These are ideas, principles and norms for us to think about, engage with, talk about, revisit, revise, and expand as we work together in the time of COVID-19.

Principles for Teaching & Learning:

We want to begin by acknowledging how much we all have gone through to get here and how much we are still going through. We continue to be in a challenging and unique time and each of us face these events in our own ways, with our unique set of emotions, needs, and goals for ourselves. Given this, we want to name some guiding principles to help us build a just, humane community.

Principles (Adapted from Brandon Bayne, UNC-Chapel Hill)

1. The humane option is the best option.

• We are going to prioritize supporting each other as humans.

• We are going to prioritize our community in decision-making

2. We will remain flexible and adjust to the situation.

• Even after being in this for some time, we cannot predict where this is going and what we’ll need to adapt

• Everybody needs support and understanding

STEP Norms for Working Together 

It’s important to remember in teaching that we are all learners together and this is especially true in this moment. Things will change as we learn about what works best for us as we learn as a community. Be patient and kind with us, with each other, and yourself.

In STEP we are preparing you to teach in middle schools and high schools. Typically there are norms in these spaces that we do not create. We recognize that these norms are sometimes situated in within White Supremacy Culture. Within this complexity, we have created a self-assessment tool titled Norms for Teaching Spaces to help you navigate norms in teaching spaces. We will use these norms as a launching point in STEP, although do expect norms to be developed in each of your courses.

In addition to Norms in Teaching Spaces, please also be aware of the below:

Online Spaces

1. Keep your camera on.

STEP is a community and being present with one another is an important part of developing community. Being in virtual spaces does not give us the same communication opportunities as we have when in physical classrooms. We need, to the best of our abilities, to be able to read body language cues and know we are each engaged with one another and the content. If something is going on that will impact your online participation, communicate with your instructor.

2. Keep your microphone on mute unless you are speaking

This will cut out potential background noise and will help us all be able to hear who is speaking.

3. Make liberal use of the chat function with the whole group, not with individual people

This is a great space to ask questions, insert comments, and let everyone know you have something to say. Individual side chats can be distracting and have an even greater negative impact on classroom community than side chats in physical in-person class spaces.

4.   Do not apologize for kids (and other beings) entering Zoom frames

We are all putting forward our best selves while we work and engage with school remotely and the last thing any of us need is the additional stress of apologizing for being in our own spaces. Remember, we are guests in one another's spaces. Pets are also welcome!

In-Person

If you are sick, we ask that you stay home and if you are COVID positive, please do not return to in-person until you test negative. The UW provides guidance for what to do if you do test positive.

With masking, we ask that you put your community first in your decisions.

Even though masks will be optional for the vaccinated, we continue to welcome and encourage mask-wearing for everyone during the spring quarter. You can pick up free masks at a variety of locations on each UW campus. People need to (or choose to) wear masks for a wide range of reasons, so please do your very best to respect the needs and choices of others.

We are a diverse community with many different needs. Some of us live in households with children who cannot yet be vaccinated. Some of us live in households with people who are at risk because of age or immunity. Some of us are at risk ourselves. Therefore, we also put forth this statement from the UW Disability Studies Program:

Masks are very highly recommended for all students, faculty, staff, and other members of the Disability Studies community who attend in-person class meetings, office hours, and in-person events and activities. Continuing the use of masks will help to make our learning spaces and workplaces as accessible as possible and to protect everyone, especially at this time when there are fewer COVID safety precautions on and off campus.

  In agreeing to support each other by wearing a mask, we recognize that there are disparate experiences of this pandemic that are shaped by underlying social inequities. Elderly people, immunocompromised people, working-class people, and people of color have died at disproportionately high rates. As Black disabled activist Imani Barbarin notes, “COVID-19 and the subsequent safety guidelines have made overt the long-standing institutional and systemic inequalities that span across our culture, from the medical system to workplace policies. These complexities are exacerbated when race and other marginalized identities come into play, particularly for Black disabled people.”

  We need to practice collective care rather than shifting the burden onto those who are most impacted. In the face of what epidemiologist Gregg Gonsalves names the “national policy of organized abandonment,” we support his call for “accompaniment as policy… [in which] we walk together with those whom others would rather forget, until they tell us their journey is done.”

Imani Barbarin, “The Pandemic Tried to Break Me, but I Know My Black Disabled Life Is Worthy,”Cosmopolitan, March 11, 2022.

Gregg Gonsalves, “The Biden Administration Turns Its Back on the Pandemic: Structural Violence, Social Murder, and Our National Policy of Organized Abandonment,” The Nation, March 10, 2022.

Ed Yong, “How Did This Many Deaths Become Normal?” The Atlantic, March 8, 2022.

Guiding Principles for Developing & Growing our Teaching Practice

As we develop and grow our teaching practice, it is essential that we strive for and talk in ways that further socially just teaching. This involves:

1. Positioning students & families positively and powerfully

Teachers must position students as sense-makers and knowledge-generators, who desire to invest and succeed in school. This involves noticing children, building relationships with them and their families, valuing their perspectives, and attending to their thinking, curiosities, and capabilities. Thus, teaching requires reciprocity and relationships if we are to serve as the witnesses children deserve in school.

2. Enacting teaching practices grounded in research and knowledge of learners

Teaching is both intellectual work and a craft.  Deep knowledge of students, content and pedagogy, along with creativity and passion, fuels both learning and teaching.

3. Designing classrooms and instruction for equitable learning

Teachers must design equitable learning environments in which all children are engaged in robust and consequential learning. The physical layout of classrooms, instructional materials available, and ways of organizing participation are crucial factors in students’ opportunities to access content and skills and demonstrate their understanding and raise new questions. 

 4. Disrupting systems of oppression

Teachers’ instruction and student learning is always conducted within the context of larger social systems, structures, and hierarchies. Our work together involves making the systems and structures surrounding teaching learning visible, thinking about how they impact individuals and groups, and working together toward equity and advocacy.

5. Disrupting deficit language and perspectives

What we do and say matters and is worthy of our critical analysis. Our language and action constructs or constrains opportunities for children to build meaningful, positive, and sustained relationships to learning and one another.  We will focus particularly on collaboratively recognizing, interrupting, and revising language that explicitly or implicitly constructs deficit perspectives of children, families, or communities.

6.     Learn to be okay with uncertainty

Part of the work of teaching is learning to respond to the needs of students and others in the community. This holds true while learning to teach. We each are working with other humans, about whose lives we likely know very little.