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Remote Education: How To Improve From What We Learned

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Remote education requires instructional designs and daily teaching skills beyond the scope of usual teacher preparation.  As the nation’s medical community was not prepared for COVID, the nation’s 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 successfully used online instruction/learning for years, the human relationship is absent.  And, the crucial value of human relationship is one of the lessons learned during remote 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 in our instructional designs?  Micro-designing of instruction 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 understanding/mastery.  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 and learning?  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; thousands of decisions each day.  All these decisions are generated in the rapid-fire sequence of in-person teaching and learning.  See-respond, hear-respond, perceive-respond.  These thousands of decisions need to be enacted 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. 

Our dilemma is that remote education cannot be synchronous for all teachers and all children at all times while we engage in remote education.  Remote education is not like in-person classroom teaching.  Hence, the need for micro-design, asynchronous delivery and synchronous response. 

Micro design, the teaching of the critical attributes of what must be learned, is essential for all teaching and learning and is ultra-essential for remote education.  Critical attributes are the basic facts, the building blocks of the lesson’s content, or the a, b, c-like steps of skill building that a child must take in order to learn from an instructional  lesson.  These basics form the generalizations, concepts and understandings that complete a unit of instruction.  Without in-person engagement to synchronize what a child sees and what a child does, it is critical that these “bare bones” are identified and incorporated into a very deliberate instructional design.  The bare bones must almost become self-evident.  Critical attributes are taught asynchronously in broadcast lessons, podcasts, Zoom sessions, and e-mailed/mailed assignments.  These assignments are smaller in scope, time requirement, and the amount of required student work.  A child can appropriately be required to complete a series of essential assignments asynchronously that lead to a synchronous interaction with the teacher.  Micro design is the assurance that each component of critical learning is addressed deductively or inductively by the teacher.  Individually and collectively these points of learning lead a child to the “aha” moment.

How does this asynchronous delivery and synchronous response work?  Children engage in their lessons during a school day asynchronously and teachers are available all school day for synchronously to respond to learning.  Remote education or teaching from home requires a teacher to be “on-line” as constantly as a teacher is “on her feet” in the classroom.  Micro designing says that each child in class is working independently at home on a prescribed set of assignments within the teacher’s unit of instruction.  It is probable that no two children are at the same place in their assignments at the same time.  This means that questions and “I don’t know what to do next” problems arise at any and all times of the school day.  For this reason alone a teacher needs to be available for synchronous engagement during the entire school day.  Simply stated:  An eight-hour day of teaching at school is an eight-hour day of teaching at home.  A teacher literally works on new lesson designs, assessments of learning, and reporting of each child’s learning while being available for student engagement on-line, via text or phone call.  Synchronous response means the teacher stops the asynchronous work and attends to the student.  Synchronous access is as constantly available in remote education as it is in in-person teaching.

Asynchronous learning and synchronous response is not as screen-tied as it may seem.  There are many good strategies that make it work for children and teachers. 

“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.  Then, we can go on to the next part of this lesson.”  Or, “As you do this assignment, I will be on line to help/answer questions.  I will post each question asked, without names, and answers given.  Please check the posts – your question may be answered.  If not, contact me.”  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.  However, just like the child in class who raises her hand and is never recognized, a child whose text, e-mail, phone call is never answered disengages from remote education even faster than when a teacher is inattentive.

How do we get to this improved remote education?   The first step is supervisory.  School boards provide this 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 checks for fidelity of lessons to units and units to curricular goals.  This sounds like Teaching and Principaling 101, because it is.  However, 101 did not show up in our first experiences with remote education in the spring of 2020.

This design also connects ongoing remote education to the usual administrative and non-administrative supervision of students and learning.  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 while teachers are engaged with children synchronously.  This mirrors traditional class time.  In a usual classroom, children engage and disengage all the time.  They daydream, fidget, drop their pencils, need a drink and use of a toilet on demand.  In usual classrooms, teachers are synchronous and children are asynchronous.  Teachers are available and attentive with immediacy to student needs. We need to make asynchronous learning and synchronous response to learning 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 our resources and thinking at the time.  In preparation for the 2020-21 school year, we do not have the excuse of an emergency.  If schools are required to provide remote education, the quality of the school’s preparation 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.

Synchronicity and Asynchronicity of Remote Education

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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.

Reopening School: The Need for Day Care

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The critical attribute of school in a global pandemic is not education; it is day care and lunch.  In the face of COVID, these two functions top the list of “what the pandemic taught us about schools and our national health and economic crises” and “what does your community and state need its schools to do”.

Simultaneously, unforeseen consequences of COVID are carving the nation with demonic swaths.  The national box score this morning showed nearly 100,000 deaths and more than 1,500,000 positive cases of the virus.  These numbers dominate the news.  Pandemic not only makes people sick, it sickens all of life’s activities.  People shut down.  Businesses shutdown.  Community activities shut down.  Employees become unemployed.  Unemployment data shoots upward from less than 5% towards 20% and governments focus on how to pay massive unemployment benefits and keep businesses afloat.

The crisis has quickly grown geometrically in two daily graphs – cases and deaths, and, unemployment numbers and economic failure.  These represent the status of public health and the status of economic health.  The urgency to deal with the pandemic has taken two dimensions – how to restore the health of the nation’s people and how to restore the health of the national economy.  After two-plus months of crises, the need to restore the economy is overtaking the restoration of public health.

We remember from our history lessons that President Coolidge unabashedly said in the 1920s “… the business of America is business” and not even a pandemic has altered his truth.

COVID quickly exposed the critical attribute of public school.  Schools are by far the nation’s largest day care provider.  When children are not in school for an extended period, the urgency of day care becomes a state and national crisis.  In order to return to normalcy, schools must resume day care operations.  It is not the loss of reading, writing, and arithmetic or the cancellation of winter and spring activities and athletics that our governments and communities lament.  It is day care. 

I believe that schools will never return to what they were like in March 2020 and before COVID. 

The fall 2020 school term will begin with all children in a school setting.  Repeat – in September, all children will be in school and parents will be available to return to work.  The need for a working nation trumps the need for general public health.  But, schools will be different.  Even as businesses race toward normalcy, day care/school will be held to CDC guidance on phased practices.

  • Overarching public health advisories will require social distancing in school, in classrooms, in hallways, and every area of the school.  Guidance abandoned by business will be upheld for schools. 
  • Children will have their temperature taken at the school entry each morning and will not congregate with their friends.
  • In order to space children safely with a six foot radius between, class sizes in a standard classroom will max at 16 children per class, four rows by four rows, outer rows next to walls.
  • Schools will need more classrooms, almost twice the current number.  All spaces in the school will be considered for conversion to classrooms. 
  • School boards will rent “big box” buildings in the community for temporary classrooms that will then become semi-permanent in the next five years. 
  • More classrooms will require more staff.  Boards will hire more support staff to supervise children in classrooms. 
  • Teachers who mastered remote instruction will use their new pedagogical skills to stream grade level and subject area lessons to children in school and Big Box classrooms.  A new category of teacher will emerge – remote instruction designers.
  • Speaking of teachers, there will be a shortage of classroom teachers.  COVID and remote education will have been more than many current teachers can handle and they will leave the profession.  The current shortage of prepared teachers will be magnified.
  • Children who became acclimatized to screen time during the remote education will continue to learn through their screens.  Restrictions on in-school movement will keep children at their desks and screens.
  • Physical education and music instruction will be personally contracted between teacher and student, because large group instruction in gyms and rehearsal halls will be not be safe.  Children will video their PE and music practice time and submit these to their teachers.  Some gyms will be repurposed as classrooms.
  • School athletic programs will narrow to individual, non-contact sports with limited spectators.  Outdoor programs will be safer than indoor programs.  Major team and contact sports will not be safe.  Locker rooms and shower rooms will be converted for other purposes.
  • School lunch will be distributed to children at their desks.  Massed feeding programs in cafeterias and lines of children moving from classrooms to the cafeteria will be unsafe.  Cafeterias will be repurposed as food prep areas or classrooms.
  • School auditoriums will be repurposed as classrooms.
  • The most significant problem will be school transportation.  A 72-passenger school bus normally carrying three children per seat will carry 12 – one child per alternating seat row.  School buses will make multiple runs every morning and afternoon to transport children from home to school and home again.  More routes and each route will be shorter in time duration.  Activity and athletic transportation will require multiple buses per trip, if they are allowed.

Across the board, the cost of school will increase at a time when state revenues have been deeply diminished by the pandemic.  This will be a conundrum for state legislators.  In order for business to return to normalcy, children need to be in school.  In order for schools to follow prevailing pandemic safety guidance, each of the bullets above needs to be in daily practice.  This will cause legislators to find the money or return children to school without CDC guidance. 

Watch the box scores.  The critical attribute of public school will be on display.

Getting Covrosion Off the Learning Needle

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What do we call it when a student re-engages in learning after taking a substantial amount of time off from school?  Or after a child has been ill or home bound for a lengthy period and returns to school?  How do we describe the challenge when a student takes a test or tries to demonstrate what would have been learned during the hiatus?  We have named the outcome of decreased academic performance a “slide”, as in higher test results in June and lower results in September after summer vacation.  Summer slide.  We don’t have a word for the stagnant condition of learners not being tested over time.  We need one, especially post-COVID.

Professional athletes have words to describe a player returning to the game after periods of non-play.  When a PGA golfer returns to the tour after rehabilitating an injury or taking a vacation from play, reporters describe the player as “being rusty” or is “working to get the rust out of a swing”.  NFL quarterbacks work to regain their “timing”.  MLB players work to regain their “feel for the game” and they “loosen up”, “find their eye”, and “regroove their swing”.  Boxers “get their legs back”.  These metaphors work because they describe a difference in a state of being.  At one point the athlete was performing well.  Then, due to unforeseen circumstances, performance either stopped or significantly fell off its usual standard.  Now, the athlete is working to return to old form. 

Our grandparents had words for children getting busy with their schoolwork.  “You need to put on your thinking cap”.  Or, “it’s time to clear out the cob webs”.  No thanks.

During our COVID school closure, teaching and learning continues.  Teachers and children adapt to new daily strategies for remote education.  No one really takes off their thinking cap or gets cob webby.  Almost everyone is engaged in continuous K-12 schooling to some degree.  Remote education recognizably is not the same as regular education.  At best, remote teaching and learning allow children to “stay in play”. 

Perhaps one of the universal observations of schooling in the time of COVID is that this is an “assessment-free time.”  Most vendors of large-scale assessments are closed as non-essential businesses and schools can not access their tests.  At the same time, most schools understand that the irregular delivery of instruction does not allow children to demonstrate expected academic performances, so school are not enacting school wide assessments.  March, April, May and June are “assessment-free.” 

Learning and the assessment of learning have been “covroded”.  Corrosion is a synonym for rust, hence covroded.  We need to get the covrosion out of our educational work.

Let’s talk about covrosion on the assessment needle.  From September through early March, children were engaged in continuous, regular instruction.  Regular school means regular assessments on the school’s fall and winter testing schedule were well underway.  Then, nothing.  We knew the progression of a child’s learning through six months of school, but we know nothing since.  The assessment needle is covroded and stuck in March.

Is this the end of the world?  No.  Teaching and learning morphed into remote applications and pushed student learning through March, April and into May.  But, to what effect?  Schooling today is highly data driven.  The data of assessments informs teachers about what comes next in teaching and learning.  For our youngest children learning to read and understand arithmetic, these assessments are necessary an frequent prescriptions for teaching.  For children in ELA and Spanish classes, assessments verify how well a child is mastering language mechanics and vocabulary and fluency.  For children in the pre-Algebra through Trig sequence, assessments verify that a child is ready for more complex and complicated learning.  For children in music and art, performance assessments document the learning of skills.  Although many critics decry the amount of testing in schools, testing drives the progression of teaching and learning.  Today, in mid-May, we do not have have data about student learning.  The getting of data is covroded.

We must recognize that many teachers are using quizzes and tests to understand how children are progressing with remote lessons.  We understand that the credibility of remote education for many children is supported by quizzes, tests, graded assignments, and projects.  Tests and grades help to validate the doing of schoolwork.  If there are no tests and grades, many children say “…then why do the daily assignments?”.

As a side note, interesting stories abound regarding children who struggled with spelling and arithmetic during the winter and now are very good spellers and do well on remote arithmetic lessons and on-screen tests.  When a child yells out “How do you spell elephant?” in a home bound lesson, the child probably gets several in-house answers.  And, writing assignments e-mailed in are very nicely “proofed”. 

All of this is expected.  Why not!  But, just what have children learned and how do we know what they learned?  Are they still on track to achieve their annual grade level and subject course outcomes?  If not on track, what is the difference between the status of their learning and the annual expectation?  While we want to know the extent of learning at the close of the 2019-20 school year, we really need to know the status of learning at the beginning of the 2020-21 school year.

The assessment needle not only tells us the points of student learning at the end of a school year, it tells us the points at which student learning must begin at the start of the next school year.

Schools must get the covrosion off their daily instruction and off their assessment tools for teaching and learning to return to their normally high levels of performance in 2020-21.  Education is data-driven and educators, students and parents need the data so that a school’s academic, activities, arts and athletics programs can prosper once again.  Prescriptive teaching and learning will return when the covrosion has been removed.

In the Time of COVID, Choose Wisely

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There is a child’s voice in each of us and sometimes the child speaks out when the adult in us would not.  Most frequently that intervening voice says, “I want what I want and I want it now”.  Then, the adult must make good on a decision it may not be able to rationalize.

In the time of COVID, as well as other circumstances involving health risks, most decisions of human behavior are speculative.  We speculate that most people will not become ill and that we will not be among the sick or deceased.  We play with our sense of the odds even though the odds are mathematical and not malleable.  We speculate that following the guidance of health experts is like eating our vegetables and in the long run of things eating vegetables today does not matter.  We know what we should do, but we do not want to, so we don’t.  We speculate that what we do in the “now” will not affect the “future”.  The incubation period of the virus is 14 days and if we are not seeing symptoms today, we will be okay in two weeks.  We speculate that, like a person driving a car who tries to pass a slower vehicle in a no passing zone, that no one will get hurt this time.  The gamble is that no one is in the other lane when we want to be there.  We speculate.

In the third month of COVID, school leaders face decisions regarding re-opening school in full or in part or for special events, like graduations and promotion ceremonies.  Almost everyone is fatigued with their self- and guidance related-isolation.  Spring weather calls us to be outdoors and active.  We are cabin fevered.  However, in our rural area, health officials have determined that our communities are in the phase of community spread of the virus.  We currently have a relatively low number of positive tests but a probable number of untested people who are infected.  We are told to be safer at home.  Yet, the child voices rise up with “…we have a right to our ceremonies.  No one will be harmed.  Speculate and give us what we want”.

I am no better nor worse than others when I speculate about myself – only myself.  I am willing to bear the results when I risk me.  The onus of my responsibility when I speculate about the well-being of others beyond myself is an entirely different matter. 

As a public official, I will not be pointed at like the narcissist in Indiana Jones – The Last Crusade with the judgement made of me “…he did not choose wisely” when the data and his adult brain told him “do not do this”. 

Until the data clearly tell us that in-person interactions are safe, that there is no car in the on-coming lane because we can see the fact of the matter, school leaders should choose safety.