Teacher Tom: We're All Scrambling: Talking With Parents About These Interesting Times

Teacher Tom: We're All Scrambling: Talking With Parents About These Interesting Times

We're All Scrambling: Talking With Parents About These Interesting Times

With millions of preschoolers staying home from school, we suddenly have millions of parents scrambling to figure out how to step into the role of their children's preschool teachers. They've found themselves as accidental homeschoolers, or as I've been thinking of it in my moments of dark humor: coronavirus homeschoolers.

Contrary to what many in the business and policymaking worlds seem to think, being an early childhood educator is a skilled profession, one that we've spent years honing, practicing, and improving through ongoing professional development. Now, quite suddenly, a generation of adults find themselves in our shoes with little or no training and if my social media feed is a reliable barometer (and it probably isn't) a lot of them have already concluded that we deserve raises.

In unprecedented times, we are all finding ourselves having to scramble. As for me, I had a full schedule of speaking engagements at conferences around the country cancelled or postponed, wiping out 90 percent of my expected income for the next 2-3 months and maybe longer. I'm not sharing this to evoke pity, but rather by way of letting you know that, one of the ways I've shifted gears is to work with my friends at Fairy Dust Teaching to produce my first e-course called Partnering with Parents: Making Allies of the Parents of the Children You Teach. It's a six-part series in which I've shared what I've learned from my two decades as a teacher in a cooperative school, working day-after-day in close CONTINUE READING: Teacher Tom: We're All Scrambling: Talking With Parents About These Interesting Times