Call it unprecedented, call it a game changer. However one categorizes the 2020-21 school year, United Community Schools Director of Professional Learning Roslyn Odinga understood from its outset, her portfolio required a re-tooled look and feel to address the pandemic teaching and learning realities. The consistent common denominator remained: educator support emphasizing professional learning targeted to developing and strengthening a variety of both educator and student skill sets. Odinga adapted her workshops offering Continuing Teacher Leader Educator (CTLE) hours, remote tutoring led by UFT retired members, and institutes for UCS and school staff. Her work focused on the blended learning landscape, the particular challenges faced by students managing trauma and supporting tutors with limited access to school buildings.

Professional learning tailored for UCS teachers and paras, social workers, parent liaisons and school teams forms the centerpiece of the initiative’s educator support. Odinga’s foundational experience as a UFT Teacher Center veteran informs her design of instructional strategies packaged in interactive sessions that meet this moment.

The workshop, “Trauma: What Does It Look Like? What Does It Sound Like?,” places the educator’s lens on the classroom setting with an additional focus on how school staff can provide a safe and supportive environment through relationship building and de-escalation techniques for students. “Developing a Growth Mindset” helps educators understand how the brain works in students. They are better equipped to guide their students toward resiliency when facing obstacles and setbacks and helping them avoid giving up.

As current events forced educators, students and their families to confront issues of race and culture, the two-part course, “Culturally Responsive Teaching,” recognizes that when students enter our classrooms they bring their culture with them. Odinga describes the benefits derived from integrating this approach into classrooms as “strengthening student identity, promoting equity and inclusivity while also supporting critical thinking.”

Tutor Hub’s success over the years centered on the one-to-one relationships that UFT retired members form with their students. Its emphasis began and remains reinforcing a love of learning through literacy. Prior to the pandemic, Odinga detailed that the initiative included 13 tutors in rotation at the following schools: Brooklyn’s PS 335 and PS 188; Queens’ PS 19 and PS 65; PS 18 in the Bronx and PS 1 in Manhattan. Under the guidance of Odinga and Tutor Hub leadership: Anne Rosen, Maureen Meltzer, Marc Korasham, Josie Levine and Betty Gottfried, tutors connect with the children’s teachers, obtaining information on how they are doing in the classroom, to better target literacy interventions.

With COVID protocols in place in the schools, principals expressed reluctance to add more adults entering their buildings. Likewise, operating Tutor Hub in the online space proved challenging from both the technical skill and from the student engagement aspect.

Odinga adapted. She created a professional learning space for the tutors to better prepare them for the moment when they could fully return. The Tutor Hub Book Club emerged as a group reading and discussion experience offering insights into social emotional learning and more. Delving deep into “The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma,” by Bessel van der Kolk, M.D., members of Tutor Hub’s Book Club familiarized themselves with physical and social-emotional aspects of trauma. Understanding they’re not therapists, but educators and union activists, they appreciated the book choice and the recognition they needed to augment their skill sets as they prepared to return to one-on-one tutoring in the fall.

At the April 22 book club gathering, UCS Director of Mental Health Dorene Ng presented on aligning social-emotional themed lessons to the learning skills outlined in existing curricula. For instance, highlighting issues such as respect, compassion, diversity and kindness using role-play, video and online resources, Ng explained, provides the space for social-emotional learning. Ng highlighted websites such as Teaching Tolerance and Welcoming Schools and encouraged the team to “take what you like and customize it” to their teaching and learning experience.