I'm a reflective writer--it helps me organize and think through things. My administration asked me to do a writeup of the things I tried and did during our time of distance learning, to include as a part of my professional evaluation. So I figured I'd try to pivot it, and turn it into something that's useful for my practice and continued development. I hope this is helpful for other people too.
- Part 1: Necessary Changes (this post)
- Part 2: The Classwork
- Part 3: Communicating with Students
- Part 4: Questions I Still Have
Necessary Changes
- In the classroom, we all have a collection of classroom routines and structures that are always working with. We then add in a "toolkit" of instructional routines and moves that we access every day, choosing whatever the right tool is for the job that day. Having a bigger, deeper toolkit, full of routines and moves you've thought deeply about, is helpful as a teacher.
- And this is good! Kids know that any given day is going to be different. And what's happening between their classes is going to be different. They have a schema for how days and classes can be different, because they've been doing this for years. Most of my 9th graders have been in school for almost a decade. They've developed a level of capacity and understanding, so they can roll with things changing quickly and often--they expect it. And even if something doesn't make sense one day, there are 30 other kids buzzing around doing the same thing, providing quick feedback and direction. Worst case scenario, they've got 179 other days that year.
- But when we are teaching things online, for the first time, most students don't have a decade of online learning experiences to provide a schema for what's going on. So every new routine and structure is VERY NEW, and as such has a much higher cognitive demand. Layer upon that the demand of simply navigating computers in general. Then seat that kid in the middle of a global health crisis, an economic implosion, and a nation's renewed public attention on anti-black racism. The bank of cognitive and emotional capacity is constantly being withdrawn from, simply trying to figure out what is going on. This leaves little cognitive space to dedicate to doing math.
- That is not to say that these are all excuses for not providing students with a rigorous and worthwhile education. This is simply evidence that to the greatest extent possible, in addition to build academic capacity, our schoolwork should do two things:
- build student cognitive and emotional capacity
- minimize unnecessary cognitive and emotional demand, while focusing it on necessary things (relevant and rigorous content)
- Yes, our school work would be doing this all the time. That's the goal, anyways. But on the spectrum between "don't do these at all" and "do these all the time," the context demands that we move in the direction on increased sensitivity.
Asynchronous > Synchronous
- Synchronous learning puts a lot of pressure on those students who can't dedicate their entire day to the schedules set by their teachers. And especially if your school is one of the majority schools in the country, and doesn't have a particularly coordinated or united instructional or administrative leadership, then your kids probably have anywhere from 4-7 different adults trying to schedule times to meet with students.
- And their means of communication are probably just as all over the place. Some are scheduling things on Google Calendar, some are emailing, some are posting in their online classrooms, some are texting/calling. So teachers can't just shrug and say, "Well I emailed them my office hours, so..." Or worse, "Within the first week of distance learning, every kid at least logged in to my Google Classroom. So they have no excuse!"
- I'm not saying that synchronous learning is never right. But based on what I know about my school, my kids, my context, and me...I'm putting all my chips in asynchronous learning this round.
The next post in this series is Part 2: The Classwork.
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