Remote Learning: Translating Best Efforts into Best Practice
The swift change to remote learning that occurred at the close of the 2019-2020 school year cannot be considered true remote or distance learning. Rather, it was our best attempt to continue students’ learning until the close of the school year. Our next step must be to turn our work into best practice as we move forward.
We have a summer to reorganize and reassemble, using our past experience as a driving force for some of what works, and a lot of what does not. Perhaps you found that synchronous meetings with 22 plus students were not effective. Maybe you discovered that multiple choice tests were inauthentic and prone to be cheated. Students were disengaged because they were overwhelmed, or they were just, well, not that interested in what was happening. We know the problems. As educators with students learning from home, we saw what went wrong. Now we will work to change it.
A teacher’s goal in school is to have the students who move on from their classroom understand a given number of concepts upon which those students can build. We need to simplify those understandings, in general terms – not in those of Common Core. While it is easy to lecture about those concepts, we need to find better ways to support students as they develop those understandings. Once students feel comfortable in their understanding, we need to offer them an opportunity to show off their new-found knowledge.
It’s not that simple, but as teachers, it’s what we do every day. There were not too many of my students that got jazzed up about my lecture on the Roaring Twenties, but plenty of them got excited to explore the effects of prohibition, and talk about how behind the times the U.S. government proved to be. Whether students are eighteen years old or four years old, and whether we are learning online or face-to-face, these are the experiences to champion - experiences that are relevant, authentic, and engaging.
It might look like students taking pictures of their lives and identifying shapes by circling them on their parents’ iPhone to send the teacher via email, or this example from Kimberly Howard, where her children identified sight words using water balloons. (PS - If you think that I’m not trying to find a way to use water balloons in my next class, that is simply ridiculous.)
It might be a student recording themselves explaining a math problem or a passage of a speech and getting credit in their AV course for filming and editing, their Social Studies class for identifying the importance historically, and their English class for explaining the rhetoric. We must find new cross-curricular studies for old concepts.
It’s fair to say that this experience has been rough on all of us. It’s unfair to say we can’t do this, or that this is an impossible way for kids to learn. We are creative enough to make it work.
Ready to dive into this topic? Visit these links for further reading:
Teacher: A One-Size-Fits-All Approach to Instruction is Stifling Our Classrooms by Valerie Strauss
This is Not Online or Distance Learning by AJ Juliani
How Effective Is Online Learning? What the Research Does and Doesn't Tell Us by Susanna Loeb
Distance Learning Isn’t Working by Bethany Mandel
