Online and Personal: First Thoughts About Home-Alone Learning During Pandemic

So already, I loved Shonda Rhimes' tweet about homeschooling during the COVID-19 pandemic: I love anything that shows respect for teachers and the challenging work they do all the time, usually successfully. 

But truthfully, I think the challenges Rhimes experienced have little to do with her not being a teacher by profession. In a moment when a whole nation is on edge, when teachers and students are both fearful, and when students can sense that the adults around them are also fearful, even if they are calm, it's hard for students and teachers alike to get focused and stay focused on learning--well, at least on some kinds of learning.

So what kinds of learning can and should happen in a moment like this one? And what's working in our favor in March 2020 as we set out to support our students academically and emotionally during a moment that's "new" for everyone? And yes, I said emotionally: if we're not thinking emotionally, we might as well give it up now, in my opinion. 

[And no, this is not going to be a blog post about the abundant socioeconomic inequities that are a very real impediment to many children's being able to take learning advantage of this current bizarre educational moment--but I'm very glad any number of other people are writing about that very important problem. And while we're at it, an additional warning: I was a high school English teacher before I retired in 2014, so the students I'm foremost imagining as I write this are secondary school students, though I've been really curious about the way teachers of younger students are handling all of this.]

Here's what's in our favor, especially in places where schools and kids' homes provide access to online environments:

Greening Willow Near the Princess Eve Salt Marsh

• First of all, it's springtime. That means that students know one another, since they've been in class together since the beginning of either the school year or the semester. This was true right after the Boston Marathon bombings, which also disrupted the emotional equilibrium of both students and teachers, at least where I worked. It was not true after 9/11, which occurred when the school year was very young and students were only beginning to get to know their teachers and fellow students. The bottom line is this: when students already know one another through face-to-face interactions, it's much easier to create an online learning environment that is safe enough for them to take the intellectual and emotional risks on which learning depends.


• Second of all, many classrooms that are going online completely have already been operating as blended classrooms--classrooms in which at least some learning and learning resources are respectively orchestrated and shared online. That means that given the time of year, teachers and students already know how to work in these online environments. Given that they've already had opportunities to use the "required" online tools, students are not worried about how to submit work either for pre-final-assessment feedback or for final assessment. And they don't need more to worry about right now!

So what is it that students do need right now? First, I think they need to maintain a sense of connection to one another. They need to know how one another is doing, if they are all okay or getting better in relation to coronavirus, what each of them is going through as a member of a family and part of a neighborhood. I know that chances are high students will communicate some of this without its being part of school, but I still think it's important for this kind of communication to have its place in the virtual classroom, where teachers can look in on it.

Second, they need opportunities to talk about what they're hearing, seeing, experiencing, wondering about, feeling: in other words, there needs to be room for the pandemic online. For many years, classrooms have been places where students have come to vet the information they've gotten from here, there, or anywhere.That needs to continue, and it represents a skill and questioning disposition that schools are always trying to cultivate in students anyway.

New Hampshire Vernal Pool

Third, they need to keep their established learning routines in place: some students might be in the habit of sharing a current event story weekly, of posting data about an ongoing science investigation regularly (since going outside still is okay under the right conditions, heading out to the backyard or a nearby vernal pool* could still happen), of posting a review of an outside reading book monthly, of sharing every two weeks what's happening in their "assigned country" as relates to a global issue the whole class is studying. And also of responding to others' online posts related to all of these. Good habits are reassuring, normalizing things during moments that unsettle us collectively.

So what about other academic learning, specifically whole-class curricular learning? I believe that this is not the best time for introducing all kinds of "new conceptual content," not the time to be committed foremost to teaching units that were planned last August for this March: in my experience, new conceptual content, especially for young people who are developing their capacities to ask questions and capture their own and others' answers to them--in other words, young people who are still much in the process of learning to negotiate learning with themselves and with others, and who may have special learning needs in addition--is best taught when there can be face-to-face interactions around it. Some schools and classroom groups may have the capacity to forge ahead online as if COVID-19 isn't shaping our lives, but most cannot. And so be it. Adherence to pacing guides and curricular plans just isn't the most important thing right now.

So what could, and perhaps should, school be about right now if "new stuff" is too hard learn and teach outside of the classroom? I think this is a real moment for helping students to retain what they've learned this school year to date. This could be done by

• first, reminding them, or helping them to remember, what they've experienced in the classroom and created/done during the past year/semester: the teacher could lay out an online timeline of the learning events, or better yet, the students could create the course timeline and plot the learning events on it;

• second, getting them to look at the work they've done--the projects, the homework, any online or folder/binder-housed portfolios--and supporting them to reflect on what they think they've learned--and what makes them think they've learned it (saying "I got a good grade" won't cut it). Incidentally, the learning that students identify can and should relate to both skills and content: they should be encouraged to say what they can now "do better" and to say what they now understand more deeply, or understand now that they misunderstood or only partially understood before. 

• and third, asking them what parts of the learning they've identified that they most value-- 

• as learners generally, 
• as learners of a particular subject matter, and 
• as human beings with individual interests and goals

--and why. It's also fine for them to identify learning areas where they feel they still have learning to do: teachers can then direct them to online places** that can help them fill in their learning gaps or make their tentative learning more certain, and therefore more useful to them.

Reflection on learning always involves some explaining, some describing, and some story-telling. Therefore, it's essential that teachers provide an array of questions from among which students can choose to help them express their most authentic, thoughtful reflections on their personal learning journeys. Some variation of the Project Zero "I used to think . . .; now I think . . ." thinking routine*** is always a good idea:

• I used to think  . . .; now I understand that . . .; 
• I used to wonder . . .; now I know . . .;
• I used to think I was/wasn't good at . . .; now I feel that  . . . because . . .;
• I used to think I was good at . . .; now I understand . . .;
• I used to think . . .; now I want . . .;
• I used to think I couldn't  . . .; now I think . . ..

"Spring Reflections"****

All of these thinking routine modifications indicate a before-and-after mindset in order to help students recognize their progress. It's a wonderful thing to empower students to say with authority what they think they have learned, especially when they're basing their judgments on the evidence provided by their own work and their knowledge of themselves. It's amazing how often students, when encouraged to reflect, take the opportunity to describe changes in not only their skills and knowledge, but their attitudes toward learning and even their understanding of how learning happens for them personally. One of the biggest shifts I've often had students identify was in their appreciation of the benefits of learning with others: through conversations; through the need to negotiate a common purpose or action as part of a group project.  

The good news is that online spaces are really good places for showing student work and for posting excerpts from and reflections about that work. Whether students post the actual work or photographs of it, they and other students can see what exactly they're talking about in their reflections.

There's so much literature about how much student learning is lost over summer vacation. There's a real chance that the COVID-19 closure of schools--who knows how long it will last--could create a hiatus in learning regardless of all the well-meaning steps teachers and schools are taking to make learning continue during pandemic. 

But I have very serious questions about academic content can be learned deeply and flexibly during a time of so much stress. Better our students should be given the chance to reflect back over the school and develop a thoughtful snapshot of themselves and their learning at this very moment. If they can see that they've learned, know what they've learned, celebrate what they've learned, understand how they've grown, and somehow capture what they've learned in a form that they can examine at a later date--in other words, if they can make their learning visible**** so that they can look at it later and use it to reorient themselves and then relaunch their learning in schools on the basis of it--that would be a very hopeful and very useful thing. 

Reggio Emilia's Teatro Municipale*****

"Making Learning Visible" isn't my phrase; it's the name of a Project Zero project that I was part of as a teacher-researcher for many years--and that had its beginnings in the preschools of Reggio Emilia, Italy. As the coronavirus has ravaged Italy, I've thought a lot about Reggio Emilia. I've wondered about the welfare of the students and teachers, and about the way all of the schools have been  dealing with the virus-imposed interruption of schooling. 

Though I can't know for sure, I've felt certain that those who embrace the values and best practices of the preschools have been doing everything they could not to separate the intellectual and curricular from the social-emotional or the civic. And we would be advised not to do so either. Let's give our students the chance to be who they are--and see who they are--in this moment of novel uncertainty. Let's impress upon them that just because they've lost time in school buildings doesn't mean they've stopped learning, or that they will lose learning. Above all, let's provide them with learning experiences that communicate our certainty that there will be a post-COVID-19 future and that they'll be ready for it as students and human beings.

* https://extension.unh.edu/resource/vernal-pools 
** There are great online resources for kids struggling to use certain marks of punctuation correctly--ones that offer online quizzes that explain to students their right and wrong answers.
*** https://smartprimaryed.com/2016/03/06/ideas-visible-thinking-thinking-routines-part-2/ 
**** One of several "Spring Reflections" photographs on "The Dancing Donkey" blog: http://thedancingdonkey.blogspot.com/2015/04/spring-reflections.html
***** Paolo Picciati / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Teatro_municipale_notturno_reggio_emilia.JPG 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlkdSXs9dng