Looking Ahead: Insights on Building Capacity for Remote Learning
Written by Kate Anderson Foley and Tony Flach
July 5, 2020
We have interacted with thousands of school leaders and educators since COVID-19 essentially closed every school in the nation. In call after call, webinar after webinar, and video meeting after video meeting, these educators have expressed a growing belief that the start of the 2020-2021 school year will be anything but normal. Most anticipate there will be some form of remote learning involved even if students are able to physically attend school.
We have conducted multiple polls asking our partners to identify their fears regarding remote learning and the related barriers to equity and excellence. The second largest concern identified, after engagement, was capacity.
You might expect that our respondents were concerned about their own capacity to design and deliver meaningful instruction remotely, and you would be right. However, educators were also taking into consideration the ability of students and families to successfully navigate any remote-learning platform. Roughly one third indicated that they had any sort of virtual learning or eLearning in place prior to the pandemic and, for many of those, the use of remote learning was an occasional rather than an embedded design feature and practice. That means that virtual learning was and may still be an unfamiliar experience for more than 60 percent of our families.
Collective wisdom can help us respond to daunting challenges. We would like to share four ideas that have emerged from our ongoing conversations with educators across the country on how to build the capacity of schools and the communities they serve to engage successfully in eLearning.
· Reflect on what worked (and what didn’t). Teachers and school leaders are anecdotally describing positive changes stemming from the pandemic. They have described individual students who struggled in face-to-face settings who found their voices and improved their achievement. Teachers and principals reported the development of lasting resources like mini video tutorials that can be repurposed for future lessons. Conversely, there are stories of students who have disconnected and teachers who have struggled with the transition. Now is the time to assess the practices your teams developed in the last two months. What do your students and families say has helped, and where have they struggled?
· Pick a main application and stick with it. Our partners have almost universally reported that they entered the pandemic shutdown with multiple ed-tech tools in use. Different teachers within a single building have been using the applications that they have discovered on their own. One principal mentioned a conversation in which a frustrated parent described each of her three children in his building using a different collaboration tool and how difficult she found it to just stay on top of their assignments as a result. We have often looked for the perfect learning solution and, perhaps, the pandemic has helped us understand that no one product does everything. Define your needs, look for the application that matches most of those needs, and commit while remembering that the power is in the instructional practice, not the specific program or application. What do you need most from a remote learning platform?
· Learn from each other. There are pockets of deep expertise in any organization. Our partners frequently noted that there were one or two members of any staff who had expertise with a platform or application. Survey your colleagues to find out what they know and would be willing to teach others. We are doing that here at Creative Leadership Solutions with regular internal meetings in which we are teaching each other how to use collaboration tools like Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and Poll Everywhere. None of us knows everything about every application, but one of us knows enough about each to support our peers. The same is true in your school or community. It is important to remember that technology is only as good as the design behind it. Technology provides the access to learning to support achievement and social-emotional wellbeing. Who are your “tech buddies” among your teachers, your students, and your families?
· Provide time for learning. The time provided should accommodate learning for our educators, our students, and our families. Harry Wong, author of The First Days of School, urges teachers to focus on “procedures, procedures, procedures” during the first weeks of a new school year. Educators across the country are realizing that they will need to allocate time for users to learn how to successfully navigate the ed-tech tools they choose. They are identifying appropriate procedures for assigning and scoring work, communicating with students and guardians, and all the other tasks necessary to learning that now need to be done remotely rather than in person. They are then building in time to teach those processes to each other and to their students and families. When will you teach the skills needed for successful remote learning?
Looking ahead to the 2020-2021 school year, what do you need your teachers, students, and families to be able to do to make the most of eLearning? Take time now, while your experiences are still fresh, to reflect, prioritize, and plan for a return to school under the “new normal.”