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Essential: The New Occam Razor in the Time of COVID

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Every significant historical and cultural event provides us with words and language that immediately bring that event to mind.  Even though human memory ultimately is short-term and we quickly move on forgetting as we go, these words will connect our future with this present time.  Think of 9/11 and World Trade Center.  This pandemic provides us with these references.  The word “COVID 19” moved from an acronym used by epidemiologists to the word pair that names a worldwide pandemic.  “Social isolation” seemed to be an oxymoron, but it defines the most widely used strategy for mitigating COVID.  “Peak” and “flattening the curve” give graphic words to understand the transition of the epidemic over time.  Old words, like quarantine, found new usage. 

In the field of education, “remote education” combines practices of school-provided instruction, home schooling and alternative delivery systems.  In the design of distanced learning, educators and educational leaders are finding the word “essential” to be the optimal and simplest word for refining and redefining curriculum and instruction, student assignments, and post-learning assessments.  As we transist from school closures back toward our traditional concepts of schooling, the word “essential” will prove to be the new Occam Razor used to reassemble post-COVID education.

Let’s combine essential with other constructs for reassembling school to imagine an “essential” education that will be the beginning for evolving into a healthier time.

Essential and social re-integration.

  • School may not immediately be the ringing of a bell and all children reporting to class as they did pre-COVID.  In the transition and foreseeable future, children may assemble in shifts.  A shift allowing for distancing between individual people.  Perhaps, some children may attend school in the morning and other children in the afternoon. 
  • School bus routing may be modified.  Children may not be seated three-to-a-seat, but one child per seat.  It may take several bus runs to get all children in a shift delivered from home to school and then school to home.
  • Class sizes may be smaller or sized according to the area of a classroom.  Student desks or seats may be distributed around the classroom instead of massed in rows.  This may mean more classes or a schedule in which only a given number of children may be in school at a time.
  • Children may be scheduled to be in the hallways and at their lockers and entering and exiting the school.  Passing from one classroom to another may be orchestrated one classroom at a time.
  • More lunch shifts.  Children may not pack around cafeteria tables to eat and be with friends.  They may not queue in lines to receive their lunch.  Perhaps, students may eat lunch in their classrooms where personal space has been defined or in other places in the school. 
  • Physical education, athletics, and the dramatic arts may be reconstituted.  It is hard to consider team sports, especially contact sports, as immediately comporting with personal space.  They may begin with virtual competitions and performances viewed without spectators.

Essential and curriculum and instruction.

  • Because instructional time in school may need to be abbreviated, curriculum and teaching may be simplified.  Remote education forces teachers to refine assignments to the essential knowledge, understandings, skills and dispositions that children must learn.  While a regular curriculum lays out all the things we want children to learn, an essential educational program clears away much of the “extra”.
  • Remote delivery refines our selection of curriculum to the things children must learn so that they are prepared for next and future learning.  Essential learning when school re-opens may continue to be “most” efficient and effective.  It may be very sequential and aligned with “next”. 
  • In distanced education, directions must be clear because there is not the immediacy of question asking and clarifying answers.  Personal contact is limited to what teachers and students can write in an e-mail or text.  Elaboration gives way to simplicity.  If remote children do not understand the directions they did not do the assignment.  The need for clarity and simplicity may transfer to new classrooms with limited daily time for each class.
  • Sponge and filler activities are not needed when children are remote.  They are able to go or not go to the next assignment without waiting for classmates.  Timing is controlled by the student not the teacher.  Many children may appreciate this in their new classrooms – eliminate the waiting. 

When schools re-open, there will be a new assessment of the essential school.  After the March, April, May and June closure this spring and the months of summer vacation, school programs that are missed the most will be valued the most.  There will be an urgency about these.  School programs that are mandated by state statute will get attention, because school boards are accountable for these programs.  What was not missed may be slow for renewal or not renewed at all.

While we hustle to reinstitute what was missed, what is mandated, and what is urgent, safety will insist that mitigation and social distancing will be the essential word as we re-open schools to teaching and learning.

In the Time of Post-COVID, new, essential schools will emerge.

In The Time of COVID, Moms Do Not Have To Be Teachers

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Stop trying to be something you are not!  Moms, most of you are not prepared to be school teachers.  Be the many other things you are supposed to be, mother to your children most importantly, and demand that your school does the teaching in this time of remote education.  Manage how your children engage in their remote learning, don’t try to be their teacher.

I write this as an educator and parent.  Also, as a realist.  Even in the time of COVID, two WI statutes prevail.  Parents are responsible for the education of their children and school boards are responsible for the provision of a free and appropriate education for all children.  These are stated in the WI Constitution and there has been recision of these statutes. 

The following may not pertain to homeschooling parents.  By choice and necessity, they have and are working out the challenges of parenting and teaching.  For all other parents, please consider the following.

The verbs matter.  Parents are responsible for the education of their children means that parents enroll their children in an educational program – public, private, charter, home, it doesn’t matter which – and guide their children to engage in education until the child is 18 years of age.  Enroll and guide in engagement.  That’s it.  Parents are not responsible for teaching.

School boards are responsible for providing educational programs for all children that comply with mandates for equity and equality.  School boards employ teachers to implement these programs.  That’s it.  Teachers are responsible for teaching.

The educator tells me that we, all of us, can find and implement strategies that will keep all children learning while schools are closed and the provision of education is required to continue.  I write the following by addressing Moms, because they are the traditional go-to person at home.  This applies to all parents.

  • Moms, don’t guilt yourself if your children do not understand or know how to do a remote lesson.  Instead, contact their teacher.  It is up to the teacher to find another way for children to understand or complete the lesson.  Not you.
  • Moms, don’t fret that your children cannot finish a lesson.  It is a fact that many children do not finish lessons when sitting in class.  Let it go.  The lesson will be there later or tomorrow.
  • Moms, do not worry that you cannot remember your Algebra or the words of the Preamble to the Constitution.  You aren’t expected to dredge these out of your memory.  If your child has questions about math or any other lesson, contact the teacher.
  • Moms, if your child cannot understand how to do an assignment and after you read it you also have questions, contact the teacher.  Every direction needs to be written so that a child can understand what to do.  Directions should not require your interpretation.
  • Moms, if you always wanted to be your child’s teacher and have the disposition, dispositions of patience, calmness, and smiley-face are essential, and the time to be a home school teacher, then go for it!  If you don’t aspire to this, don’t.
  • In every instance when your child confronts a question or problem in an assignment that you cannot easily answer, stop and go to another assignment.  Don’t worry about it – contact your teacher so that the teacher can do the teaching.
  • Mom, if the Internet is inadequate to engage in online assignments, contact your child’s teacher and request all assignments be mailed or available for drive-by pick up.  It is the school’s responsibility to provide instruction in a variety of formats.

Social isolation presents enough problems for children and parents to resolve.  Those are your natural responsibility.  Remote education is the school’s responsibility.  If you have opened your home to receive remote education, you have fulfilled your responsibility.  Make your schools do the work they are responsible for doing.  Last point.  If you cannot find satisfaction with your child’s teacher, immediately contact a principal or superintendent.  The entire school organization is responsible for providing your child’s continuing education.

Remote Education in the Lifeboats

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Some time there is no joy in a good decision.  As a school board member voting with an “aye” to the motion “… we will continue with remote education for all children while our school house remains closed for the duration of the 2019-20 school year”, I acknowledged a good decision while sensing no joy in its passing.  It feels like the captain yelling, “Abandon ship!”.  The 2019-20 school year, as we traditionally conceive of April, May and June at school, has sunk.  The good news is that all aboard will continue with their schooling in various remote lifeboats until we make it to shore safely and life will go on.

For the Class of 2020, “Bon Voyage”. 

For all, be safe as you continue to teach and learn and await a future day at school.

Making Instruction Whole Post-COVID 19

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Five years from now, will the world give today’s children a pass saying, “You were educated in the time of COVID 19 and we know that your academic education was incomplete.  That’s okay.  We will not expect as much from you.”  I don’t think they will and I do not expect them to do so.  Our task today is to educate children while schools are closed and then make their education whole so that no one will need a pass.

Scope of the issue

Most schools were closed by order of school boards and state governors in the last weeks of March.  At first, the belief was that schools would be closed for the month of April and re-opened in early May.  As the pandemic bloomed on the east and west coasts and then in larger cities and more slowly across the middle of the United States, hopes for May became a realization that the 2019-20 school year would end with most schools closed.  The next issue to be faced is how schools will open in the fall.  And, if there will be a second wave of COVID 19 in late fall/early winter as is suspected. 

School curricula is either a spiraling band of K-12 instruction or it is chunked into subject area courses.  In both constructs, the teaching of academic units is packaged and scheduled on an annual calendar.  Seldom is the K-12 spiral systemically broken as it has been by COVID.  Organizationally, the machine of instruction begins in September and grinds steadily until June.  With 90%-plus of children present in class every day, a school year is a steady stream of teaching and learning.  We know how to compensate missed learning for children due to their illness or other reasons for school absence.  With lessons either before or after, children become whole in their academic year. 

The issue now is that all children missed two or more months of teaching and learning.  A second issue is, although teachers and children used remote education services to sustain teaching and learning while schools are closed, no one knows the relationship of what was learned to what was expected to be learned.  Remote education is idiosyncratic to the local school district and within a school district it is dependent upon an individual teacher’s skills and dispositions for working remotely.  Add to that the issues of Internet connectivity and instructional effectiveness becomes more of a question. 

A closed school faces many issues.  As one elementary principal said, “We are focused on assuring that our students are safe and secure at home.  We are working to assure they are fed and that their social-emotional concerns in this crisis are addressed.  Daily lessons come after these problems are resolved.”  For some children, remote education is last on their day’s concerns.

Key questions

Much of education is scaffolded.  What a child learns in third grade is foundational for what a child will learn in fourth and fifth grade.  Scaffolding is most easily illustrated in the spiral of mathematics education.  Fractions, a troublesome subject for many children in the best of schooling times, is taught in 4th and 5th grades.  We know from decades of experience that children who are not secure in their understanding and manipulation of numerators and denominators and ratios have difficulty learning Algebra.  And, Algebra is the fundamental to secondary mathematics.  A deficit in fractions plagues a child’s education for years afterward.  Focus then on this question, how can we assure that children in the 2019-20 school year who are scheduled to learn and become secure in fractions are secure in fractions?

Move the scaffold across the curricula to ELA, science, social studies, world languages, the arts, and technical education.  What chunk of foundational learning lacks security? 

Look inside the scaffold.  How well did children with special needs prosper under remote education?  Many schools are diligently providing IEP-required modifications to lessons during remote education.  Special education and school interventionists make daily contact with children to assist their remote learning.  As we look carefully at the learning performances of all children post-COVID, we must look with care at the performances of special needs children to assure they made expected progress.  This includes children with gifted and talented needs as well as children with disabilities.

Work to be done

Our task is to adapt re-opened schools with a focus on making the education of all children whole regarding the 2019-20 and 2020-21 school years.  There is not a singular solution for doing this.  Every recommendation will have its proponents and opponents.  Each solution attempted will have its challenge, because it will be implemented within the moving parts and new expectations of the 2020-21 school year.  The assessment piece will be difficult, because children’s experiences in remote education will be so varied as to make each child a case of one.  And, continuous monitoring and adjusting of compensatory education filling in the learning gaps will be ongoing requiring more assessment.

At some point in time, perhaps June 2021 or June 2022, we need to say to every child who was schooled in the time of COVID, “Your instruction has been made whole.  Your future education and career will not be impacted by lost instruction doe to COVID 19.” 

We have work to do.

Teaching and Learning in the Time of COVID

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In Larry McMurtry’s “Lonesome Dove”, Augustus McCrae says, “Yesterday is gone and there is no getting it back”.  Gus was talking about the tragedies of life on a cattle drive from Texas to Montana.  In our contemporary world, we can mirror Gus and say, “COVID is changing the way we cause children to learn and when it is over there will be no going back to school exactly the way it was.  Yesterday is gone.”  It is hard to find a similar event in our recent national or state histories that shuttered school houses like COVID has.  Hopefully, COVID is a one and done.  Regardless, COVID will make things different in our future schools.

Yesterday

Two months ago, virtual or remote teaching and learning was the exception to regular school.  Remote learning was the venue of the Khan Academy and home schoolers.  For twenty years, synchronous instructional television (ITV) connected in-school students to curricula they could not receive in regular classrooms.  Students enrolled in AP courses, college colleges, and rich elective courses.  Almost every new curricular product on the school market came with digital features, many of which were accessed by teacher and students anywhere and anytime.  Forward-leaning teachers captured their initial instruction on digitized formats and students accessed these when they are absent from school or need a review of what the teacher said, demonstrated and clarified.  In almost every application thus far, virtual or remote teaching and learning has been an adjunct to regular, daily, classroom-based teaching and learning.  COVID makes an abrupt change to past practice and is forcing new practices.  Today, there is no in-school teaching and learning; everything is remote.

Break and Make

In mid-March, many districts made the decision to close all school programming for several weeks to a month.  Luckily for some, this coincided with their calendared spring break, so the cancellation seemed to fit into place.  Some state governors simultaneously declared all public schools in their state closed for a month.  The general idea of school boards and governors was that closure would allow for a deep cleaning at school and for the influenza to pass.  Remote learning was quickly designed as a practicing of recent instruction or a brief enrichment opportunity.  COVID did not agree.

The first month of remote education divided school districts into yet another division of haves and have nots.  Some districts have extraordinary technology capacity, meaning one digital device per student, and others have little to no capacity.  Some districts have explored e-learning as a school option for snow days and begun training teachers and students for out-of-school education and other districts have no pre-COVID conversation about remote education.  Finally, some school districts have the leadership capacity to make a dramatic sea change toward remote education and other districts will follow later.

Education in the Time of COVID

Today, we are considering the probability that the 2019-20 school year will end with schools closed.  Today, we are considering how to provide two-plus months of school remotely.  Instead of practice exercises of what children learned in February and early March, we are moving into ew and initial instruction provided to all students remotely.  That means all school instruction to all students remotely.  Special education modifications remotely.  Assessments of learning remotely.  Elementary reading groups remotely.  Virtual chemistry labs remotely.  All academics remotely.  Yesterday is gone.  Today and tomorrow are very different.

Past Models of Lasting Change

I consider how we adapted to life with personal computers in the 80s and what that means for life with remote schooling today.  In the 80s, some of us were pioneers looking at the first Compaq, Commodore, Toshiba, Texas Instrument, IBM PCs, and Apple 1 machinery and marveling at what we could do at our desk sites.  Each year provided a new iteration and as we moved to new hard- and software, the technology mainstream followed along.  The first Motorola mobile phones were amazing!  And, every year provided a new amazing!  In the early 90s, the yesterday of no technology was gone and there was no interest in getting it back.  Mobile technology changed the world.

Remote schooling will mirror innovations in technology and just as we don’t want to return to our first Commodore or Motorola StarTac, we will not want school to be exactly as it was before remote learning.

After one week of remote schooling, my 7th grade grand daughter sits on the sofa with her PC on her lap, I-Phone propped to her right so she can read her e-mails and texts and several printed pages on her left so she is reminded of a lesson’s directions.  She splits her screen so she can read citations and write her essay.  When her screen blips, she opens Zoom and immediately sees her friends/classmates for a scheduled collaboration on a math assignment.  When a question arises that the group cannot answer, she uses her phone to text her teacher and five minutes later shares what he said with the group. 

She says to me, “Gramps, I get more schoolwork done in less time doing it this way.  I don’t know how I will do on the tests, but I am reading and re-reading and editing what I write much more than I would at school.  But, I miss being at school with my friends.  I miss the structure of a school day.” 

An hour later, she complained, “Why doesn’t my teacher get back to me quicker.  I need his help now!”.

On FaceTime I talk with grandchildren in two other school districts each in a different state.  In one district, children are waiting for their next week’s assignments to arrive via US Postal Service.  In the other district, children received batches of e-mailed assignments with scant directions.  “I am not a teacher”, my daughter-in-law lamented.  “I need directions that I can understand so that I can help my children.”

In the immediacy of education in the time of COVID, we are all over the landscape.  If there is disconnect between the federal government and state governments regarding medical supplies, it is even greater between schools and homes regarding ongoing education.

And, therein lies the challenge for tomorrow.  Remote education done well will provide some children with powerful new learning tools and strategies, new environments within which to learn, and more collaborative tools to use with teachers and fellow students.  Some children will thrive in remote schooling and be loathe to return to regular school.  Remote education not done well will leave too many children one-half to a year behind in their educational progress.  Those children will not thrive, but will languish.

My discussion with area school districts includes the following:

  • If you are not a pioneer in remote education, be a good and high-quality follower.  Schools need not invent their way through out-of-school education in the time of COVID.  Find a credible and similar school district that is moving forward and replicate their movement.  It is impossible to overcome past capacity needs in the immediacy and there are more important daily needs to be met.
  • Achieve learning equity for all children.  If you are mailing out assignments, make all assignments quality learning.  If you are on a learning management system, assure that all children are getting quality instruction and learning opportunities.  Quality over quantity.
  • Do not try to replicate a day in school in your remote education design.  Instead of seven hours of class time, strive for three to four hours of student engagement.
  • Create teacher accessibility.  Children will have more questions in remote education than they do in-school.  While a parent may be in the room at home, children want to talk with their teacher.  Telephone.  E-mail.  FaceTime.  Once lessons are in the hands of children, teachers need to be accessible.
  • Make everything parent friendly.  For each new and initial chunk of instruction, provide parent instructions to assist them to assist their children.  Creating parent instructions takes time, but without good parent instructions, we lose whole families to the frustration of “We cannot do this!!”.
  • Use teacher strengths.  Within a grade level or subject area team, let the teacher with the most expertise create remote education assignments.  It is not necessary that every teacher creates lessons, because some are not as adept at remote teaching and learning.  This is a fact.  Let the creative create and others do the daily contact with children to assist their learning.  Let teachers who are really good at group work meet with children face-to-face virtually.  Let teachers who are good at differentiation and lesson modification connect with children who need personal assistance.  Differentiate the roles of teaching.
  • Use all instructional personnel.  School closure does not mean furloughing teacher aides and paraprofessionals.  Each child who benefited from their instructional assistance yesterday will need their assistance tomorrow.
  • Educate all children.  Children with special education needs need more and different assistance in remote education.  A school’s responsibilities for an IEP does not stop if a school engages in remote education.  Children with needs for enrichment need attention in remote education.  Special needs are magnified in remote education. 

Next Tomorrows

When COVID 19 leaves us three realities (or more) will confront us. 

  1. Most people will want to re-stabilize life by returning to pre-COVID.  We will re-open schools next fall and many students and parents will expect the normalcy they lost.  While we look backward at that old normalcy, we need to be cognizant of what we learned using remote education.
  2. COVID and remote teaching and learning will cause us to re-evaluate what is essential in 4K-12 education.  Some pre-COVID school functions and roles may not seem as essential after COVID.  The advantages of remote instructional delivery for some children and some curricula will need to be integrated into the new normal.  Education will have evolved and we will need to recognize its new forms.
  3. And, sadly, there may well be a COVID X and we will return to remote education.  We need to consider what we have learned from COVID 19, make plans for a new and improved remote education, and be ready for our unknown future.