Bob Shepherd. Is a former teacher, editor, curriculum designer, and assessment developer. He believes that a return to in-person instruction would be “an unprecedented catastrophe.” But he defines remote learning as a guarantee that any real learning will be remote.
How to find a path forward give the dangers of reopening and the tedium of remote learning?
He writes:
Clearly, if we are to depend on remote learning, we must address some serious issues:
–How do we ensure that kids have home access to high-speed internet connections and computers and software?
–How do we ensure that poor kids who no longer have access to free breakfast and lunch programs have regular meals?
–What do we do about kids whose parent or parents have to work? Who is going to watch the kids?
–What do we do to compensate for the loss of the safety checks that schools provide with regard to dangerous home environments, ones in which kids are inadequately cared for or subject to abuse?
–What kinds of learning can be conducted remotely and how? What would ideal remote/distance learning look like? Yes, we ALL understand that remote learning stinks. It’s child’s play to make the long, long list of its deficiencies, but, if we haven’t a sane alternative, what can we do given the circumstances? What does the best better-than-nothing remote learning pedagogy look like?
These are all big questions. We should be thinking very seriously about them, now. Instead, we are thinking about how to “reopen safely,” which is like thinking about how to jump safely out of airplanes without parachutes.
One way to begin thinking about the last question–the one about remote learning pedagogy–is to ask, what can we do well at a distance? In what ways can computers actually be used effectively, at a distance, as learning tools? What are they good at? Well, they can be used
to provide easy, ready access to enormous numbers of texts. What if every poor kid in the US had a gift card for purchasing online books from a curated list, for example?
for direct instruction videos. (How many teachers have simple video-editing software and know how to use it?)
to provide directions for projects to be carried out by students on their own.
to provide demonstrations–walkthroughs of procedures, for example (think of how-to recipe videos, for example).
to provide curated links to instructive materials online. The Internet is the freaking Library of Alexandria writ large.
to collect assignments and return them with feedback. (How many teachers have been instructed in how to use Word editing features or Adobe Acrobat mark-up tools for marking manuscripts? Precious few, I imagine.)
to do online check tests or quizzes with immediate feedback. (How many teachers know how to use Zoom’s built-in quiz feature? How many know how to use online quiz-making programs like Kahoot?)
to provide instructive graphics–picture galleries, maps, timelines, and so on.
to conduct online discussions and some modicum of community via Zoom.
to provide sharepoint folders for collections of class documents. (How many teachers are skilled at organizing such sharepoints?)
to present beautifully typeset equations. (How many teachers know how to use the Mathtype add-in for Word to do that?)
NONE OF THIS IS IDEAL. OF COURSE IT ISN’T. But it’s better than risking the lives of students, teachers, administrators, staff, and relatives and acquaintances of all these. But here we are, wasting time discussing safely jumping out of airplanes without a parachute when we could be spending this time instructing teachers on using these tools and setting up mechanisms for teachers to share with one another what has been working for them in their online classes.
One thing that should be avoided like the plague, I think: online computer instruction programs with diagnostic tests and instructional modules. These are failed behaviorist programmed instruction modernized with graphics. They are extremely demotivating. Kids hate them, and what they learn from them, mostly, is to hate what they are supposed to be learning.
Agree with this 99%.
Not sure how to teach math in the absence of “instructional modules” and ‘diagnostics” though.
All helpful thoughts welcomed.
I’m not an expert on math instruction, so I will pass on this. I was referring, specifically, to online instructional programs. Those are deadly, except when used very sparingly, as supplements to instruction by a teacher. That math, like anything else, should be taught in coherent units (and also through sheer play) is unquestionable, and diagnostics have a role to play, of course. I reserve my ire for the summative standardized tests. However, I can say, definitively, that the diagnostics built into these online math programs are extraordinarily superficial and not the AI-based insight engines that they claim to be. It makes sense to me to have diagnostic pretests for specific units of instruction to find out what the students’ zone of proximal development is–where to get started. To presume to be able to do these broadly, for an entire course, at the beginning, is over the top.
Thank you, Bob Shepherd. Great piece.
Love your last paragraph.
Agree totally with, “One thing that should be avoided like the plague, I think: online computer instruction programs with diagnostic tests and instructional modules. These are failed behaviorist programmed instruction modernized with graphics. They are extremely demotivating. Kids hate them, and what they learn from them, mostly, is to hate what they are supposed to be learning.”
YES, so many are just “FAILED behaviorist programmed instruction modernized with graphics.”
Agree.
My district will be implementing a mechanism to ensure students are engaging in remote learning and following up on what situations will impede such with the formation of a home monitoring team.
The MTA, AFTM, and BTU have an interesting plan to address learning dispositions in the home:
“Phase two would allow educators to meet the students and their families, either virtually or in-person. In addition to using the time to explain the new health protocols, the letter says this stage will be “used for social emotional wellness checks, basic needs assessments, an evaluation of technology needs and reconnecting with students, families and school communities.” “
https://www.wgbh.org/news/education/2020/07/15/massachusetts-teachers-unions-unveil-four-phased-reopening-plan?utm_campaign=wgbhnews&utm_content=1594915913&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook
Add how do we provide engaging and meaningful instruction? How do we assess that instruction and then provide timely intervention or extension as needed. How do we create classroom interaction and belonging? How do we motivate and prove to students that we care about them. How do we create the relationships that students rely on for mental health?
I count 5 questions here. So far, the answer to each is that I cannot be effective. Stay tuned. Many of the counties around us are going all virtual as covid cases rise in the rural areas now
Unless districts can provide technology to poor families, these most vulnerable students will not have access to any of the at home plans.
Technology AND training in using it.
A health teacher I once knew used to take students outside and have a primal scream session to relieve stress. I’m pretty sure we’re at the primal scream point for teachers! 🙂
That’s entirely called for in these circumstances!
Great questions.
And, I’m very glad to see Bob use the phrase high speed internet connection. It’s not just an issue of having the internet. I know of students using satellite connections and things like Zoom poop out on them. Or, they have a limited amount of video time they can use. Or, there are five kids in the house trying to use it. Or, it’s too costly. Or, all of the above.
Something as basic a thing as a printer and/or printer ink was sometimes tripping up students, pre-pandemic, never mind now that some families are struggling for money.
Rural areas are getting hit hard by the lack of adequate internet but other areas of the U.S. aren’t immune, that’s for sure.
Of course, tragically, so many rural voters went for Trump in 2016. But what’s he done for extending better internet to their homes? And, didn’t his Secretary of Agriculture basically say family farms are done for?
I just found out the reason many students won’t turn their cameras on in virtual class is that it takes up so much bandwidth. Most don’t have enough.
When schools close again, as they inevitably will after the inevitable surges, people will be faced with starting to plan for and implement what they should have been planning for and implementing months ago.
This might be a good time for our education policy makers to reread Aesop’s fable about the Ant and the Grasshopper.
We are opening school. I am on day 7 of classes. I am also teaching students who are in class virtually. It would be charitable to say that I am incompetent. I am far beyond incompetent. I cannot even envision teaching 150 kids remotely.
I do not see how virtual school can be anything but expensive unless the expense is placed directly on the backs of teachers. That will be how it goes. We will be expected to learn on the fly. When we do a bad job, we will be blamed with phrases like “those lazy teachers unions.”
Remote learning is way different from in-person. How can we ever expect to be able to do this well without extensive training. Parents are desperate to get rid of their children. None of this is going to work.
there’s the NATIONAL question, barely addressed inside the endless push to open in person: HOW can we ever expect to do this well without extensive raining….
Kamala!!!!
Yes!
Kamala is well qualified. Brilliant and experienced.
Can’t wait to see her debate hapless Mije Pence!
She will chew him up and spit him out on the floor. Pence the Dense v. Kamala. I predict a KO in the first ten seconds.
Very pleased with this choice!!!!! Of course, he couldn’t choose Rice because the Trumpeteer fantasists would have drowned out any discussion of real issues between now and Election Day with nonsense about Benghazi. Secretary of State?
Pence v. Harris. It will be like watching Tom Cruise debate topics in number theory with John von Neumann.
I think it was the right choice. She is the strongest candidate, plain and simple.
I would have been happy with Rice or Warren. Both truly exceptional people. But Senator Harris is a great choice.
I agree. A great choice. She’s smart, strong, experienced, and ready to do the job at a moments notice. In retrospect, her choice seems inevitable.
I am a little weary of some of the websites available and wonder about privacy issues, but this line: “What if every poor kid in the US had a gift card for purchasing online books from a curated list, for example?” That would be a tremendous boon. Thank you for suggesting it.
If all these billionaire education disrupters would simply do this instead, what a boon that would be!
HI Bob,
Thanks for your ideas.
I’m finding that it’s not only the lack of knowledge about how to teach online using platforms, but it’s also the complex, confusing and outright unworkable schedules that schools are coming up with that is posing great problems. Teachers will have to teach in-person and online all the time with rotating schedules. Information is in a variety of places – email, Google Classroom, Parent Square, SchoolTool and what ever other online sites teachers might use. Add on top of that having to have Google Meets at certain times and all the prep work that requires. It’s all over the place. It’s just a mess. It might be ok for a teacher who teaches 1 subject all day, but I have 5 preps (5 different subjects) to teach. At some point it becomes unsustainable. I often think of Eckhart Tolle who said, “Some things don’t get done and then they just disappear.” It’s pretty much impossible to keep up with it all.
Yikes, Mamie. I really feel your pain. In my last two years of teaching, I, too, had five preps. Almost impossible to keep up with under normal circumstances!!!! I’m so sorry you are going through this!!!! Be safe!!!!!
My sympathies go with you. I don’t know how any teacher can survive either online or in person.
That isn’t a very optimistic outlook but really, can teachers reach out successfully to students under such conditions?
I’m still waiting for some elementary music teacher to explain how to teach online, especially band class.
Then, I’ll be waiting for some elementary music teacher to explain how to teach music in-person. EKK!!
GOOD LUCK!
Again, I go back to the idea that even when in the classroom, teachers will have to teach online. The kids in the classroom will have to be online so teachers can also teach to the students who chose the remote learning option. When students and teachers go out sick, everything will have to be online anyway. I can’t walk around the room or collect papers. The kids in front of me in the room will be doing work online. The only difference is that hundreds of people will be in a building at one time. In most school plans I’ve read, kids will be able to take off their masks in the classroom when they are 6 feet apart. What will happen when kids cough or sneeze with no mask on? What will be done to clean the air? Nothing at all is the answer. Kids will be able to remove masks to eat lunch of course. Have you ever heard how LOUD a cafeteria gets with kids talking? I have. All those germs are going to go all over the place as students scream to their classmates 6 feet away. What will be done to clean the air? The answer? NOTHING.
I teach elementary beginner band. Last spring it was very difficult, as any band teacher knows, to have any normalcy in lessons due to the latency of online streaming. What I did is what most of us have been doing: I held zoom lessons where I teach/demo and then either have the students play along on mute or have individuals take turns playing. It’s not optimum, of course, but it’s doable.
The biggest issues I had are similar to what other subject areas have: Some kids cannot keep their attention long enough to wait, some don’t ever want to volunteer and some just turn off their cameras. As well, there were connectivity issues for some students. Small groups are the only thing that worked for me. There was absolutely no way we were having band rehearsal unless everyone was muted, since it was next to impossible to monitor anything with so many young inexperienced students.
Now on the bright side, I was able to do something remotely I could never do in person. I teach in three schools across the district. So remote learning put them all in my band together. What I was able to do was to group them by ability across the district. So students who were advancing quite well attended zoom lessons together and moved rapidly through the material. They were given supplemental work and progressed beautifully. Others were in my middle group where they moved as the program moves normally, and the last group required remedial help. I gave them three options per week to attend a lesson in their grouping to accommodate different school schedules and it worked out beautifully.
I also used the online mp3 tool that came with their book which allows them to listen and play along at different speeds. It also comes with PDFs of supplemental material and lots of how-to videos. I used it during lessons and they used it for home practice. It was a godsend. For the more advanced players I used Smartmusic which was offered for free up until last year. I also used flat.io for quick publishing, and I was able to send students anything I wrote for them to play via email and google classroom. I used screen castify to create companion videos that took them through new learning and offered them a chance to practice along as they watched.
It can be done, but you need a host of ways to deliver instruction to reach your students with varied learning styles. I also posted these activities on google classroom so those who wanted to read the instructions could do so. If you cover all the bases, you can get engagement. I included a lot of choice activities, too. I taught them to explore my website for more resources such as online metronomes and links to safe websites to learn more. I had them analyze practice poems and write their own. They were permitted to write about their exploration experiences. They could send me practice videos. They could do a daily practice check-in on a simple google form. Every engagement activity whether it be straight up zoom lesson attendance, sending in practice videos, google classroom assignments, or daily practice check-ins allowed them to earn points on a virtual wall of fame. Kids loved seeing their initials up there and got excited to do more and more. I had one student who sent me 3-5 practice videos a day. I offered feedback on every single one. It’s time-consuming, but worth it.
Now for beginning band this year, we are all virtual which worries me. The last thing we need is for students to be opening instrument cases and experimenting without proper in-person guidance from day one. I have not yet spoken to the music dept. or admins about this because we are in the process of just learning about our reopening plan, but I have some ideas about how this will go. I’m going to pitch postponing beginning band until we can be in-person and offer to assist the middle school band directors with small online groups since they most likely won’t have the time in their schedules to have small groups for everyone. If this isn’t going to fly, I will attempt some sort of instruction for my beginners. Again, this isn’t optimal, but all is not lost. We can do something to engage students remotely and help them to be eager for the real thing when it’s safe to have it.
LG: Thank you for your comments. I am not that great on the computer but I admire what you are doing.
“The last thing we need is for students to be opening instrument cases and experimenting without proper in-person guidance from day one.”
I totally agree. There is too much at stake to have students play incorrectly and learn those bad habits.
I’M GLAD I’M RETIRED!! I got exhausted just reading what you’re going through.
It is a lot of work. I get extremely annoyed when people say that teachers aren’t working when we are teaching remotely. We are putting in more time to manage our lessons and assessments than we do in person.
LG: Do you know how any elementary classroom teachers are doing remote learning?
I worked at the International School of Kuala Lumpur for my last 8 years of teaching. I had grade 4-6 chorus that met one day after school.
The band classes were held during the morning. On a rotating schedule each class would send their band students [5A, 5B, 5C, 5D] and the whole group would meet after school on Wednesdays.
My classroom music classes had a full set of Orff Schulwerk xylophones, a Chinese large sitting drum and various rhythm equipment. There was a CD player and room for lots of group movement activities. We had a full set of music song books.
Kids would not have any of this at home.
I’d be interested to learn what classroom music teachers are doing.
ISKL, is planning to open in August. That school has children from 60-65 different countries. They have a new campus that is huge…the elementary, middle school and high school are in separate departments in different places in the huge campus. I have only seen this campus virtually.
Class sizes when I worked at the elementary campus were topped at 16 children. It was considered an overload to have 18 in a room. The school has very large music rooms, according to my friend who is still working there. They also have an elementary auditorium with raised seats and a stage.
There were classes for 4 years olds, capped at 10 children and an aide was always present.
This school has the money and space to do teaching properly. Public schools in the U.S. have been underfunded for too many years. In my opinion, opening up public schools would be a disaster. Some children are getting further behind and that isn’t good. BUT, going to school means some will get sick and some will die…either adults or children.
I miss my band kids but would not want to be responsible for teaching any music these days.
All of our related arts classes will be virtual but we still have to report to the building site. Our classroom music teachers had choice boards where students could do a variety of activities, but performing with feedback is always an issue. I just left the classroom music position in January and I’m glad I did.
Early on, I had commented about using Zoom. Is it too cost-prohibitive to be used by large school districts? It seems that it would be the next best thing to in-person learning: everyone can be seen, it’s interactive (& the teacher can mute the class, so no unwelcome or extraneous household noise) & it’s like The Brady Bunch. (At the start of some of the more “whimsical” meetings I’ve attended, we actually do the B2 thing–look up, down & sideways at each other.)
This seems to me to be a good solution to the boredom & rigidity of distance learning. &–if memory serves me–John Ogozliak (sp.-?) seemed to be having a positive experience w/at least one of his classes.
This is how opening up schools will work.
………………………………….
Delta High School, Middle School to close doors with so many students in quarantine
The two schools will be closed for two weeks after more than 200 students were sent home to quarantine.
MUNCIE, Ind. — Delaware Community Schools, which has sent more than 200 students home to quarantine, announced Tuesday night that it will close the doors to Delta High School and Middle School for 14 days.
“I applaud everyone’s efforts for 2020-21 school year preparation as we opened our schools with a face to face learning experience,” Superintendent Reece Mann said in a message to the school community. “However, over the last few days, our secondary schools seem to keep ramping up with exposure/symptom related issues that increase the number of quarantined students being excluded from school. Because of this reason, I am moving Delta Middle and Delta High School to a remote learning application for the next 14 days.”…
Check out this story on thestarpress.com: https://www.thestarpress.com/story/news/local/2020/08/11/delta-coronavirus-high-school-middle-school-close-doors/3349651001/