Remote education requires instructional design and daily teaching skills beyond the scope of usual teacher preparation. As the medical community was not prepared for COVID, the educational community was not prepared for remote education. The issue is not why not, but what now. Don’t look back, look forward!
First and foremost, remote teaching and learning is not and will not be the same as in-person teaching and learning. Albeit that homeschoolers and online universities have used online instruction/learning for years, the human relationship is absent. And, the essential value of human relationship is one of the lessons learned during education in the time of COVID . Children miss their teachers and teachers miss their children. That said, we can make remote education much better in the future.
What is missing? Micro-design for asynchronous (not in real time) teaching and synchronous (real time) student-teacher response is needed to make remote education effective. When a teacher addresses a classroom of children, the in-person instructional design understands whole group and synchronous delivery, immediate feedback, and a targeted, synchronous teacher response interactional loop. It looks like this – “I say/show/display a chunk of new learning to all students. I watch/listen/perceive their understanding and comprehension of the new learning. Based upon my observation of student responses and raised questions, I clarify and correct student understanding and comprehension of the new learning. Children show me through their practice/work with the new learning the level of their learning. I check student work for accuracy of their understanding and application of new learning and make new corrections/clarifications. Then, I teach more new learning.” This loop goes on constantly in all classrooms every day when teachers and children are physically together.
How important is synchronicity in teaching? It is a quantity issue. Madeline Hunter showed us that a teacher makes hundreds of instructional decisions in each teaching and learning episode in every class class; thousands each day. All these decisions are generated in the synchronicity of in-person teaching and learning. See-respond, hear-respond, perceive-respond. These thousands of decisions need to be made in order for teaching and learning to progress.
Synchronicity also is a quality issue. We are a real-time people who expect/demand immediacy in our interactions. In a real-time classroom, watch what happens when a child raises her hand and cannot command the teacher’s attention. Facial and body language droop and commitment to the learning task moves from positive to neutral toward negativity. In remote education, even in Zoomed large group sessions, the teacher cannot see/hear/perceive/experience the same real time values of how well children are learning. And children, who cannot get synchronized engagement with their teacher disengage faster when they are at home and out of sight. Even the most committed and hard-charging child is put off by remote education’s delay of teacher attention and response time.
Hence, the need for micro-design, asynchronous delivery and synchronous response. What does this mean? Cut the lesson into smaller bits. Do not simply, just make smaller. It is like reading two paragraphs in a chapter and asking “Tell me what you understand from this”. Then, reading the next two paragraphs, same question, next two chapters, same question. It does not need to be as small as two paragraphs, it can be a larger chunk, but the quantity needs to be small enough that a quality check can be made easily and frequently.
How does this asynchronous delivery and synchronous response work? Remote education or teaching from home requires a teacher to be “on line” as constantly as they are “on their feet” in the classroom. A micro-designed assignment looks like this. An eight-hour day of teaching at school is an eight-hour day of teaching at home.
“Read/do this. Answer this question/attach your work and text/mail it to me at 9:30 am. I will be on line for thirty minutes and will respond immediately.” Or, “As you do this assignment, I will be on line to help/answer questions. Children whose names begin with A – L text/mail me on the hour and names M – Z on the half hour”. The design is that assignments are chunked small enough that their incremental nature makes understanding and learning more efficient. And, children work the assignments independently and at their speed (asynchronous), but when then they have questions or need assistance they can get it in near-real time (synchronous). Efficient and effective.
How do we get to this improved remote education? The first step is supervisory. School boards provide the educational goal – using remote education, all children will be provided their annual grade level or subject course curricula meeting the district’s annual assessment targets. This is essential. Board assertion of this goal eliminates the substitution of “time fillers” and “cut and paste” assignments that populated remote education in the spring of 2020. The second supervisory step is administrative. Supervising teaching from home requires each teacher to submit weekly lesson designs to a principal. Lesson plans need to be aligned with the district’s course guides, even though they are micro-designed. The principal is checking for fidelity of lessons to units and units to curricular goals. This sounds like Teaching and Principal 101, because it is. However, 101 did not show up in our first experience with remote education.
This design also opens ongoing remote education to the usual administrative and non-administrative supervision of students and parents. Teachers report student assignments in the district’s electronic grade book so that principals, students and parents can observe both the teacher’s adherence to an annual curriculum and a student’s attention to and success with assignments and assessments. This component of supervision was conducted with some laxity in our first exposure to remote education. It must be re-affirmed in our future remote work.
Let’s paint the picture one more time and from a different perspective. In our future remote education, teachers need to be available to children in real time for the entirety of a school day. Using micro design, teachers can chunk the rate and degree of how children will do their daily schoolwork asynchronously, but teachers need to be engaged with children synchronously. This mirrors traditional class time. Teachers are available in the classroom and attentive with immediacy to student needs. In a usual classroom, children engage and disengage all the time. They daydream, fidget, drop their pencils, need drinks and use of a toilet on demand. In usual classrooms, teachers are synchronous and children are asynchronous. We need to make this the new normal in future remote education.
As last words, remote education in the spring of 2020 was emergency work. We were unprepared and did the best we could given resources and thinking at the time. In the 2020-21 school year, we do not have the excuse of an emergency. If schools are required to provide remote education, the quality must assure that all children meet their annual curricular goals. This requires a better instructional design and improved supervision of teaching and learning.
Look forward.