Category Archives: Blog

Occupandi temporis dociles!

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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!

Mommy, Daddy. What Did You Do During the Pandemic of 2020?

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It’s time to write some history!

Children of the Baby Boom unknowingly were given unrecognized gifts by parents and grandparents and older friends and neighbors.  Being one, I remember.  We heard stories of the Depression and World War Two from people who were there.  We heard stories of the hard times and scarcity of the 1930s when work was hard to find and supper was measured in spoonfuls.  We were told their thoughts and fears on December 7, 1941, the day Pearl Harbor was attacked and the United States was committed to war.  They cried telling stories of family members and friends who died in uniform.  They explained about our family fall out shelter in the basement with its blocked windows and stacks of canned meats and vegetables water canteens.  We were gifted with first-hand accounts from people whose words made history meaningful to next generations.

In the summer of COVID, educational and social writers encourage summer school or an early start of school in the fall as a strategy for recouping lost teaching and learning due to remote education this past spring.  At the same time, polls show that 2/3s of families are hesitant to send children back to school because they believe virus remains a real danger.  Our question:  what do we do as educators between these two important positions?

A good rule of thumb when you seem to be uncertain of the direction you should go is to stop, stand still, and observe all around you.  Let the world find you.

In the gap between a remoted spring and an unknown fall, let’s write history.  We can assist children who are living through a unique world event to memorialize their experiences for family and friends decades from now.   We have the skills to help them to tell their story of Life in the Time of Covid.  We have the opportunity to create gifts that will help children in the future to know what their parents and grandparents did in the Pandemic of 2020.

This is a wonderful summer project with educational outcomes.  Stories From the Time of COVID can be recorded by children of all ages.  Stories can be in written word, personal artwork, photographs, song and playwriting, recorded voices and any combination of the same.  There is no right or wrong or passing or failing in storytelling, just the telling of stories.  This is personalized learning at its best.  It is a learning project every child can accomplish.

One of the best ways to understand the COVID pandemic has been to read the stories of those who lived through the Spanish Flu pandemic 100 years ago.  Or a war.  Or the Civil Rights years.  Or through a time of great turmoil.  The personal stories and photos of their times help us to understand the historical phenomenon of a pandemic, its devastation of death, what people did to survive, and the after effects of their ordeal.  Children today can read about children then and compare and contrast their own experiences.

I encourage teachers to make this suggestion to their students:  This was my life during the Pandemic of 2020.  This is not a required assignment.  It will not be graded.  However, it will be important and it will be cherished.  Someday in the future, the stories of how children and young adults lived during this pandemic will be helpful to children and young adults them as they face their own challenges. 

In a summer without structured, large group activities for children of all ages, a suggestion from a teacher may help a summering student find an important outlet for time, talent and energy. 

Then, take your own advice and write your personal story:  This is what I did during the Pandemic of 2020.

Summering After Remoting: Now to Next

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Schooling for the 2019-20 school year is closing several months after the schoolhouses closed.  The shuttering of schoolhouses and the end of this instructional year are two events that will be marked on our calendars and not fade into history quickly.  Most important is our recognition that closing a schoolhouse and closing a school year are not synonymous.  Schoolhouses closed in late March and schooling continued until June.  If this were June of any prior year, children would exit school doors after a last day of their school year, teachers would box up classroom materials, and schoolhouses would be darkened for the summer.  Someone would be yelling “School’s out.  School’s out.  Teacher’s let the monkeys out.”  In those days, schoolhouses, schooling, and a school year had clear markers.  Not so much today.

A side note worth considering.  Schools and governors chose the safety of closing schools instead of staying in school and remote education instead of in-person, large group education.  These were health and safety decisions not based on educational or economy-based rationales.

According to NWEA, an educational assessment, professional development, and research vendor in Oregon, posting in the NY Times, “New research suggests that by September, most students will have fallen behind where they would have been if they had stayed in classrooms. . . . Racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps will most likely widen.” 

NWEA believes that the usual and traditional summer slide of student academic performance indicators, June compared with September, will be greater next fall than in prior years due to schoolhouse closures in the spring of 2020.  Other commentators agree with NWEA’s opinion that the loss will be greatest for students of color and poverty.  Most everyone agrees and understands that remote education this spring was not the equivalent of normal in-person teaching and learning.  The big question now is, “what do we do about it?”.

Some responses are knee jerks.  Others are contemplative.  And, a few are progressive.  Knee jerk reactionaries want to open schools in late July or August to add back weeks of learning time lost this past spring.  They want to open schools regardless of health and safety and complete the 2019-20 school year as if it were still the month of March.  For those who believe that schooling is time in school,  that nothing was learned during remote education, and schooling is a cut and paste enterprise, this works.  It is a traditionalist’s approach to making things whole.  Once whole again in school time, the future looks like the past.

The contemplatives look backward and rethink the decisions of governors and school boards to close schoolhouses in the ramp up period of the pandemic.  “If only …” thinking tells them “we cannot know how COID would have affected the health of children, their families and communities, because we closed schoolhouses.  But, we do know the educational and economic impacts of closure and they are not pretty.  Perhaps if we had not closed schools, educational loss and economic disasters would not have been as great”.  The unknown effects of COVID on the health of children due to closure is weighed against the known losses in educational performance and across-the-board economic losses.  This causes contemplatives to want to open schoolhouses to recoup our educational and economic losses.  “We gave a lot in to sustain healthy children.  Perhaps school closures were not necessary.  Now, it is time to balance things out.” 

Some facts.  Educational data will show disparate results in student learning resulting from remote education.  Some disparity arises from the differences in school and home resources.  Certainly, some schools and homes were better positioned to support remote education than others.  Certainly, some communities have better Internet connectivity than other communities.  And, certainly some teachers and students were better able to transfer rigorous teaching and learning from in-person and in-classroom to home-based strategies.  I know teachers whose daily, remote instruction caused children to sustain their academic growth and approximate student’s in-class academic growth.  I also know teachers whose daily instruction did not. There will be differences in outcomes.

What do do?

  • Get the data.  When in-school schooling resumes, assess. Use the same learning assessments that were used in September 2019 and January 2020 to understand the educational performances of all children.  Add in data from assessments taken in September 2020.  We need side-by-side comparisons.  Look at each child’s beginning of year and mid-year indicators.  What is the difference between anticipated educational gains and real educational status? 
  • Schooling in May always is differentiated from schooling in September through April.  May is ramp-up for high school AP testing and it is ramp down for almost everyone else.  How does comparative data from past ramp down years relate to data from remote education?
  • Summer slide is an annual phenomenon.  Educators have forever shaken their heads about the loss of performance indicators from June to September.  How does the data from remote education plus slide differ from in-class plus slide differ?
  • Should the compensation for differences in what the data shows us be time-based or effort-based?  We know that education “percolates”.  Children need time and opportunity for learning to gel and make sense.  Instruction over time also builds learning strength and adds depth to knowledge and skills.  Some compensation will require time on task. 
  • Learning time also is personal.  Some children require more time on task to master new learning than other children require.  We need to disaggregate the data so that children receive the compensation they need.  We would error greatly in requiring all children to receive identical compensatory instruction they may not need or others not to get the instruction they need.
  • We also know that instruction has critical attributes that lead to essential learning and enrichment values that may not be essential.  Compensation should ensure that all children achieve essential educational outcomes.
  • Urgency is relative.  There are content knowledge and skills that are urgent because they are necessary for children to engage in what comes “next” in school.  Learning is additive.  The mastery of early learning outcomes allows children to learn later outcomes.  Other knowledge and skills are cumulative and urgency is not a matter of concern.  Children will learn these over time.  We need to deal with the urgent but not be overwhelmed by the not-so-urgent.
  • The issues of health and safety in the time of COVID are not going away quickly.  While we want all children to return to school to resume schooling and repair any educational loss and our parents and community adults to be available for work to repair local, state and national economies, we also want everyone to be healthy and safe.  Consequently, re-opening school must follow our best knowledge and facts about the continuing pandemic.  It is more than probable that social distancing, masking, screened access, and hand washing will be requirements in a re-opened school.
  • Re-opening school will cost more money than a typical fall opening of school.  The issues of compensatory instructional time and new instructional designs combined with compliance with health and safety guidelines will add new costs to a traditional September opening of school.  When all is said and done, these facts may the real driver of the decisions a school board makes regarding September 2020.

Next will arrive in its own time.  We need to understand exactly what will be our next.

Remote Education: How To Improve From What We Learned

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Remote education requires instructional designs and daily teaching skills beyond the scope of usual teacher preparation.  As the nation’s medical community was not prepared for COVID, the nation’s educational community was not prepared for remote education.  The issue is not why not, but what now.  Don’t look back, look forward!

First and foremost, remote teaching and learning is not and will not be the same as in-person teaching and learning.  Albeit that homeschoolers and online universities have successfully used online instruction/learning for years, the human relationship is absent.  And, the crucial value of human relationship is one of the lessons learned during remote education in the time of COVID .  Children miss their teachers and teachers miss their children.  That said, we can make remote education much better in the future.

What is missing in our instructional designs?  Micro-designing of instruction for asynchronous (not in real time) teaching and synchronous (real time) student-teacher response is needed to make remote education effective.  When a teacher addresses a classroom of children, the in-person instructional design understands whole group and synchronous delivery, immediate feedback, and a targeted, synchronous teacher response interactional loop.  It looks like this – “I say/show/display a chunk of new learning to all students.  I watch/listen/perceive their understanding and comprehension of the new learning.  Based upon my observation of student responses and raised questions, I clarify and correct student understanding and comprehension of the new learning.  Children show me through their practice/work with the new learning the level of their understanding/mastery.  I check student work for accuracy of their understanding and application of new learning and make new corrections/clarifications.  Then, I teach more new learning.”  This loop goes on constantly in all classrooms every day when teachers and children are physically together.

How important is synchronicity in teaching and learning?  It is a quantity issue.  Madeline Hunter showed us that a teacher makes hundreds of instructional decisions in each teaching and learning episode in every class; thousands of decisions each day.  All these decisions are generated in the rapid-fire sequence of in-person teaching and learning.  See-respond, hear-respond, perceive-respond.  These thousands of decisions need to be enacted for teaching and learning to progress.

Synchronicity also is a quality issue.  We are a real-time people who expect/demand immediacy in our interactions.  In a real-time classroom, watch what happens when a child raises her hand and cannot command the teacher’s attention.  Facial and body language droop and commitment to the learning task moves from positive to neutral toward negativity.  In remote education, even in Zoomed large group sessions, the teacher cannot see/hear/perceive/experience the same real time values of how well children are learning.  And children, who cannot get synchronized engagement with their teacher disengage faster when they are at home and out of sight.  Even the most committed and hard-charging child is put off by remote education’s delay of teacher attention and response time. 

Our dilemma is that remote education cannot be synchronous for all teachers and all children at all times while we engage in remote education.  Remote education is not like in-person classroom teaching.  Hence, the need for micro-design, asynchronous delivery and synchronous response. 

Micro design, the teaching of the critical attributes of what must be learned, is essential for all teaching and learning and is ultra-essential for remote education.  Critical attributes are the basic facts, the building blocks of the lesson’s content, or the a, b, c-like steps of skill building that a child must take in order to learn from an instructional  lesson.  These basics form the generalizations, concepts and understandings that complete a unit of instruction.  Without in-person engagement to synchronize what a child sees and what a child does, it is critical that these “bare bones” are identified and incorporated into a very deliberate instructional design.  The bare bones must almost become self-evident.  Critical attributes are taught asynchronously in broadcast lessons, podcasts, Zoom sessions, and e-mailed/mailed assignments.  These assignments are smaller in scope, time requirement, and the amount of required student work.  A child can appropriately be required to complete a series of essential assignments asynchronously that lead to a synchronous interaction with the teacher.  Micro design is the assurance that each component of critical learning is addressed deductively or inductively by the teacher.  Individually and collectively these points of learning lead a child to the “aha” moment.

How does this asynchronous delivery and synchronous response work?  Children engage in their lessons during a school day asynchronously and teachers are available all school day for synchronously to respond to learning.  Remote education or teaching from home requires a teacher to be “on-line” as constantly as a teacher is “on her feet” in the classroom.  Micro designing says that each child in class is working independently at home on a prescribed set of assignments within the teacher’s unit of instruction.  It is probable that no two children are at the same place in their assignments at the same time.  This means that questions and “I don’t know what to do next” problems arise at any and all times of the school day.  For this reason alone a teacher needs to be available for synchronous engagement during the entire school day.  Simply stated:  An eight-hour day of teaching at school is an eight-hour day of teaching at home.  A teacher literally works on new lesson designs, assessments of learning, and reporting of each child’s learning while being available for student engagement on-line, via text or phone call.  Synchronous response means the teacher stops the asynchronous work and attends to the student.  Synchronous access is as constantly available in remote education as it is in in-person teaching.

Asynchronous learning and synchronous response is not as screen-tied as it may seem.  There are many good strategies that make it work for children and teachers. 

“Read/do this.  Answer this question/attach your work and text/mail it to me at 9:30 am.  I will be on line for thirty minutes and will respond immediately.  Then, we can go on to the next part of this lesson.”  Or, “As you do this assignment, I will be on line to help/answer questions.  I will post each question asked, without names, and answers given.  Please check the posts – your question may be answered.  If not, contact me.”  The design is that assignments are chunked small enough that their incremental nature makes understanding and learning more efficient.  And, children work the assignments independently and at their speed (asynchronous), but when then they have questions or need assistance they can get it in near-real time (synchronous).  Efficient and effective.  However, just like the child in class who raises her hand and is never recognized, a child whose text, e-mail, phone call is never answered disengages from remote education even faster than when a teacher is inattentive.

How do we get to this improved remote education?   The first step is supervisory.  School boards provide this educational goal – Using remote education, all children will be provided their annual grade level or subject course curricula meeting the district’s annual assessment targets.  This is essential.  Board assertion of this goal eliminates the substitution of “time fillers” and “cut and paste” assignments that populated remote education in the spring of 2020.  The second supervisory step is administrative.  Supervising teaching from home requires each teacher to submit weekly lesson designs to a principal.  Lesson plans need to be aligned with the district’s course guides, even though they are micro-designed.  The principal checks for fidelity of lessons to units and units to curricular goals.  This sounds like Teaching and Principaling 101, because it is.  However, 101 did not show up in our first experiences with remote education in the spring of 2020.

This design also connects ongoing remote education to the usual administrative and non-administrative supervision of students and learning.  Teachers report student assignments in the district’s electronic grade book so that principals, students, and parents can observe both the teacher’s adherence to an annual curriculum and a student’s attention to and success with assignments and assessments.  This component of supervision was conducted with some laxity in our first exposure to remote education.  It must be re-affirmed in our future remote work.

Let’s paint the picture one more time and from a different perspective.  In our future remote education, teachers need to be available to children in real time for the entirety of a school day.  Using micro design, teachers can chunk the rate and degree of how children will do their daily schoolwork asynchronously while teachers are engaged with children synchronously.  This mirrors traditional class time.  In a usual classroom, children engage and disengage all the time.  They daydream, fidget, drop their pencils, need a drink and use of a toilet on demand.  In usual classrooms, teachers are synchronous and children are asynchronous.  Teachers are available and attentive with immediacy to student needs. We need to make asynchronous learning and synchronous response to learning the new normal in future remote education. 

As last words, remote education in the spring of 2020 was emergency work.  We were unprepared and did the best we could given our resources and thinking at the time.  In preparation for the 2020-21 school year, we do not have the excuse of an emergency.  If schools are required to provide remote education, the quality of the school’s preparation must assure that all children meet their annual curricular goals.  This requires a better instructional design and improved supervision of teaching and learning.

Look forward.

Synchronicity and Asynchronicity of Remote Education

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Remote education requires instructional design and daily teaching skills beyond the scope of usual teacher preparation.  As the medical community was not prepared for COVID, the educational community was not prepared for remote education.  The issue is not why not, but what now.  Don’t look back, look forward!

First and foremost, remote teaching and learning is not and will not be the same as in-person teaching and learning.  Albeit that homeschoolers and online universities have used online instruction/learning for years, the human relationship is absent.  And, the essential value of human relationship is one of the lessons learned during education in the time of COVID .  Children miss their teachers and teachers miss their children.  That said, we can make remote education much better in the future.

What is missing?  Micro-design for asynchronous (not in real time) teaching and synchronous (real time) student-teacher response is needed to make remote education effective.  When a teacher addresses a classroom of children, the in-person instructional design understands whole group and synchronous delivery, immediate feedback, and a targeted, synchronous teacher response interactional loop.  It looks like this – “I say/show/display a chunk of new learning to all students.  I watch/listen/perceive their understanding and comprehension of the new learning.  Based upon my observation of student responses and raised questions, I clarify and correct student understanding and comprehension of the new learning.  Children show me through their practice/work with the new learning the level of their learning.  I check student work for accuracy of their understanding and application of new learning and make new corrections/clarifications.  Then, I teach more new learning.”  This loop goes on constantly in all classrooms every day when teachers and children are physically together.

How important is synchronicity in teaching?  It is a quantity issue.  Madeline Hunter showed us that a teacher makes hundreds of instructional decisions in each teaching and learning episode in every class class; thousands each day.  All these decisions are generated in the synchronicity of in-person teaching and learning.  See-respond, hear-respond, perceive-respond.  These thousands of decisions need to be made in order for teaching and learning to progress.

Synchronicity also is a quality issue.  We are a real-time people who expect/demand immediacy in our interactions.  In a real-time classroom, watch what happens when a child raises her hand and cannot command the teacher’s attention.  Facial and body language droop and commitment to the learning task moves from positive to neutral toward negativity.  In remote education, even in Zoomed large group sessions, the teacher cannot see/hear/perceive/experience the same real time values of how well children are learning.  And children, who cannot get synchronized engagement with their teacher disengage faster when they are at home and out of sight.  Even the most committed and hard-charging child is put off by remote education’s delay of teacher attention and response time. 

Hence, the need for micro-design, asynchronous delivery and synchronous response.  What does this mean?  Cut the lesson into smaller bits.  Do not simply, just make smaller.  It is like reading two paragraphs in a chapter and asking “Tell me what you understand from this”.  Then, reading the next two paragraphs, same question, next two chapters, same question.  It does not need to be as small as two paragraphs, it can be a larger chunk, but the quantity needs to be small enough that a quality check can be made easily and frequently. 

How does this asynchronous delivery and synchronous response work?  Remote education or teaching from home requires a teacher to be “on line” as constantly as they are “on their feet” in the classroom.  A micro-designed assignment looks like this.  An eight-hour day of teaching at school is an eight-hour day of teaching at home.

“Read/do this.  Answer this question/attach your work and text/mail it to me at 9:30 am.  I will be on line for thirty minutes and will respond immediately.”  Or, “As you do this assignment, I will be on line to help/answer questions.  Children whose names begin with A – L text/mail me on the hour and names M – Z on the half hour”.  The design is that assignments are chunked small enough that their incremental nature makes understanding and learning more efficient.  And, children work the assignments independently and at their speed (asynchronous), but when then they have questions or need assistance they can get it in near-real time (synchronous).  Efficient and effective.

How do we get to this improved remote education?   The first step is supervisory.  School boards provide the educational goal – using remote education, all children will be provided their annual grade level or subject course curricula meeting the district’s annual assessment targets.  This is essential.  Board assertion of this goal eliminates the substitution of “time fillers” and “cut and paste” assignments that populated remote education in the spring of 2020.  The second supervisory step is administrative.  Supervising teaching from home requires each teacher to submit weekly lesson designs to a principal.  Lesson plans need to be aligned with the district’s course guides, even though they are micro-designed.  The principal is checking for fidelity of lessons to units and units to curricular goals.  This sounds like Teaching and Principal 101, because it is.  However, 101 did not show up in our first experience with remote education.

This design also opens ongoing remote education to the usual administrative and non-administrative supervision of students and parents.  Teachers report student assignments in the district’s electronic grade book so that principals, students and parents can observe both the teacher’s adherence to an annual curriculum and a student’s attention to and success with assignments and assessments.  This component of supervision was conducted with some laxity in our first exposure to remote education.  It must be re-affirmed in our future remote work.

Let’s paint the picture one more time and from a different perspective.  In our future remote education, teachers need to be available to children in real time for the entirety of a school day.  Using micro design, teachers can chunk the rate and degree of how children will do their daily schoolwork asynchronously, but teachers need to be engaged with children synchronously.  This mirrors traditional class time.  Teachers are available in the classroom and attentive with immediacy to student needs.  In a usual classroom, children engage and disengage all the time.  They daydream, fidget, drop their pencils, need drinks and use of a toilet on demand.  In usual classrooms, teachers are synchronous and children are asynchronous.  We need to make this the new normal in future remote education. 

As last words, remote education in the spring of 2020 was emergency work.  We were unprepared and did the best we could given resources and thinking at the time.  In the 2020-21 school year, we do not have the excuse of an emergency.  If schools are required to provide remote education, the quality must assure that all children meet their annual curricular goals.  This requires a better instructional design and improved supervision of teaching and learning.

Look forward.