It is easy to grumble about what children cannot do as at-home learners. Instead, let us consider what they can do. In fact, remote education is prime time for learning that requires children to work independently, requires practice, lends itself to asynchronous collaboration, and requires one-to-one teacher assistance. Consider the kinds of school assignments that a child typically does as an independent student – just me, myself, and I. I will highlight several and know that all PK-12teachers will quickly identify more. In each, a teacher provides clear instruction and demonstration of new learning and checks for student understanding. Then, teacher and children disconnect from the Internet and work independently.
Before we go further, all at-home learning can be informed by academic standards and assist children to become competent and proficient in those standards, just as if they were sitting in school and in class everyday.
Student Writers and Peer Editing. Some children love to write and others would rather go to the dentist. However, all students write. And, all students submit their writing. Let us start there. Writing begins and finishes as a solo endeavor. The assignment may be to write a paragraph or an essay, a poem, or a short story, to answer a question or make an argument. As a writer, picture a child with a pencil and paper or at a keyboard pondering what to write, beginning to write, considering her writing, editing her writing and making corrections and changes. Envision a child focused on writing, stand up to stretch and move about, return to the writing, tear up a page of paper or delete it from her screen, begin again, and persevere until she has a composition. Writing, or the writing of a first draft, is a very private and independent process and fits the isolation of at-home learning very well.
She writes or thinks “The end” at the end of the assignment. But, not quite.
Remote education also is a wonderful setting for peer editing. Writing and peer editing go hand-in-hand in theory. However, when children are in-school, time for peer editing often is omitted. Peer editing takes time and, although editing is a specific assignment, it takes children time to focus, to read, consider and make comments. This editing process can look like some children focused and others fully checked out, hence class time, a limited commodity, too often is eliminated for peer editing.
Remote peer editing is flexible time – children do it on their time not on the classroom clock. Online classroom platforms allow children to write and maintain their writing in a personal folder and then share their writing with other students. This sharing option is made for peer editing. It is easy to share a written document with several classmates, for those peer editors to read and make marginal comments on the document and for the author/student to read peer comments. No one needs to move. No paper is handed back and forth. This is truly a digital routine and children complete this task on their time.
Peer editing not only helps a student/author improve her writing, it helps the peer editor see how other children interpreted and completed an assignment. It extends their understanding and requires peer readers to be critical readers and clinical in their comments. Peer editing helps a teacher to understand how children understand the assignment as writers and skillful and insightful peer commenters.
Musicianship, Solo and Aggregated Performance. Elementary music classes, secondary bands and orchestras, and secondary choirs illicit in-school images of large group instruction and performances. Social distancing and remote education seemingly shattered large group music instruction and performance. Maybe not. At-home learning provides a music teacher the opportunity to focus on the musicianship of each individual child with a specificity that is not present in-class. Many of us may remember being called upon by our music teacher to sing or perform, especially while we stood in the middle of the chorus or sat in the middle of the band room and every other student waited, listening only to us. “Again”, the maestro required. After the third “again”, we could not shrink to a smaller psychological low. This is not just my inglorious memory – I hear about similar moments from many.
A Zoomed individual music lesson allows a child to sing or perform just for the teacher and for the teacher’s individualized comment. It allows the teacher to critically assist a child to understand and undertake the incremental steps of improvement required. And, without peers.
A child at-home can audibly and/or visually record practice time, review her own performance, and forward it to her teacher. There is no limit to the amount of practice time and recorded practice time an at-home child can accomplish. The key is to make a record, forward it to the teacher for review and comment and then wait for next instruction.
Zooming to a large group allows a teacher to provide academic musicianship instruction and individual Zoomed appointments allow the child to demonstrate her understanding of that instruction.
Practicing voice or instrumental lessons may have been harder to schedule in pre-pandemic times. In the Time of COVID, practice time helps to structure a child’s time at home and a teacher can listen to each recording at the teacher’s leisure.
Math Reasoning. One of the most effective math teachers I have observed wonderfully used “show me” and “explain to me” requests in causing children to excel in high school math. In-school, she had students at the board – chalk or white – displaying and then explaining their solutions. It was all about reasoning and using mathematics to create clear and concise answers to quantifiable and qualifiable problems. Children watching learned from the reasoning of others and confirmed or reworked their own rational solutions based upon the work of their peers. Eloquent reasoning is a trait of mathematical problem solving that requires time and practice and critical review.
Remote learning changes nothing. Children are provided quality, synchronous instruction by their teacher on new mathematics. The teacher uses the synchronous time to verbally check for understanding. Independently, a child works and resolves practice problems. She submits electronically to the teacher her “show me and explain to me”. This is a one-to-one conversation and the teacher provides personal feedback on the math application and reasoning. Depending upon commendation or recommendations, the student then resolves other problems or reworks the existing problems using the teacher’s comments. This process takes time, but time in remote education is an available commodity that is well worth the depth of individual understanding and learning that is accomplished.
Drawing, Painting, and Design. Many teachers and children have created at-home art studios. Supplies are delivered by school bus to children’s homes where kitchen tables or card tables or corners in garages have become independent art rooms. Once again, teacher instruction is delivered synchronously to the art class of at-home learners. Clear demonstration of technique and expectation are presented and children are checked for their understanding. Then, children have independent art time to draw, paint and design at home. They do not need other children or a teacher to do this – they work independently. Completed work is submitted to the teacher electronically or returned via school bus pick-up.
Extended and Intensive Reading. Because in-school time is limited to class periods or segments of a morning or afternoon, time for children to read in-school is reserved for short assignments or to begin them on assignments to be finished at home. Children seldom have time in-school to read a full chapter of a book or reread any parts they did not understand. And, children almost never read an entire book using in-school only. Extended reading takes time and at-home learning provides the time for a child to read, take a personal break, return to reading, consider reading, and read more.
Consider the traditional readings of literature in-school, such as The Miracle Worker, Night, Great Expectations, Of Mice and Men, Scarlet Letter, The Crucible, Julius Caesar, and Romeo and Juliet. Some works are assigned to all children and others are child-selected.
Consider children in elementary classes taking a trade book to sit in a soft chair, stretch out on a floor cushion or walk around while silently reading. Consider a child of any age reading aloud so she can hear the words not just see them. Consider a child reading all the parts of a play and moving around to semi-act them out. Now think of a child having extended time at home to read without a school bell or the need to close the book and move on to a math lesson. Remote education promotes extended and intensive reading.
Natural Observations. Children at-home have the opportunity to be observers of what naturally happens in the world around them. No matter where – in a rural home in the woods, a suburban home in a neighborhood, or an urban home in a city – life happens. Observation of life can cause learning. Children can observe people. They can observe weather. They can observe plants. These observations can be planned for in an at-home curriculum based upon academic standards. Science, social studies, mathematics, the arts, behavioral sciences – all and more can be crafted into at- and around-the-home observations. Children see. Children make notes. Children write or talk about. Children learn from.
Astronomy. Lastly, school time and astronomy do not live on the same clock. Unless a school has access to a planetarium, it is difficult for children in-school to observe the stars and planets and heavens. However, as at-home learners, children have access to the nighttime skies. Synchronous instruction and direction can prepare children for sitting or laying out on the ground at home to watch the sunset and the night skies appear. They can identify and become familiar with constellations, meteor showers, planets and stars. They can observe and record the seasonal rotation of the skies. They can report and share their observations on Zoom chats with classmates and their teacher. They can learn first-hand what otherwise would be largely book learning. At-home learning can definitely promote a learning of astronomy.
It is hard for me to write, but I do, that there are many things that remote education with at-home learners allows us to accomplish that we could not when all children were in-school. It must be our decision and design to cause all children to learn in this new educational setting.