Written by Kate Anderson Foley and Tony Flach
June 28, 2020
What will school look like in the fall? Will it be in-person, virtual, or some combination of the two?
Teachers, students, and families are asking the same questions across the nation. While no one can predict how education will look, it appears highly likely that there will be some form of remote or blended learning involved. In recent surveys of more than 1,500 educators, engagement was the largest barrier identified to equity and excellence in remote education. Educators at all levels and in all settings have been challenged in maintaining student and family involvement during the emergency. However, the end of the school year gives us time to reflect and plan for concrete steps that can be taken now to increase engagement in our new eLearning world. Our conversations with educators have identified three steps educators should consider and one foundation upon which to build those steps in preparation for the next learning cycle.
· Establish presence. Creating your online presence requires intentionality. A powerful way to increase engagement is by “telling your story.” Telling your story means sharing what is important to you personally and professionally. It means providing clear parameters for how learning will take place regardless of platform. It means describing the learning environment clearly and frankly so the opacity of eLearning becomes transparent. Doing so will set the expectations for learning and foster the classroom community.
· Build muscle. Schools have been moving closer to personalized learning for years, with 37 percent of respondents to our survey indicating that they had been doing some form of eLearning prior to the pandemic. Over the coming summer months, we need to develop the tools for empowering students to self-regulate their online learning. This means building students’ digital muscle in study skills, persistence, organization, and assessing resources. Take the time to identify the skills students will need to be successful, regardless of the platform, and explicitly teach those skills throughout first semester of school. Examples of these skills include persistence, chunking assignments, assessing credibility of available resources, and organizing their learning.
· Design interactively. Increasing engagement takes planning. Moving to online instruction shifts time, meaning that learning can be synchronous or asynchronous. One way to increase interactivity is to design lessons that are synchronous with mastery in mind. This will allow for the authentic teacher-to-learner and learner-group interactions needed to persist with the content. For example, the teacher introduces a math lesson to the whole group and uses a whiteboard to work through the example. This allows for students to ask questions and for the teacher to demonstrate the steps in solving the problem. The teacher can then assign students to small groups using breakout rooms, or other online features, to work in groups to practice solving problems. The teacher can enter each group and observe and guide the learning. Students learn the content while navigating the social aspects of learning.
Foundation. All the above suggestions need to be built on the foundation of effective relationships between schools and the communities they serve. This message has been loud and clear in the conversations we have had with educators since the pandemic shut down in-person learning. School and district leaders are reporting different levels of student and family participation among classes in their buildings. As we have analyzed the root causes together, almost universally there is a correlation between the depth of the relationships between the classroom teacher and their students. How will you build or deepen relationships as you move forward?
As this academic year closes, it’s time to take stock of what worked and what didn’t. Survey your students, families, and teachers so a functional path can be practically designed and seamlessly implemented. John Rockefeller once said, “I always tried to turn every disaster into an opportunity.” Let us collectively use the pandemic as an opportunity to deepen student engagement.