A story from years past has new relevance today. “A primary grade child saw her school teacher in the aisles of a local grocery store and exclaimed, ‘What are you doing here? I thought you lived at school.’”. Today’s updating of this story is a child learning at-home in the Time of COVID saying, “With cell phones, texting, e-mailing and social media, I thought you were available to my communications 24/7”. “Nope” is the correct answer to each naïve comment. We need to understand some boundaries.
In the Time of COVID, we have children attending school and children learning at-home and communication protocols need to be clearly established for each. Communicating about teaching and learning with in-school children resembles pre-COVID communication with in-person questions and answers, group and individual conversations, and before and after school exchanges. Most communication is successfully made during and just after the school day.
Children learning at-home are in the foggy zone of life on-line. Some lessons are synchronous with a teacher and classmates in real time. Some are asynchronous and children work independently of the teacher and classmates. In order to balance screen time, many at-home children are advised to break up their school work with other at-home activities. Add to this the need for at-home children to wait for parental assistance with lessons until working parents return home after a working day. The result is a thinking that communication with teachers can and should take place at any time day or night. The norms for at-home children contacting teachers are new and not-yet defined.
Reasonable, respectful and responsible need to be our norms.
School leaders ask teachers to provide a single curriculum to all children regardless of a child being in-school or at-home. In addition, principals and teachers work to create a teaching and learning environment in which children can shift from one location to the other given parental choice and trends of health data. These provisions create a real expectation of a child’s accessibility to a teacher in order to answer learning questions about instruction.
For children in-school and at-home alike, a school day should begin with a teacher opening the in-person and at-home instructional day at the time a regular day at school begins. Children in-school will continue with a school day that ends at the usual time for dismissal from school. In-school children have in-person communications with a teacher throughout their school day. Children at-home will continue with a school day including real time with a teacher and off-line time without a teacher. At-home children have on-line communication with a teacher at varied times during the day with the real expectation that a teacher will respond quickly.
After school hour communications present their own dilemma. In pre-COVID Time, students and parents called or electronically communicated with teachers after school hours. Perceived necessity, being what it is, spurred such communication. In pre-COVID Time, after the end of the school day, a teacher could answer or not answer a phone, let phone communications go to voice mail, check or not check texts, e-mails and social media addressed to them. Many communications could reasonably wait until the next school day. Real emergencies were appropriately responded to, but most communications were not real emergencies. A teacher had control of the nature and timing of a response.
The ubiquitous nature of on-line schooling can easily cause children and parents to assume a 24/7 access to teachers. If a child can do asynchronous, remote lessons at any time of the day, evening or night, a child can think that their teacher is accessible in parallel time.
Not necessarily so. Teachers do have out-of-school lives that need to be respected.
A first appropriate guideline is that a school day is its usual hours, usually 8:00 am to 4:00 pm. Given time for lunch and usual health-related breaks, a teacher should be accessible during these clock hours. Unless teaching at the moment or engaged with another child, a teacher who is not synchronous with at-home children should be accessible by an at-home child via phone or text or e-mail with the expectation of an immediate or very quick response. The repeated caveat is unless teaching or engaged with another child. To facilitate understanding, a teacher can readily post their usual lunch time or necessary time out of the remote classroom.
A second appropriate guideline is that non-emergency out-of-school day communication by any child or parent will receive a response the next day. Real emergencies aside, next day response is a real and best practice.
The Time of COVID has disrupted so many things we used to take for granted, including home and school communications. We need to establish new guidelines that help not hinder good teaching and learning. Everyone wants all children to be in-school learners as soon as possible and good communication guidelines will help us get there. If we cannot make these two appropriate guidelines work during the Time of COVID, what will post-COVID be like? Will 24/7 teacher access be the new norm when all children are in-school? I don’t think so.
Remote teaching and learning is not the Wild West with no rules or norms. Responsible communication is essential for in-school and at-home learning and it is easier than we think when we treat each other respectfully.