Interview with Michelle Tynan, History 150 Spring 2024, Conducted by Delaney Tynan, March 16, 2024.

Overview:

Over the past several years, it is safe to say that the average classroom has changed drastically between the increase in technology and the COVID-19 pandemic. Another factor many educators, specifically female educators, have taken into account during these past decades is the challenges women go through working in education, especially when changing in and out of job titles. 

The COVID-19 pandemic forced many schools into online learning, increasing the already large presence of technology seen in many schools. Teachers were typically left navigating tricky technology, and students were left feeling out of place as they completed their assignments from home behind a screen, instead of being able to be hands on and form connections with their teachers and peers. Especially in the younger grades, many students were not taught the proper socialization skills due to social distancing. Many teachers also argue they were not given much room for creativity during the pandemic. This is because many schools enforced strict schedules and guidelines for educators to follow during online learning. The increase in technology in the standard classroom over the past few decades has its positives along with its negatives. One of the positives include students having an extreme variety of research at the tip of their fingers, while the negatives present themselves in online bullying, being a distraction in the classroom, and students forming more connections through a screen rather than in person. These challenges have been especially prominent for working women who have been through a variety of job titles under education. Making the switch from organizing a classroom of several kids, to orchestrating a school of hundreds can be eye opening and put things into a broader perspective. When being a teacher you have less responsibility and are typically following guidelines your school requires, while being a principal requires you to take more charge and make decisions for a bigger whole. It can be challenging and difficult to navigate a bigger role as since the COVID-19 pandemic so many communities have different opinions on technology in the classroom and how much of it should be used to help teachers. 

Biography:

Michelle Tynan was born on October 7, 1970 in Natick, Massachusetts. She attended Fitchburg State, a small school in Massachusetts, and received her masters degree from Boston College. She has been a hardworking teacher, principal and assistant principal for 27 years, and a mother of two (her children are 22 and 19). Thus, she has also faced the challenges that come with being a working mother during a majority of her time being an educator. She has remained in Massachusetts. She has faced the challenges that come with teaching during the pandemic, but also through the day to day challenges that educators face. She is now in her third year of being an assistant principal at a public elementary school. Before that, she was teaching Kindergarten at a different elementary school for 6 years. Despite the length of her career and hardships she faced during the COVID-19 pandemic, Michelle’s drive to teach has never gone away. Although the average classroom and school looks a lot different than it did 27 years ago, Michelle explains the social change she has picked up on throughout these years and how it has affected her personal teaching style.

Research:

It is no secret that in the past few years, technology has played a big role in the everyday classroom. One of the biggest reasons this has happened, is the COVID-19 pandemic and just about every school in America switching to online learning.  Madeline Will did an excellent job of describing the challenges and changes in teaching over several years in her 10 Ways the Teaching Profession Has Changed Over the Past 10 Years, giving multiple examples on the different ways teachers and students had to adapt to learning and teaching through a screen. Many teachers also noticed how social media became more prominent in the classroom and the toll it could take on their students in terms of bullying. Many teachers have also argued that the internet has its pros and cons in the classroom. The pros would include being able to access a variety of different learning sources, being able to explore more opinions and topics at the touch of your fingers, and more. The cons educators have picked up on include students being bullied online, not paying attention in class, and cheating on assignments.

The origin of technology being introduced into the classroom is discussed dating back to the 1980s, and today a lot of American high schools even offer courses such as coding. Most of Gen-z has grown up around technology, its advancements, and how many people from Gen-z have not gone a day without using technology. ASU Online describes this perfectly in their How has technology changed education? as technology begins to grow and become more and more apart of the average Americans everyday life, teachers also are faced with learning more about technology and how to use it, as their generation did not grow up with it as much as their students generation did.

During these past few decades, another topic we have seen being brought up more and more by educators, is the introduction of standardized testing, especially in elementary schools. Laura Jimenez and Jamil Modaffari do a great job of shedding light on different changes in the classroom such as standardized testing in their Future of Testing in Education: Effective and Equitable Assessment Systems. Standardized tests are essentially given so educators can see what their students know and don’t know how to do. There has been stigma growing around standardized tests the past few years, as some parents, students and educators think they are not an accurate representation of what students can and can’t do.

A lot of teachers and students also argue that the pandemic stopped students and teachers from forming connections that they usually would if they could have been face to face. In Keevan Kearns and Lucy Mezey’s Pandemic Isolation Has Weakened Group Bonds While Clarifying Friendships, Students Say, they highlight how most students would agree not being able to see your friends face to face tested their friendships, and showed them which ones were strongest. Some other students agree they would rather be face to face, and learn better this way and the pandemic took a toll on forming these connections.

There has also been an increase in teacher activism, but a decrease in the amount of people who want to be teachers. Many teachers argue that teaching now feels more prescriptive, and there’s less room for creativity. Brian Johnsrud elaborates on this in his Creativity in the classroom reduces burnout and improves teacher and student wellbeing, as the demand for higher academic performance in many states rises, teachers feel they have less flexibility and are binded to teach things a certain way at the expense of teaching in an engaging and creative way. Many educators are also feeling burnout and exhausted being held to such high standards and trying to form connections with students who are still trying to grasp their bearings in the classroom after being faced with online learning and social distancing from peers for over a year.

Transcription

DT (0:02)

Okay. Hello, my name is Delaney Tynan and today I’m interviewing my mother, Michelle Tynan, who is an educator of 27 years. So let’s begin with the first question. Are there any big changes you’ve seen in the classroom over these 27 years of teaching? And what are they?

MT (0:21)

I think for me over the past 27 years, the biggest changes have been the time on learning, and the push for rigor. Those have been the biggest changes for me over the past 27 years. When I started, kindergarten classrooms still had things like a play kitchen, a dress up area, blocks, and a dramatic play area. The shift started happening in 2003, 2004, where there was more emphasis placed on literacy instruction, phonics instruction and fundations lessons replaced the time to play. And assessments like dibbles and DRA came to be the primary focus. As teachers are PD focused on phonics and reading, and as kindergarten teachers, we’ve started to feel the urgency to teach five and six year olds how to read before they left us for first grade. We had a schedule to follow without much downtime for kids to socialize, and learn how to interact with each other.

DT (1:27)

That’s awesome. And how do you think all of that has changed your teaching style over the course of your career?

MT (1:35)

I started my career without any curriculum frameworks. So fortunately for us, we implemented Massachusetts curriculum frameworks back in 1997, 98. And they’ve been updated over the years. We didn’t really have a clear understanding of what to teach or when. So the mass frameworks have really changed that for the better. And it’s helped me focus on what I have to teach and when.

DT (2:08)

Just because you’ve been teaching so long before the COVID 19 pandemic and after the pandemic, how did it feel teaching during the pandemic?

MT (2:19)

I think like a lot of teachers, for me teaching during the pandemic was extremely difficult. I was teaching kindergarten, and most of the time or most of the days spent teaching kids how to socialize, how to take turns, make friends. And I was at a relatively small school, it was a pre K to school with about 300 kids. We left on that Friday, March 13, with a lot of uncertainty. And then by the end of the following week, we were told that the learning had to continue until June. So teachers had to learn to do many different things with technology, while missing our students, and trying to just figure things out day by day.

DT (3:07)

How do you think going to online learning and the pandemic in general affected the relationships you formed with your students?

MT (3:19)

So I think we were all feeling very isolated during the pandemic. I felt really close relationship with my students in person until March. And then when we were forced to convert to remote teaching, I think we felt like we lost that relationship with some of our students. And so it was really difficult to maintain those relationships. We did get to know the parents a little bit better. I felt like in the families, because they were usually sitting with their kids during the lessons and during the live calls that we had. But overall, it really did affect the relationships that we had with kids and families.

DT (4:09)

How did it feel when you started having more of a presence of technology and just having technology introduced into classrooms in general?

MT (4:19)

This was a huge learning curve for the teachers that I was working with. We really didn’t have any PD prior to this around focusing on Google Classroom, Google meet, we really didn’t know anything about Google Docs or slides. So a lot of it was self taught. There were some PD opportunities offered. But there- it was really just a forced thing that we were thrown into. And we had little to no input in the way it was rolled out. And it’s So it was definitely different. It changed the way- I saw myself as a teacher, and it changed the way that I taught in person after the pandemic.

DT (5:10)

That’s great. And just switching gears a little bit, can you describe the biggest difference between being a teacher and being a principal?

MT (5:22)

I think the biggest difference is probably just that I’m responsible for different things. I think being a teacher, you’re responsible for those 20 to 25 kids you have in your class, being a principal, you’re responsible for more- bigger school, more kids, you’re responsible for things that happen on the bus, things that happen in the cafeteria, and throughout the buildings. So I think just being responsible for different things.

DT (5:52)

That makes sense. Um, and can you describe any challenges, or maybe the biggest challenge you faced trying to go from being a teacher to a principal?

MT (6:04)

The first time I went from being a kindergarten teacher to a building principal, I was a new mom, I was on maternity leave, Delaney was only a few months old. So it was difficult. And it was also difficult because I was a teacher in the same building. But it was also easy because they were my colleagues and friends. They were all very supportive. This time around, I went from being a kindergarten teacher at a different school, to an assistant principal, it was much easier, my kids were older. And after remote teaching, with kindergarten kids, I knew that I needed to change. And definitely I needed a new challenge.

DT (6:51)

Right, and I’m switching gears just a little bit again here. How do you feel about the themes of gender in the classroom? And how do you feel that the themes of gender and education intersect if you could describe what that’s like in the classroom or just schools in general.

MT (7:24)

So my opinions about this have changed quite a bit over my 27 years. Although I don’t believe parents should ever influenced their child’s gender, or push them in one direction or another, I do think humanity is changing. And educators have to be sensitive to this. Although students at six and seven years old, or even seven, eight year olds may not know what gender they want to be, we must be reflective on how we react and not tolerate peers or friends that may not be on the same page. So I think we have to be tolerant of this reflective. And I do think, in our current curriculum in Massachusetts, it’s called Children Discovering Justice. It is our new curriculum that we’ve adopted in our district in Massachusetts that addresses gender related topics. And I do believe it can be woven in to everyday interactions with kids of that age.

DT (8:29)

That’s great. And then just one more question for you. If there was any advice, you could go back and offer yourself before pursuing your career, what would you say to yourself?

MT (8:44)

I think I would just say, really take the time to think about what you want to teach. If you know that you don’t want to do middle school, high school, maybe explore that a little bit, and then roll it out. And then stick with something even when it gets really difficult. I knew that I didn’t want to do middle school, high school. But I was given the choice of administration or special education. And while I have a passion for special education, I knew that admin was the way that I needed to focus my efforts. So stick with it, even when it gets difficult. The work is hard, but if you can find a balance between work and downtime, it will all be worth it in the end.

DT (9:40)

That’s great. And that’s all the questions I have for you, so thank you so much for doing the interview.

MT (9:45)

Thank you.

Transcription Process

This interview was transcribed using Otter.ai. I found otter.ai very useful and would recommend it to other students completing this assignment. Some parts I had to manually edit, but for the most part every word was picked up during the interview because I placed my phone which I used to record the audio between my interviewee and I. I used the voice memos app on my iPhone to record this interview and I believe the audio came through very clear.

Bibliography

Will, Madeline. 10 Ways the Teaching Profession Has Changed Over the Past 10 Years. EducationWeek, 2019. https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/10-ways-the-teaching-profession-has-changed-over-the-past-10-years/2019/12.

How has technology changed education? ASU Online, 2023. https://asuonline.asu.edu/newsroom/leading-educators/explore-how-technology-has-changed-education-and-learning-design-careers/.

Jimenez, Laura and  Modaffari, Jamil. Future of Testing in Education: Effective and Equitable Assessment Systems. Cap20, September 16, 2021. https://www.americanprogress.org/article/future-testing-education-effective-equitable-assessment-systems/.

Kearns, Keevan and Mezey’s, Lucy. Pandemic Isolation Has Weakened Group Bonds While Clarifying Friendships, Students Say. The Augur Bit, March 14, 2021. https://theaugurbit.com/2021/03/14/pandemic-isolation-has-weakened-group-bonds-while-clarifying-friendships-students-say/.

Johnsrud, Brian. Creativity in the classroom reduces burnout and improves teacher and student wellbeing. Adobe Blog, July 26, 2023. https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2023/07/26/creativity-in-classroom-reduces-burnout-improves-teacher-student-wellbeing.