Teachable moments come and go. We know them for what they are – that convergence of event, time, place, and people when a window for learning opens. Some are BAM! in your face and demand your attention for teaching and learning. Others flash so quickly that before we can capture the compelling concepts they are gone in the rapid fire of our national and personal attention spans. COVID, tragically, has grabbed the world and is not letting go. However, COVID presents a treasury of teachable moments. So, BAM! Seize the teachable moment or in Latin, occupandi temporis dociles!
If educators were not swamped in stay-at-home remote education and struggling with technology, the loss of personal contact with children, and how to teach in their pajamas, our educational journals would be overflowing with new curricula. What is essential knowledge in a world crisis? What are required skills when working remotely from others? What dispositions and values are changing when personal contact and physical proximity are not possible? What political, social, cultural, economic outcomes are more important than community and world health? Every subject is a trove of compelling topics: art to zoology. The moment is ripe and the content is rich.
Emergency generated emergent teachable moments. No teachers were prepared for school closures and remote education. No students were prepped for this version of home schooling. No parents were trained to be surrogate teachers for their children. Bam! These were not present in our three-quarter school year, September into March, and overnight they became our world for March, April May and June. Emergency caused educators to create an entirely unanticipated delivery of instruction. To add to its complexity, instruction needed to be personalized from a distance, differentiated to each child’s needs, academically challenging, and in compliance with district standards.
Out of this morass came a multitude of complaints that remote education doesn’t work and children across the nation will lose up to year of academic progress. Yet, within this morass there were unbelievable gems of teaching and instructional delivery. These are the teachable moments that we need to explore, understand and use to expand our pedagogy for future education.
I continuously talk with teachers who clearly demonstrate that they taught all the essential curricula of their grade level and subject area course in March, April, May and early June. They
- Found systems for learning management. Many school districts already had learning management systems (LMS) in their technologies, but because all teaching and learning was in-person, the LMS was not widely utilized. These platforms allow teachers to post and maintain schedules of assignments, post printed text, prepared media, demonstration podcasts, lecture/presentation podcasts, and assessments. LMS are tied into district assessment and grading protocols. Districts that did not have an LMS found a need for one.
- Disassembled the given curricula into its critical attributes. A usual class period of instruction contains many minutes of getting settled in the classroom, general conversation, materials distribution and collection, sit time and transition time into what comes next. These are not present in remote education. A lesson is purified into the critical attributes of “do this”. Read. Look at and examine. Consider and analyze. Write. Edit and rewrite. Draw. Paint. Play on your instrument. Practice. Practice. Practice. Complete an assessment. Zoom with your teacher and classmates. The assemblage of critical attributes of curriculum creates a map of teaching and learning that is very clear when we remove the classroom environment and all the non-curricular doings of school. Many teachers identified a clarified curricular map they will carry forward into in-person teaching and learning.
- Chunked daily teaching into the bits that children could learn at home. Teachers relearned that a child’s attention span is 10 to 15 minutes in length. In a usual class period, reviewing prior learning blends into a presentation of new learning that blends into practicing of new learning that blends into a first checking of student learning. Remote learning without a teacher present allows a child to shut down when she doesn’t understand what to do next, becomes distracted, becomes bored, or simply doesn’t get it. The classroom teacher is not present to bring her attention back to the learning. Hence, chunking student learning into 10 to 15 minutes with a clear stop or end point plans for a child’s focused and then unfocused reality. Teachers always have known about chunking, but remote education made chunking a requirement for teaching not just something to consider.
- Texted, e-mailed, phone called, and Zoomed. While children worked asynchronously with their teacher, children also needed synchronous communication with their teacher. In a usual classroom a teacher looks across the classroom to see a hand rise, a troubled face, a distracted body, and a frustrated mind. Remoting does not allow this immediate communication between student and teacher and necessitates technology. Teachers who immersed themselves in remote teaching are available constantly to a child who needs assistance. Text me. Call me. E-mail me. I will get back to you immediately or I will get back to you on this pre-planned schedule. Until I get back to you, stop this assignment and do something else. Or stop schoolwork altogether. We need to talk.
- Learned to use Zoom, Webex Meet, Google Meet, FaceTime and other real time video applications that allowed teachers and children to see and hear each other synchronously. Overnight, teachers learned new technology applications and became users or found students who already were users and piggybacked on their students’ expertise.
In our local school district, we are taking the time for teacher talk. What did you learn from your remote teaching and learning experience? We are not interested in the daily challenges, because they were common to most teachers. Instead, we are focusing on what teachers learned about teaching practices, specific teaching methods that worked remotely, and a time and task analysis that will inform better teaching and learning in the future.
Occupandi temporis dociles!