If you are an educator, you probably just survived the toughest year in your career. We witnessed our students suffering from uncertainty and our colleagues suffering right along with them because of the unprecedented level of demands from all sides of the profession. During the pandemic, educators all across the country stepped up to keep students physically and mentally safe while doing the important job of educating them. Some of my colleagues felt like they were working as hard as they could without it mattering to anyone, especially the very students they were working so hard to support. I can relate. As a principal, I felt more than once that nothing I did was making my staff, my students or my families better or happier. I often felt defeated and exhausted.

This profound sense of defeat and exhaustion among educators manifested in a variety of ways. Some educators are calling it quits. In her recent Washington Post article, “‘Never seen it this bad’: America faces catastrophic teacher shortage,” Hannah Natanson reported that the teacher shortage reached a national crisis level due to so many educators leaving the profession (Natanson, 2022). Others are still working to figure out how they can move forward. I am fortunate to see and work with them every single day. They are determined to educate our young people despite all the challenges that we have faced and continue to face. They stay for the love of their students, and they are doing the best they can, which I admire. However, some of us have developed not-so-wonderful habits of indulging our students.

I want to be 100 percent clear that there is no blame to be had. I have never met an educator who would ever want to hurt children. We all always want to help our students. However, during the pandemic, we altered some conventional practices in support of our students. Unfortunately, some of the alterations turned out not to be based on best practices or research. For example, many of us extended deadlines for all our students without any limitations, which is not necessarily a best practice. In their 2002 research “Procrastination, Deadlines, and Performance: Self-Control by Precommitment,” Ariely and Wertenbroch argued that a well-spaced deadline that demands incremental progress is better for students than simply extending deadlines without incremental benchmarking (Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002). Another attempt to support the students was allowing unlimited retakes for all tests. Many teachers reported that this accommodation increased their workload beyond a manageable level, which they were willing to tolerate until they saw how such a practice began hurting student achievement. In his Edutopia article “Allowing Test Retakes—Without Getting Gamed,” Stephen Merrill shared what teachers discovered as they allowed retakes. He offered six clear parameters for managing retakes that lead to more students benefiting from retakes (Merrill, 2019). Both of these examples illustrate why good intentions alone do not yield good results when it comes to student support.

Having said that, we also gained some extremely valuable knowledge during the pandemic. Many schools realized the importance of mental health services for their students and began providing not just intervention focused on learning loss but also social-emotional support. In their latest journal article, “Preventing Youth Suicide: A Review of School-Based Practices and How Social–Emotional Learning Fits Into Comprehensive Efforts,” Posamentier, Seible and DyTang argued that school-based mental health services have a positive impact on youth suicide prevention (Posamentier, Seible & DyTang, 2022). I was fortunate enough to be a principal at a school where we have three full-time bilingual mental health professionals and a licensed bilingual social worker to provide mental support. I was also glad to see that many other educational institutions have engaged in a similar practice. Still, many educators feel that we need to do better.