three months of the pandemic. I was on Zoom eight hours a day, day after day after day. 

And the weather was not great here, and so I wasn't outside. And I wasn't taking breaks. I had a lot of headaches at night. I couldn't sleep. I had a lot of issues with sleep going on, as many people have. 

I've been very lucky that I have not been ill during this time. But I lost my father during the pandemic, here, not because of the pandemic. He died of heart failure. So we've had to manage how do you lose someone in your life during the pandemic-- has been really, really rough. So it's been ups and downs and all over the place. 

I am at a healthier place now because I think I've learned how to manage it. I definitely take more breaks. I don't schedule as many things, maybe two or three things a day. That I'm not on Zoom for eight or nine hours if I can help it. And so I'm really forcing myself to do that. 

I'm forcing myself to get exercise and be more physical. And I think that's really important. And I'm trying to figure out things to do in terms of hobbies and other things that are not screen based. And it's very hard. We do a lot of screen time in our lives. And so I'm trying to find ways to do something other than that to manage all of it. 

HELEN KIM: I just want to say thank you for sharing how you've been taking care of yourself because it's inspiring. And I'm so sorry to hear about your father. And I just have so much respect for educators and teachers, especially right now. 

Because despite what they're going through, it's not like that they can show that to the students, ever. Even before the pandemic it's hard. You just gotta go to sleep, come back the next morning, and just have a fresh face on. And make sure these students and kids are getting the education that they deserve. 

TIM DOHRER: Well, one of the things we know from research is that people feed off each other. There actually is a part of our brain and nervous system that responds to facial features, and body language, and tone of voice, and feelings, and emotions. And teachers know this. 

They innately recognize very quickly that if you are a stressed out teacher, your kids will be stressed out. If you bring some energy to your classroom from the minute you step in and they see that, your students will bring that same energy to you. 

And so this is why we do have to worry about teacher mental health. It's not just about, we should care about teachers because we should. But we should also care that that teacher is going to have a huge impact on the 30 students that they're standing in front of. Or the 150 that they're going to see during the course of the day, not to mention their colleagues, and families, and others. 

We bring our selves to these interactions. And what we know now from all the brain research that's been done is that there's a scientific reason why we connect or not with each other, or we are affected by those things. And teachers are in a very important position, especially with young kids. Even adolescents, they're in a very important moment in their lives, and every interaction matters, every interaction counts. And so what I do in those interactions is critically important. 

So I have to be able to take care of myself. Everybody should have a mental health plan. In fact, a colleague of mine, Dr. Tom Golebiewski, who I work with on a lot of this work, loves to use this term which is, we talk about physical hygiene. We've got to brush our teeth, and washed ourselves, and take care of ourselves in this physical way. But we don't talk about mental health hygiene. 

And so just like I would say, how many times do you brush your teeth a day? Did you shower? These kinds of things-- We want to ask questions about what are we doing everyday to take care of our mental health. What is our plan? 

Is it going to be I'm going to take a walk every morning, or every afternoon, or every lunch break-- I'm going to do that. Or is there a time in our day when we take some deep breaths. And plant our feet in the ground for a moment and just be quiet for a few moments. Or maybe we go out and play a game of basketball. 

There's so many things that can get us to a place where we get back into a state of calm, or a state of happiness, or a state of flow, or whatever that is. We have to think about how do we do that every day. And every single one of us needs to really reflect on what do I do every day that recharges my battery. That it gets me back to a stasis point where I'm ready to handle the regular or irregular stress and trauma that the world throws at us every single day. 

And so that's something I hope everybody does, but especially our educators that they have that plan. 

[MUSIC PLAYING] 

HELEN KIM: Thank you for tuning into today's episode of Northwestern Intersections. For more information about our podcast, please visit northwestern.edu/intersections. Until next time, stay safe and take care of yourself and your families.