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Quality Indicators of Remote Education: Curricular Integrity and Accountability

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Curricular integrity matters, especially in the Time of COVID.  Before and after this pandemic, PK-12 instruction in our schools was and will be based upon district-approved courses of study.  Adherence to the adopted curricula assures that instruction is standards-based, developmental, and contains necessary modifications making it accessible by all children.  Instruction during the pandemic is not a bridge over the disruption of schooling, but must be a clear roadway through the disruption that connects all children with the requirements of their pre- and post-pandemic educational needs.  All children need to be receiving their district’s approved curricula now regardless of instructional delivery.

Let there be no doubt that March and April, 2020, put almost all school districts into an emergency mode.  With statewide, local or school board orders to close campuses to daily school attendance and shift to virtual and remote education, the issue of what to deliver was secondary to the issues of how to deliver.  The first concern was how to connect school-based instruction with at-home children.  To abuse the term, virtually all teachers were virtual instructors and all children were virtual students.  We learned the mechanics of synchronous and asynchronous teaching and learning.  Curriculum was then attached to these new delivery systems.  And, in the early school months of the pandemic, connecting children to education, any education, satisfied our immediate needs.

I hear from parents in our local school district that they believe the remote lessons their children were provided last spring were better than the lessons children are receiving this fall.  Further questioning clarifies that those early lessons were perceived as more fun and entertaining, easier to engage in, and took less time and effort to complete.  Children were on-screen for less time and happier with their on-screen time last spring as compared to this fall.  When asked if the lessons that were more pleasing were clearly connected to their child’s ongoing lessons from September through February, it was clear that most were not although some were close in nature. 

I also hear that lessons this school year are clearly connected to the school’s curriculum.  They are similar to the lessons children in elementary grades and secondary courses received when they were in classrooms at school.  These lessons use the school’s curricular resources and are connected to the school’s assessments of learning.  This is curricular integrity.

Why is curricular integrity important?  A child really has one school year per grade level and one semester or year per secondary course.  A spiraling curriculum and academic development does resurface content, skills and dispositions that were taught earlier, but every re-emergence is an elaboration of complexity and sophistication.  The spiral assumes that grade level learning has been accomplished. 

Additionally, time and expectations do not stand still for the pandemic.  This year’s fifth grade students will pass to middle school, eighth grade students to high school, and this year’s seniors will graduate.  This will happen without an asterisk indicating that their academic progress was less than otherwise due to the pandemic. 

Our schools owe it to our children to maintain curricular integrity so that their learning is of a quality that meets the needs and demands of their respective futures. 

Quality Indicators of Remote Education: Mastery of Time

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Online teaching is not difficult; it is different.  Once we understand and learn to work with the differences, remote education becomes another scenario among many for teaching all children.  Educators are educable, don’t you know.

When we approach in-school teaching of at-home children, our first focus is on the technology involved.  Cameras and screens.  Many small faces on a device’s screen.  No children physically present in the classroom.  Each of these is true.  But, technology is a false front of difference.  Our laptops, chrome books, IPads, display boards, cameras and screens also are present in classrooms filled with children. 

Time, not the remoteness of children or the new arrays of technology, is the critical difference between in-person and remote teaching and learning.  It is consideration of and use of time that we must master in order to become effective remote educators.  Once this is done, remote education is only an alternative teaching strategy.

As remote educators, we are relearning these characteristics of instructional time.

Time is a package.  A lesson in most public school classrooms occurs within an envelope of minutes.  In a secondary classroom, a math lesson occurs within the minutes of a class period.  In an elementary classroom, ELA, reading, math, science and social studies each have an identified amount of minutes in the school day.  When ELA time is up, the lesson moves to the next subject.  A unit of instruction requires a number of lessons and, as each lesson requires time, so units span weeks of time. 

Time is finite.  The minute hand on the clock moves marks the beginning and ending of instructional time.  When the clock says the class is to begin it begins and when the clock says the class is over, the class is over.  Schooling is ordered by the clock and the number of finite minutes allocated for instruction .

Time is visible.  On a regular school day, school bells or tones sound to begin time for teaching and learning and their ELA materials and take out their math materials.  Children understand this – they watch the clock and know how the flow of a lesson and time work.  Any classroom observer sees children each day who know there are only so many minutes in a lesson in which a teacher may call on them to speak or answer a question or perform.  Outside of those minutes they are anonymous in the classroom.  They know that the first minutes of class are settling in time and the last minutes of class are packing it in time.  Children see time differently than teachers see time.

Instructional time must be optimized within known attention spans.  Studies tell us we can generalize a child’s attention span to be 3 to 5 minutes per the child’s age.  A Kindergarten child can pay attention for approximately 15 to 25 minutes before they begin to drift.  Children with learning disadvantages may have lower attention spans.  A 3rd grade child can pay attention for 24 to 40 minutes.  Effective lessons must be crafted within these attention spans – connection with prior learning, initial instruction, modeling, guided practice, checking for understanding. 

https://blog.brainbalancecenters.com/normal-attention-span-expectations-by-age

Attentive focus also is dependent upon whether or not a child finds the topic of her attention to be meaningful and personalized.  As soon as she determines that what she is hearing, seeing or doing is not, she drifts away from paying attention. 

At-home learners are vulnerable to losing attention due to factors outside the teacher’s domain or control.  We are not aware of what else is happening in the child’s home, what is off-screen, or the child’s state of readiness to learn prior to connecting online.  This heightens the need for compact, compelling, meaningful and personally-connecting instruction.

Time must be front-end loaded.  Teaching at-home learners is a “get what you can when you can” proposition.  For this reason, instruction needs to be front-end loaded.  Within the finite envelope and while you have a child’s attention, provide necessary initial instruction.  The longer into the lesson a teacher waits to deliver necessary instruction, the less likely it is that a child will engage.

Time for student work is off-screen time.  The most egregious complaint of children and parents regarding remote education arises when a teacher requires a child to be on-screen for hours at a time.  Don’t do this.  When the lesson moves to independent practice time, disconnect from screen time.  Let children do their reading, writing, and math assignments off-line.  Let children connect with other children as part of their time not part of their on-line time with a teacher.  The more a teacher allows children to work off-screen, the more children will engage with a teacher during instructional time.

Time lost is not equally regained.  When a child perceives that on-line schooling is a waste of time and begins to disengage, the time it takes to get the child to re-engage is never regained.  A child who sits passively watching an in-school teacher lecture for a full class period quickly hits the off-screen button. On-screen lecturing is a major cause of secondary student disengagement.  And, it takes far more time to re-engage a child than it would have taken to sustain engagement from the beginning.  In remote education, lost time really is lost time.

Time is accountability and accountability creates persistence.  Teachers who understand the relationship of time, high quality lessons, and personalized relationships demonstrate everyday that children who are engaged in these well-crafted, on-line lessons stay engaged.  Children respond to teachers who hold them accountable as learners BECAUSE the teachers are accountable for a quality use of time.  These child persist and are succeeding as at-home learners. 

These are not necessarily new or earth-shaking revelations about how to effectively use school time.  They are, however, incontrovertible truths – violate them at your peril.

Quality Indicators of Remote Ed – Personal and Daily Connections With Every Child

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Remote, distanced, virtual, hybrid – none of these are our public school tradition. Yet, for many teachers and children today, these are their pathways to a continuing education in the Time of COVID. Let’s consider how these strange yet necessary pathways can work to cause all children to learn.

We need to begin a discussion of best remote education practices with this proclamation. Some teachers will excel as remote and online teachers and some teachers will fail. This does not defame those who are uncomfortable, ineffective or inefficient as distanced educators. Our faculties are selected and hired to work in direct contact with children. Personal relationships are essential to causing learning. Remote education’s screen time is a game changer. The lack of daily, person-to-person presence disrupts if not completely baffles many teachers. This does not mean that ineffective remote teaching cannot be improved. Where there is willingness there is a way. Where there is a “must” there is a “can do”.

Personal and daily exchanges between a teacher and each of the teacher’s students are essential if we are to overcome the distancing required of remote education. The key words are “daily” and “personal”. Best practice is a personal exchange between teacher and child every day. It takes time. It takes planning. It takes commitment. Personal contacts are irreplaceable. A day with a personal talk between a teacher and child is the best prevention of student disengagement, because disengagement is the educational disease of COVID.

Personal exchanges are “you matter” moments. The greatest loss in distanced education is the personal connection between teacher and child. We need work-arounds that re-establish personal conversations.

• A daily one-to-one screen chat or a personal telephone call is a classroom lifeline to a child at home. And, this is not just for a young, elementary child only – it also is true for seniors in high school. After initial instruction for a lesson has been given to all children, shut off the broadcast and let children work independently. Children do not need the distraction of what other children are doing and not doing. Use this time to make one-to-one screen chats or telephone calls to one child at a time.

• Personal means personal. This talk time is only about the child and the child’s school work. You my inquire about health and safety and how the family is doing. And, then you need to get to the school work.

“Tell me how you will start this assignment.”
“Let’s talk about this sentence in your writing.”
“Tell me about…”
“How did you feel when…?”
“Tell me more …”

The conversation only needs to last several minutes. Enough for the teacher to assures to the student that her teacher is committed to her learning every day.

• Personal contact is student-centered. The conversation is not about the teacher or teaching. This call is not about any other student. It is all about the called child and that child’s learning. Do not introduce other school or class issues. If you have five minutes, make all five about “this child”.

• Link consecutive calls. “Yesterday we talked about … let’s go on from there.” Linked calls provide continuity for a child. They expand the lesson from the moment into learning over time. “Yesterday you said … What are you thinking about that today?” “Tell me about what you did in reworking that math problem.”

• Do this every day. Make it your #1 priority. Make a daily contact with each child your COVID Resolution. This is more than possible because it is so utterly necessary. Like so many preventative measures, the total amount of time required for daily contacts will be far less than the time and effort to re-engage a disengaged child.

• Personal is the sound of your voice. Get off screen and use a telephone. Not a text. Not an e-mail. Your voice talking to the child’s voice. Teachers frequently forget that the sound of voices, their voice in particular, is distinct and unique. A teacher’s voice has special meaning for a child. Many adults still recall the sound of a particular teacher’s voice, her speaking mannerisms, and with that sound the words she spoke. Make your voice heard by your students by speaking to each one individually.

• Make a record of your daily contacts. One purpose of the record is to ensure that all children are being contacted with regularity. A second purpose is to provide you with the reinforcement that comes from committing to and doing a necessary task. A long and continuous list of made connections easier to sustain than restarting an on again and off again pattern.

• Principals will pay attention. One element of your principal’s assessment of your work as a teacher of distanced children is how well you maintain contact with each child. Your commitment to personal and daily contacts and your record of these assists your principal to validate the effectiveness of your remote teaching.

There will be a day when all children will join their teachers in their school classrooms. Teaching and learning will return with highly personalized, daily conversations between teacher and child. The distancing caused by the pandemic need only be an inconvenience not an obstacle to the continuity of personal and daily connections.

A commitment to personal and daily contacts now during remote education will make a day when everyone is back in school a gathering of people who know each other well – not a meeting of people who saw each other only as distant and impersonal faces on screens.

Pandemic + Concurrent Teaching + Exhaustion and Fatigue = Change the School Calendar

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Our five-pound bag no longer fits the six pounds we are packing into it.  If we are not going to adjust the load, we must adjust how the load is carried.  The proverbial five-pound bag does not help us to achieve the same outcomes today as it did in days past.  Change the school calendar.  There’s a leap!  Bags.  Calendar.  For school people, bags and calendar are the same thing.  The school calendar is how we carry our educational loads.   

The “givens” of public education this school year are formidable.  All children need to be educated.  Schools need to be open so parents can work.  Parents require choice as to whether a child will be an in-school or an at-home learner.  School houses require strong mitigation protocols.  Due to positive tests, staff and students are required to quarantine on notice.  Children need to be socially connected with their peers.  There is a fear that children will become a “lost” generation of undereducated, socially crippled people.  And, this is just October.  There are six-plus months to go.

Each of the above issues is important.  Educate.  Keep safe.  School and local economies.  Support for the education of every child.

Let’s parse out the equation.

Pandemic.  The COVID pandemic is not abating.  Human behavior is too fickle and our commitment to a course of action too short-lived to effectively mitigate family and community viral spread.  We are going to be living, working and schooling under pandemic conditions until vaccines provide prophylactic protection.

Concurrent Teaching.  How we educate children is an interplay of in-person and remote teaching and learning.  How schools do this displays as a dizzying patchwork of independent decisions across a state.   Each local school board is forced to create its own, independent scenario and rationale for how it will educate children.

Teaching in-school to children in-school.  Teaching in-school to children at-home.  Teaching from at-home to children in-school.  Teaching from at-home to children at-home.  Teachers are experiencing each of these scenarios and many others with variation.  In general, the direction all these is headed toward teaching in-school to children both in-school and at-home.  Concurrent teaching.  Most likely, this will be the preferred scenario, when COVID testing allows, for the duration of the pandemic.

Exhaustion.  We were not prepared for concurrent teaching.  Teaching to and managing children in-class and at-home concurrently is like teaching the same lesson to children in two different classrooms at the same.  The constant back and forth, classroom to screen to classroom, is mentally, emotionally, and physically like teaching two school days in one.  Hence, the reference to six pounds into a five-pound bag.  Concurrent teaching, however, will be the preferred because it answers most of the “givens”.   But, not without its own price.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/educators-teaching-online-person-same-time-feel-burned-out-n1243296?fbclid=IwAR0He2Q_qdFK475RvrVAa0hXm4loerdeFHLtb7KOHRy7tM9yA5z_066mYTc

Fatigue.  There is a new word regarding the human condition related to teaching and learning and supporting school children in the Time of COVID.  Fatigue.  Teachers are fatigued by the daily arguments regarding in-person and remote education.  They are fatigued with worry over who the virus will touch next.  They are fatigued from either working in a worrisome school with minimal mitigation or being sheltered at home without collegial contact and support.  It is fatiguing to teach a lesson in three separate presentations simultaneously – in-person, on-line, and in delivered packets.

Parents are overwhelmed into fatigue.  Few are prepared to be tutors for their children now at-home learners.  Fewer still have an inkling about teaching, although they may have expressed personal opinions about teachers in non-pandemic times.  It is hard to teach your own children.  It is hard trying to remember how to do school assignments from your youth decades ago.  Parent fatigue is noticed by shouts of “I quit!”.

Children are fatigued.  It is one thing for a child to choose to sit for hours playing video games or engage in social media.  It is quite another for a child to be tied to a computer screen for daily schooling.  The former is exciting and the latter is grueling.  Tech savvy children quickly know to turn off their screens saying “… my Internet is failing”.  Child fatigue is noticed by their disengagement. 

Overall fatigue leads to overall diminishing of teaching and learning.  The educational killer in this equation is student disengagement.

School Calendar.  The calendar of school days remains the same bag it has been for more than a century.  The bag is approximately 180 school days spread across ten months and rolled out as consecutive weeks of teaching and learning, give or take the holidays.

Interestingly, most attempts to change the shape or composition of the school bag have met with passive to extreme resistance whenever change is raised.  Days have been spliced and whittled, but the general shape of a school year for today’s children is exactly like it was for their great-grandparents.

As a swimmer, I pushed to find how many laps I could swim with one breath.  The first lap was not difficult, but, nearing the completion of the second, holding my breath made my head hurt.  Often, I gasped just after the second flip turn.  Time for air!

Schooling needs air now and again to combat the fatigue of how we are forced to teach and learn during a pandemic.  Thinking we can maintain a “head down in the water” drive for weeks and months on end more than makes our collective heads hurt.  Oh, and a weekend is not enough air.

It is time for a new bag. 

Consider the inconsiderable.  Intersperse real breaks within the school year so that teachers, children, and parents all have a time to breathe.  Intersperse a week of no schooling every four weeks.  Consider what it would feel like to have a scheduled and purposeful release from teaching and learning these days when schooling is so fatiguing.  How would we feel today, if for example, at the end of September, everyone had taken a one-week breath?  Afterward, re-oxygenated, teachers, children and parents would have returned to the work of schooling.  How would we feel today, if, four weeks later in mid-October, everyone had taken another deep breath?  Now, at the end of October would we be talking about the overwhelming sense of fatigue that is diminishing teaching and learning and make parents wild-eyed?  Would schooling be suffering from the same disengagement?  It reminds us of Einstein’s own equation of what doing the same things over and over with an expectation of different results yields.  Leave us not define our own insanity.

A four week on and one week off is a pandemic response.  It may not be appropriate after the pandemic.  It may not be a new, permanent school calendar.  However, when the calendar we are using knowingly contradicts the facts of our conditions, the pandemic, we need to consider how we bag our commitments to teaching and learning and parental support of how we educate their children.

Consider a new bag.

Piloting Schools in the Time of COVID

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Course changes are required.  An airplane takes off from Chicago, sets a course toward San Francisco, flies for hours over the Midwest, plains, western plateaus, mountain ranges, and then lands at San Francisco.  Easy peasy.  Not so much.  From take-off to touch down, the pilots of the plane make numerous corrections in the compass course, the elevation, and speed as the plane flies.  If there were no corrections, this flight would end somewhere on the west coast but not at San Francisco.  So many things happen between Point A and Point B that course corrections are always required.

So it is with piloting schools in the Time of COVID.  School leadership is required to make course corrections in order for children, staff, curriculum, learning environments, and families to arrive safely and educated at a Point B somewhere in our future.  In the Time of COVID, the two courses of school leadership – safety of all and education of all children – require well-thought out flight plans and then close monitoring and constant sensitivity to needed course corrections.

That brings us to this moment in time.

School leaders have set many different pandemic education plans in motion.  At one end of the pandemic plan continuum are schools that completely opened a campus for teachers and children and in-person schooling as usual.  At the other end are schools that assigned teachers to teach from home and children to learn at home and closed the campus to all.  And, in-between are an untold number of variations. 

Schooling requires plans for health and safety and plans for continued teaching and learning.  Time, place and function wound these two courses of action together into a helix design of who would teach how and from where and who would learn how and from where.  The design reflected the leaders’ understandings of medical science, educational delivery systems, and community resolve for each of the two courses – keep children safe and educate my child.

In March 2020, no school leader anticipated the depth and breadth of the pandemic or that five school months later their school would still be on a pandemic flight plan.  In March, we shuttered schools when there were few or no positive cases of the virus in our schools or local communities and made our way through April and May toward the end of that school year.  In August/September, we launched a new school year when there were tens to hundreds of positive cases in our school and community environment.  Now, in later October, we are maintaining our course plans through the facts of thousands of local positive cases and nationally more than 224,000 virus-related deaths. 

As good school pilots, we check our instrumentation constantly.  Although our county is rated as very high in viral activity, there have been very few local children or school staff infected with the virus.  That metric within a metric becomes an important focal point.  Our course mission of keeping children and school staff safe is being met by the current course of action.

We check a second instrument – quality of teaching and learning – and we find a very erratic array of data displaying the current status of how well we are schooling children.  The data is teacher and child dependent.  Some instruction by some teachers is of the highest quality and children are engaged and achieving.  Student learning data indicates that some children are achieving and even surpassing our educational expectations. Some instruction by more teachers began with quality but over five months of stressed delivery is no longer causing learning in the acceptable achieving range.  And, some children, a growing percentage, are checking out.  Hybrid or remote education without continuous contact with teachers, school activities, and classmates leads children at home to push the “off” button and disengage.

Reminder.  Our point B is the quality of school health AND the quality of student learning.  It is time for corrections in course.  The issue before us is how to keep children and staff in a low incidence virus environment while bringing children and staff together in-school for teaching and learning. 

Of course, parents will retain the option of remote education for their children if they choose not to return their children to school.

First course correction —  Open school for in-person learning to one grade level in K-2, one grade level in 3-5, one grade level in 6-8, and one grade level in 9-12 on Monday.  All children in other grade levels remain in remote education.  On Tuesday, rotate the next grade level to in-person learning.  On Tuesday, grades 2, 7 and 10 will be in-school.  On Wednesday, grades 3, 11 and 11 + 12 will be in school.  On Thursday, start the rotation again so that one day in three, all children have the option of in-school learning. 

During the rotation, a teacher teaches simultaneously to children in-class and at-home or only at-home depending upon the grades being rotated.

Maintain this rotation for two weeks to monitor the effects of in-school teaching and learning on school health.  Maintain all school protocols – everyone is masked except when eating or drinking, social distancing in classrooms and hallways, and constant hand sanitation and schoolhouse disinfecting. 

After two weeks, if low incidence of infection is sustained, shift the rotation of in-school learning to alternating days for alternating grade levels.  Half of the children will be in-school every day for the next two weeks.  If low incidence of infection is sustained, open to campus to in-school learning for all children every day.

So, what is a low incidence of infection?  It is not zero infections, although the current remote education course has caused zero in-school spread of the virus.  The current county positive test rate is more than 20% of all tests each day.  The school board’s initial target was less than 3% and that should be the new course, in-school low incidence indicator. 

Second course correction — Children will have the option of in-school learning as long as the in-school infection rate is below 3%.  If a child has a positive test, the child and child’s class(es) will return to remote education for fourteen calendar days.  If the in-school infection rate rises above 3% of the student body, all children will return to remote education for fourteen calendar days.  And, if a teacher has a positive test, the teacher and teacher’s classes will return to remote education.  After quarantining, teachers and children may return for in-school learning.

Possible course correction — Course correcting always allows for a return to the initial course heading.  If required, all teachers and children may return to at-home teaching and learning.

Arriving at Point B for a school, even in healthy years, is a matter of monitoring and adjusting how well school policies are causing children to safely attain the school’s quality educational indicators.  Those usual adjustments do not draw much attention.  In the Time of COVID, every course correction is contentious depending upon a person’s initial preference – protect the health of children and teachers or protect the educational options for all children.  Getting to Point B in these times requires course corrections across each of these targets and then more corrections until we all arrive at Point B.