Three Insights from My Shadow a Student Challenge

by | Mar 8, 2018

On March 6, 2018 I took part in the Shadow a Student Challenge, which invites school leaders to build empathy for the student experience by spending a day by the side of one student. I shadowed DeAndrea (name changed), a 5th grade student at Lincoln Elementary in Richmond, CA.

It was eye opening and invigorating to spend the day with her. Over the last decade, I have spent a lot of time in schools, but as someone who coaches principals, my view of schools is almost always limited to the office. One day shadowing gave me a much more nuanced picture of how schools work.  

Here are a few things I am reflecting on from this experience:

  • So Much Technology! School has changed a lot since I was a student and I was absolutely blown away by how much time students spent on tablets. The challenges and opportunities for substitute teachers using edtech is something we talk a lot about at Substantial, but seeing how central technology was to the school day made it very real. The tech use also felt strikingly emergent: the teacher was still building her fluency in moving between different platforms, and there was a lot of time spent troubleshooting. There were many many moments when DeAndrea had to reboot or log back in to get the tech working. It was a near constant source of frustration for her and she felt anxious about losing time to complete her assignments.
  • The Power of Play: Near the end of the day the teacher announced that they were going to play dodgeball for PE. This immediately made me tense up, remembering getting hit with hard rubber balls on rainy day recesses. But watching the teacher set up the game and begin to play with her students, I was struck by how transformative the game was. The boy who had been scolded all day for not being on task led his team, cheered loudly, and lit up in a way he hadn’t otherwise all day. At one point, there were just two girls left on one side, holding their own against six or seven boys. They had been so quiet during the day that I hadn’t noticed them before. It was an emotional and physical release for the whole class and at the end the teacher jumped in the game, laughing along with the kids. The power of play is undeniable and is something the adults tasked with running schools and school systems almost never talk about.
  • Students Care: When you hang out a lot in school offices as I do, you tend to see students at their worst, sent to the office because they’re in trouble or because they’re sick. In these moments, students are often withdrawn and quiet. During my shadow day, deeply involved in classroom life, I was stuck by how much students in the class wanted to help each other. They are loyal – not just to their friends, but also to their classmates. There were a least a few students in the class who didn’t speak English and relied on other students to translate. Students were constantly explaining things to each other and  troubleshooting technology for each other. They were also eager to help their teacher. She clearly cared about them, and the students responded in ways that showed they knew it. I expected 5th graders to be more jaded, but this group was eager to engage.

While my brain is spinning with ideas: how can we help make it easier to for subs to use technology in the classroom, should we think about infusing games into new sub training, can we bring more team-based projects into sub days – the biggest impact of my shadow day is a sense of renewed urgency. Today, I feel more responsibility to do what I can to make school systems work better. For DeAndrea and her friends and all the other 5th graders out there.