Tag Archives: school

What was it like to lead a school in Estonia through the school closures? This week, Indrek Lillemägi looks back on his experiences in the pandemic as leader of the Emili Kool (named for Jean Jacques Rouseau’s book Emile, or On Education), a private K-9 school that Lillemägi helped launch in 2016. In the first part of the interview, Lillemägi described how he applied what he learned at the Emili Kool as the founding principal of a new upper secondary school, Tallinna Pelgulinna Riigigümnaasium, that opened in Tallinn in the fall of 2023.

This interview is one in a series exploring what has and has not changed in education since COVID.  Previous interviews and posts have looked at developments in Italy, Poland, Finland, New Zealand, the Netherlands, South Africa, and Vietnam. This interview with Lillemägi was conducted by Thomas Hatch a few months before the Pelgulinna Riigigümnaasium opened. The interview has been edited for length and clarity

Thomas Hatch (TH): When you were the principal at the Emili Kool, you were responsible for guiding the school’s initial response to the spread of COVID-19 and the related restrictions. Can you first tell us about any directions you received about how to handle the emerging situation? 

Indrek Lillemägi (IL): Maybe a week before the government’s decision to close all the schools in Estonia we had a school crisis meeting and made our first decisions then. We had most e-learning systems set up already – Office 365, student accounts, online chats – so, overall, the transition went fairly well, though video lessons were messy at first. Months later, teachers described it as a really smooth transition since we had those systems in place already. We didn’t have to rush to find new solutions. 

TH:   Was it common to have those systems in place in Estonia? I understand that in Finland it varied a lot.

IL:  It was the same in Estonia – some broad government directions but schools invented solutions. Our staff was pretty young so our teachers were very good with technology. They were already tech fans, and they were pretty innovative. But schools were in very different situations. I heard stories about some teachers who just threw up their hands and refused to do video lessons or digital assignments. 

TH: What were the broad government directions about initially – mostly health and safety?

IL: The initial regulations were about health and safety, staying home, things like that. It took time before they gave directions on curriculum and the schedule. Later, the Ministry of Education started publishing some directions about learning and studying, but they were not too directive, especially that first spring. I remember that some of the recommendations included do not leave any student behind and to find out if every student had internet access and a computer access so schools could provide devices to students if needed. As a private school, most of our students had computers, but some bigger families didn’t have enough. I think we only gave out computers to maybe every fourth or fifth student, and we had enough computers to give out ourselves. But many tech companies in Estonia also started helping schools get computers to students who needed them. I think most students who needed a computer got one that first spring.

Initially, schools didn’t have to do video lessons if they didn’t want to. Some teachers decided just to assign individual work and just have a reflection or something once a week. But people found that it didn’t work like that; schools needed to create an online learning environment. We started with video lessons, and then we added more and more lessons. But they were not lessons like in the classroom. It was more like individual work, with a teacher working as a mentor, helping out students one by one and explaining something important. 

TH: How did you make those decisions about instruction for the school? What guidance did you give teachers?

IL: In that first or second meeting we decided that we need to make a decision together, and it’s more important to make a decision than to leave things too flexible or too messy. We had a really solid structure of staff meetings, and we also decided together which apps we would use, how many letters we would send home each week, it was all written down for the teachers. As a small school, we were able to able to make the big decisions together with most teachers. Normally, many decisions are made by the leadership team, but these decisions were more collective, with all of us discussing things together early on.

“We decided that we need to make a decision together, and it’s more important to make a decision than to leave things too flexible or too messy.“

TH: What was the decision on schedule/plan? Did you tell teachers they needed students online 9am-3pm?

IL: In the beginning, all the teachers had to meet their students at least two times per week, so all the students had at least two online lessons per day. And the student from each grade had morning gatherings or morning circles at 9 O’clock every day. The teachers met with the students; they looked at the schedule and their aims; and maybe they talked about their feelings. In some cases, maybe it was important to wake students up. After the online morning meetings, the students had much more free time or autonomous learning time, and then they were brought together again by a teacher at the end of the day teachers and students would gather together again at the end of the day.

TH: That’s interesting that the teachers were talking to the students about their feelings. Was that normal before COVID?

IL: Yes, that was normal. But we wanted to make the online learning as safe, socially and emotionally safe as possible for the students, and part of that was finding things pre-COVID that we could bring to the to the online version, and morning gatherings were one of those things. 

TH: Was the morning circle just for the primary students or all students? 

IL: Both. In the primary school, the students would meet with their homeroom teacher. At the lower secondary school, the students had different subject teachers, but we still have the class teacher system in Estonia so the lower secondary students would meet with their class teacher. The head of studies made the schedule at the beginning and end of the day, but the primary teachers could decide for themselves what do in the middle of the day. 

TH: What about parents? What information did you share with parents? 

IL: I actually have the recommendations that we sent to parents and students that first month. It was a Facebook post, but we also sent it to them directly. It’s from the 17^th of March, 2020 — the first month of home learning. The first recommendation is about organizing a comfortable learning space. The second is to discuss and write down the rules of home studying; make a schedule with resting and active time; make a routine; and at the end of every day write down 3 “success stories.” 

TH: As I understand it, the Estonian government made the decision early on to get students back to school as soon as possible. As you moved into the next phases and particularly as you tried to get most students back in person in the fall, what were some of the biggest issues you had to deal with. 

IL: I think the fears of people was the biggest issue. Teachers had different fears; parents had different fears. Some people were really open to coming back together, learning together, but some people were really scared to come back. Of course, people had different situations. Some had grandparents or sick people at home, and they had to be more scared. Others were thinking about all the economic problems as a lot of the parents either lost their jobs or their businesses went down, so they were much more stressed. And some parents refused to bring their children back to school. I remember there were some mathematicians who sent the calculations and said it’s going to be really bad if we come together, and they had modeled everything out.   

As a private school, there were also lot of economic questions. Lots of people were in an uncertain situation, and they didn’t know if their salaries would be cut. In general, in Estonia not too many people had deep economic problems because the government still supported small businesses and they provided some salary compensation, but still there was a lot of uncertainty. 

We tried to deal with everything through lots of communication, explaining everything, and we tried to be as flexible as we could. Some families wanted their children to stay home, and, in the first year, even after we came back in person, we accepted that, and we developed individual plans for those students to work online. But later on, during the second COVID wave, we said “These are the rules of our school, and we will all come together,” and we didn’t make these individual plans anymore. 

“We tried to deal with everything through lots of communication, explaining everything, and we tried to be as flexible as we could. Some families wanted their children to stay home, and, in the first year, even after we came back in person, we accepted that, and we developed individual plans for those students to work online.”

TH: What were some of the issues you had with online learning? As a private school, since parents were paying, maybe you didn’t have too many issues with students disappearing, but were there issues of mental health and stress? 

IL: We didn’t really have issues with students disappearing, but we had some issues with home routines not being supportive enough – so some student might just sleep in the morning and not show up online.  But no students fully disappearing; we kept parent contacts. 

There were also some students who worked individually with our psychologists or social workers during the closures, and some students came into the school and worked alone in the classroom, while a psychologist worked in the next room. We helped to create routines for those students who couldn’t work at home for some reason. 

When school opened again, we found some increased stress and anxiety among students, but it was not too bad compared to before COVID.  I still remember when we came back to school it was actually like a new positive beginning. There were really positive vibes, particularly in the primary school, where the students’ strong relationships were in their families or in their school; they don’t have friends someplace else. So they came back to school and met their friends again. 

“when we came back to school it was actually like a new positive beginning. There were really positive vibes… they came back to school and met their friends again“

TH:  In the US and other parts of the world there has been a lot of talk about academic “learning loss.” Has there been any talk about “learning loss” in Estonia? 

IL: Yes, of course. For some of the students, their results went down. And for some students home learning actually helped, but that’s only for the academic part. we don’t know about the social part because the social skills and relationships are rarely measured. We thought for about one third of the students, home learning helped their academics; for one third, it didn’t matter; and for one third it was more difficult. Later on, when the students came back, we had the extra support for some students and some extra lessons. We also had summer learning camps. 

TH:  Who paid for the summer learning camps? 

IL: There was government funding for the summer learning camps, but  schools had a lot of autonomy for organizing them. So the camps in some schools were more focused on social skills, but we put the two things together. These were like social learning camps where the students just spent time together, but they could also learn their ABC’s again. 

TH: Were those primarily for the students who were struggling or could anybody come? 

IL: Anybody could come, but I remember we talked a lot about that: That even if a student is doing okay in mathematics and sciences, it doesn’t mean that that he or she doesn’t need this social part, because that was a big loss. 

TH:  You also said that the school gave students more individual work during remote learning than they had in the past. Have they continued any of that or have things just gone back to the way it was? 

IL: Yes, after I left, they started doing individual e-learning days about once a month. Of course, everyday life in the school was also affected by the COVID experience because all the online systems became a normal part of learning and studying, so all the online collaboration methods for writing together, for doing video presentations they became part of normal life as well. 

IEN celebrates the life of Lee Shulman, renowned scholar and mentor, who passed away on December 30^th, 2024. Shulman was a Professor of Education at Michigan State University and Stanford University, before becoming the 8^th President of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in 1996. He also served terms as President of the National Academy of Education and the American Education Research Association where he helped establish the division of Teaching and Teacher Education. Shulman received numerous awards over the course of his career, including the American Psychological Association’s E.L. Thorndike Award for Career Achievement in Educational Psychology in 1995 and the Grawemeyer Award in Education in 2006. Thomas Hatch, who worked with Shulman at the Carnegie Foundation, shares some of his reflections. 

Lee Shulman was an exuberant friend and scholar. Always positive and supportive, whether in his professional advice or as a host as he and his wife Judy welcomed me, my wife (and his graduate student) Karen Hammerness and our young children into his home. Lee’s work and impact cannot be summed up in any one idea or publication, but Those who understand: Knowledge growth in teaching, his 1986 AERA Presidential Address, made clear that teaching involves substantial knowledge and expertise. In the process, he demonstrated that teaching is not just a difficult job, but a demanding profession, worthy of the same kinds of recognition and reward as any other. That work helped to launch a whole new era of research on teaching. Far more than an academic exercise, that work and Lee’s insights were central to the establishment of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, as well as to the advancement of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning and to the creation of a host of centers and institutions dedicated to studying and improving the quality of teaching in K-12 as well as higher education.  

Lee worked out his ideas over time in conversations, at meals as well as in seminars, and his ideas often launched new initiatives and new lines of work. In her remembrance, Jill Perry, Executive Director of the Carnegie Project on the Doctorate – one of several projects spawned while Lee was President of the Carnegie Foundation – explained this as “classic Lee:”

“offering a casually delivered suggestion that was, in reality, a deeply considered and insightful idea. He was known for these moments, where his offhanded guidance would leave young scholars or practitioners inspired yet responsible for sorting out the details on their own.” 

I had that experience, sitting in Lee’s office in 1996, in the heart of Silicon Valley with the internet developing all around us.  He declared that he wanted to bring the power of the three great resources of the university – the laboratory, the library, and the museum – and put them online to support faculty in K-12 and higher education who were creating the scholarship of teaching and learning. And then he asked me to do it. Inspired, I returned to my office to stare for hours at the cursor blinking on my computer screen. But, eventually, we established the Carnegie Knowledge Media Lab to support the Carnegie Academy of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL K-12 and CASTL Higher Education) and began a long line of work that included two books, Into the Classroom and Going Public with Our Teaching, and the development of a whole series of multimedia websites and images of practice that documented the work of exceptional teachers.

Beyond his ability to tell a story and make a powerful point, Lee’s brilliance was in his humanity. Lee was as likely to draw on his experience working at the counter at his parents’ deli on the south side of Chicago as he was to quote Benjamin Bloom or Joseph Schwab, two of his mentors at the University of Chicago. That deli experience, in particular, was evident in a segment he did for NPR’s This I Believe series. What did Lee believe in? He believed in pastrami: 

“I believe that pastrami is a metaphor for a well-lived life, for a well-designed institution and even for healthy relationships. Pastrami is marbled rather than layered. Its parts, the lean and the fat, are mixed together rather than neatly separated.…  Separate layers are much easier to build, to schedule and to design. But I believe that marbling demands that we work with the messy world of people, relationships and obligations in their full, rich complexity. The diet mavens inform us that marbling can be dangerous for our health, but as an educator I’m willing — even obligated — to take the risk. I want to marble habits of mind, habits of practice and habits of the heart with my students — just like pastrami.”

His writings and his talks drew from all his experiences, and, somehow, after a well-known tendency to wait until the last minute, they would burst forth, fully-formed. On one occasion, I remember flying from San Francisco to Washington D.C. for the annual conference of the American Association of Higher Education, where Lee was scheduled to give the keynote address the following day. I happened to be seated in front of him, and as we settled into our seats, I asked him what he would be talking about. He held up a pack of index cards and told me he was going to work on it on the plane. Some six hours later, after the plane pulled into the gate, when we unbuckled our seat belts and stood up, Lee spilled all the cards onto the floor. As I stooped to help him collect his notes, I realized every single card was blank.  

The next morning, seemingly without reference to a script or a single card, Lee delivered a talk, Taking Learning Seriously, that ended in a standing ovation. In that talk, Lee addressed the first question “What does it mean to take anything seriously?” by declaring that “when we take something seriously, we often talk about professing it:” 

“The deepest, oldest meaning of the word “profess” is to take religious orders in a public and visible way. When one professes faith, it means taking on a set of obligations that will serve as the first principles for controlling one’s life, no questions asked. Professing one’s faith, behaviorally and emotionally, is an impressive example of taking something seriously.

Another sense of the word is that we profess our love–for our spouses and partners, our parents, our children, our dearest friends. We profess a kind of commitment that has within it a willingness to sacrifice on behalf of the other. Also in a public manner, we declare our devotion to another. Here is yet another example of taking something quite seriously.

A more contemporary meaning of the word, a meaning more closely associated with the work of those who read this magazine, is to profess one’s understanding, one’s expertise: to be professional, or to be a “professor.” Members of professions take on the burden of their understanding by making public commitments to serve their fellow beings in a skilled and responsible manner. “Professors” take on a special set of roles and obligations. They profess their understanding in the interests of nurturing the knowledge, understanding, and development of others. They take learning so seriously that they profess it.“

Throughout the talk, and especially in the conclusion, Lee’s remarks deftly weaved together the insights of a scholar of science and a man of faith: 

“To be deeply educated, I believe, is to understand both when skepticism and evidence are appropriate, and when faith and suspension of disbelief are appropriate. There are no rules or principles for knowing this distinction. Only through studying the examples in both scientific and humanistic sources -through wrestling with that inherent contradiction between faith and reason–can we and our students come to terms with the essential uncertainties that define our roles as professionals and as human beings.

As professors, we are asked to be rational and empirical, to demand evidence. On the other hand, as teaching professionals, we expect ourselves to believe what much empirical evidence says we shouldn’t: that all our students can learn. We express our faith in our students’ potential and in our ability to teach them. As professors, we do not choose between the skepticism of reason and the hope grounded in faith. Our students demand both. And we must learn, as professional educators, to do both.”

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Donations can be made in Lee Shulman’s honor to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society and the Camp Ramah Tikvah Program in Ojai, California