Tag Archives: remote education

At-Home Learning Rethunk

Posted on by
Reply

Educators must practice their trade regarding the use of hybrid teaching and at-home learning in the Time of COVID.  Plan.  Prepare.  Instruct.  Assess.  Adjust instruction to assure learning.  We are in the assess and adjust phase of using the hybrid educational model of in-school and at-home learning.  We must “rethink” our first thoughts and designs, adjust and use what we know to cause all children to learn.

Last March when schools shifted from in-school learning to at-home learning, a first thought was how to make at-home learning as much like in-school learning as possible.  If we could do this, we could mitigate (there is that COVID word again) the loss of student learning due to the pandemic.  Much energy and many resources went into bringing children virtually back into school classrooms.  This must be our first rethink.

Does at-home learning need to be a mirror of in-school learning?

Not necessarily.  Regardless of the learner’s location, we are to teach all children to be proficient in the standards of their annual grade level or subject area curriculum.  Does that require the same instruction design, the same exact lesson, for each location?  A rethunk answer is no.  Children in the classroom and children at home are not always able to do the exact same things within a lesson.  Time, materials, and teacher proximity are not the same for each group.  Children at school remain on a school clock while children at home have more flexibility.  Children at home may use different materials in completing an assignment – what they have available at home.  Teacher proximity is a significant difference for in-school children.  At-home children, outside the eye and presence of a teacher, do not get the immediate “I see you” and they don’t get the “get busy” attitude over a computer screen.  When in-class teaching is slowed by waiting for at-home adjustments, the lesson bogs for everyone.  We now are aware of these differences and should adjust our hybrid accordingly.

If our teaching and learning design is outcome-based and student-centered, we do what we always should do – design backwards from the outcome to an appropriate and effective instruction.  Appropriate and effective instruction may mean differing the lesson for each location.

At-home learners suffer screen fatigue.  Adjust and allow children at-home to work with their screens off.  We do not need to watch all children on-screen as they read or write or do the detail of a school assignment.  Keep the audio on.  Let them turn off or work away from their screen.  If they have a question or need assistance, they can return to video.  Why this rethunk?  Some children are at-home because of parent choice regarding the virus.  Other children are at-home because they prefer to be at-home and not in-school.  This is a fact that pandemic choice has created.  Work toward the benefit of their preference not its downside.  Regardless of reason, screen fatigue is real.  Be focused on the outcomes not the process.  If the outcomes erode, bring them back on-screen for the right reasons.

Flex the time so that children at-home have until the end of the day not the limits of in-class time to complete a lesson.  A child at-home has disrupters that we do not know and cannot see on-screen.  Their attention goes to parents, siblings, pets, and others in the household at times and for reasons we do not know; it just does.  Home noises and sounds distract them as well as the comings and goings of others.  Their environment is different than that of an in-school learner.  So, understand and be flexible.  Learning outcome is the priority, not the window of time allowed for work to be done.

Clearly communicate the lesson outcomes to parents so they can monitor when a child has completed an assignment.  Put parents on the same page of concern for learning outcomes not time on task or process.  These are the adults supervising the at-home learner and they need to know what “done with an assignment” looks and reads like.  Communicating beforehand with parents saves the time of having to correct student work later.  Get our at-home parent partners in on the the game plan.

Accept alternative versions of a successful learning outcome.   In an old Harry Chapin song, he sang of a teacher who told children that flowers only come in green and red and always are in straight rows.  Harry knew that isn’t and so and so do we.  Let creativity and interpretation flourish as expressions of the learning outcomes you set.  At-home and in-school can appear differently if they achieve the same learning.

Accountability to learn still holds, so don’t go soft on grading.  Accountability requirements at state and national levels are dropping like flies, but a classroom teacher’s requirements for curricular and subject learning should not.  Give explicit feedback frequently.  Require student work to meet your usual requirements and do not create softer pandemic standards.  One of the guardrails for at-home learners will be their grades.  If an at-home shuts down, don’t let them slide.  If children respond to grades, use that lever now.  And, of course, use the grades lever with parents.  Let parents do the heavy lifting of supervising at-home learners.

The Big Duh of a hybrid design is that in-school and at-home teaching does not have to be identical for all as long as the learning outcomes are the same for all.  We can use the advantages of in-school and the advantages of at-home to cause children to learn regardless of location.

When remote education is necessary, we can use our learning to assist all children to learn. 

Commonweal in the Time of COVID

Posted on by
Reply

The Time of COVID causes us to ask a variety of essential questions regarding who decides who should do what.  Mask up.  Socially distance.  Wash hands frequently.  These are three personal behaviors that have been at the heart of mitigative behavior during this pandemic.  The decision to do any of these ultimately is left to the individual.  Do I do these because I should or because I am told to?  What does the commonweal require of me?

Opened or closed businesses?  To gather or not to gather?  State and local governments provide guidance and issue mandates without unanimity of purpose or design regarding these two questions.  In general, the business of WI is business and businesses are open for business.  School?  854,959 children were enrolled in WI schools in March, 2020, when COVID threatened our state and nation.  Immediately, the Department of Health Services enacted our Governor’s order to close all schools for the remainder of the school term.  Teaching and learning became virtual for all. Immediately, the issue became partisan debate of who decides who should do what.  Since then, political rancor has left the question of in-person or remote education up to local school district debate.  In almost every issue of personal and organizational behavior during the Time of COVID, the essential question is “what does the commonweal require?”.

Commonweal is a 14th century term for the happiness, health and safety of all of the people of a community.  The archaic term is used to describe goals and programs intended for the common good of people.  The constitutions of Kentucky, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania describe their states as commonwealths.  The word, commonweal, is appropriate in considering personal and organizational behaviors in the Time of COVID, especially regarding schools.

I find three citations in the WI Statutes that relate to the question of pandemic, schools and commonweal.  And, who decides who should do what.

WI Statutes 119.18 (6) School Board Powers – School Calendar tells us “The board may determine the school calendar and vacation periods for each school year for the regular day schools, summer schools, social centers, and playgrounds.  The board may close any school or dismiss any class in the event of an emergency, fire or other casualty, quarantine, or epidemic”.

WI Statutes 252.02 (03) Communicable Diseases tells us “The department (DHS) may close schools and forbid public gatherings in schools, churches, and other places to control outbreaks and epidemics”.  Further, WI Statutes 252.03(2) says “…a local health officer may forbid public gatherings deemed necessary to control outbreak or epidemic”. 

It is clear that in the Time of COVID, education is a continuing and uninterrupted program for the commonweal.  The WI DPI issued guidelines for the continuing education of all children during the pandemic and waivers that relieve boards of education from specific, mandated requirements, such as annual statewide assessments.  Absolutely, no allowances have been made for stopping education during the pandemic.  Teaching and learning for all children must proceed.

The issue is who and where.  Can school boards gather teachers and children at the schoolhouse for daily instruction?  Who decides?

119.18(6) considers a school closure within the context of adjusting the school calendar of instruction.  Days of instruction may be set aside for holidays and other observances.  Days may be set aside for seasonal vacations.  Days of instruction may be set aside in response to an emergency, such as fire or other casualty, as in water or electrical outage or weather damage.  The calendar is adjusted to accommodate these closings.  Days may be set aside for quarantines, as in an outbreak of measles or other childhood illness.  The calendar is adjusted to accommodate closings for these reasons.  In this statute, the Board is authorized to adjust the school calendar not close schools.

Epidemic?  I wonder what the writers considered in inserting this word.  There has been ample time since the Spanish flu pandemic and the polio epidemics to clarify the term.  Ebola, swine and avian flu epidemics touched the world but not Wisconsin.  Is epidemic rhetoric or specific?  Does the statute require the board to adjust the calendar of instruction to accommodate an epidemic?  All other closures are short-term or matters of displacement to another place where in-person instruction can continue.  Did the writers anticipate six months to a full school year, perhaps multiple years, to be a calendar disruption?  Or, is another statute appropriate; one that addresses the endangerment of epidemic disease upon community health not epidemic upon the school year calendar?

252.02(03) and 252.03(2) consider a school closure in the context of communicable disease.  The concept is that the gathering of community, children, teachers, and all staff, in a schoolhouse during a health emergency, such as an epidemic, is unsafe for the public health.  School could be a spreader event.   

Of interest, our Governor immediately closed all WI schools last March for the remainder of the 2019-20 school term.  He declared the spread of COVID to be a state health emergency.  Subsequently, the governor’s declaration was challenged by partisanship and his power to declare a statewide emergency was curtailed by the WI Supreme Court.  And, that was the last action taken by public health in the Time of COVID.  All communication from the WI Department of Health Services since is worded as community and personal guidance and recommendation and purposefully exempts schools.  WI statutes regarding schools and public health in the TIME of COVID have been neutered.

That leaves local school boards alone to decide the commonweal not from the perspective of public health but from their authority to amend the school calendar in the event of an epidemic.  School boards will tell who to do what.

Not to demean a school board, but we are lay persons elected and empowered to govern local schools on behalf of our constituent community.  Although a person with a medical or public health background may be elected to the school board, 99.9% are generalist residents with a commitment to local public education.  A school board’s commonweal is schooling not public health.  The powers and duties of a school board are described in WI Stat 118.01 and public health is not mentioned.  Yet, here we are.  Lay boards in 421 Wisconsin school districts are making 421 independent decisions of the commonweal for their respective school community’s public health.

Some children are receiving in-person instruction in-school.  Some children are receiving instruction at-home from in-school teachers.  Some children are in-school one, two or three days each week and home the rest.  Some children who receive in-school instruction are quarantined when a classmate, teacher or bus driver experiences a positive COVID test.  Fourteen days at-home and then back to school, perhaps until the next positive test. 

Lay school boards are doing yeomen’s work in sustaining a continuing education for all children during a statewide public health crisis.  School boards say who will do what according to WI Stat 119.18(6) School Calendar.  This is the condition of our commonweal in the Time of COVID.

Quality Indicators of Remote Education: Mastery of Time

Posted on by
Reply

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

Posted on by
Reply

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.

Non-Academic Skill Sets Required for Remote Learning

Posted on by
Reply

Remote education for teachers and learners quickly became a totally different ball game, an educational scenario that neither had engaged in before.  After our emergency experience last spring and our planned deliver this fall, are we prioritizing the right skill sets and dispositions for student success in a remote education?

What gets measured gets taught!  This generalized rule of thumb guides many teachers as they lay out their annual curricular goals for children.  This explains why reading, language arts, and mathematics demand so much instructional attention.  They are the focus of high stakes tests, statewide assessments, international comparisons, and ratings of school performance.  Tested curricula rules!  Not now.

COVID presents us with new challenges that are outside the 3 Rs.  Remote education is a test unto itself and success as a remote learner or teacher is not tied to reading, writing and arithmetic.  Instead, self-motivation, self-regulation, ability to work independently, and concentration and focus are the requirements for success for at-home children doing school work.  Consider this – if what matters most gets taught, how well are we teaching children how to be successful as remote learners?

Take Away

We cannot assume that children are pre-prepared for remote learning.  A child’s brain is constantly learning, it cannot help itself and that is what makes teaching children so wonderful.   Kids are natural learners.  However, the brain is a non-discriminating learner – it soaks up everything.  Education provides children with a channeling and scaffolding of instruction that prepares children to learn and then provides children their learning.

For example, when children enter PK or K classes, much attention is given to learning readiness and the skills, behaviors and dispositions that young children new to classrooms need to learn to be successful in the environment of a school.  Kindergarten teachers do wonderful work in building necessary school skill sets.  Once prepared with these, children take off in their elementary grade learning.

A second example is how teachers use pre-writing activities to focus a child’s thinking upon a writing assignment, consideration of possible topics, and application what children already know about creative or expository writing before a word goes onto paper or screen.  Getting into a writer’s thinking process makes for better writing.

A third example lies tech ed.  Before a child ever touches a tool in a workshop, the teacher demonstrates safe and appropriate uses of the tool.  A student must demonstrate “safety first” before allowed to use a tool on a tech project.  No safety, no going forward. 

Using this understanding of preparation for learning, causes us to consider how we have prepared children for the challenges of remote education.  Which skill sets and dispositions have we prepared to assure children can be successful as at-home learners?  Not many and almost all in the technology realm.

What do we know?

There are critical attributes of a successful remote learner.  We can naively think that a successful student in-school will be a successful at-home learner, but this is not a valid assumption.  Children who tacitly meet teacher directions and complete assignments neatly within classroom parameters are not equally prepared to be successful outside the classroom where teacher controls are absent or far less apparent. 

On the positive side of the ledger, there are attributes of a successful remote learner that schools do teach.  These lie in the area of “soft skills” that entered school curricula in recent decades.  Schools teach collaboration, problem-solving, team work, consensus-building, small group roles and responsibilities, and the use of communication technologies.  We can see these skill sets within the remote or virtual assignments children are given as at-home learners.

Yet, skills and dispositions which are seldom taught in school are causing many children extreme anxiety and real problems that keep them from being successful at-home learners.  These include:

  • self-motivation,
  • self-directed study,
  • time management,
  • focus,
  • self-restraint,
  • assistance seeking, and
  • patience. 

These skills and disposition certainly are not in the 3 Rs and not in the batteries of school assessments and, as they are not tested/important, they are not universally taught.  More to the point, when children are in school, teachers and classroom protocols dictate the parameters of these skills and dispositions.  Teachers motivate children, provide directions and then clarify directions, manage student work on the classroom clock, enforce classroom behavior rules, provide relatively quick and direct assistance when needed, and calmly require an element patience as the school day unfolds.  None of this available to the at-home learner.

It is essential to add at this point that parents, almost always mothers, who are at home with at-home learners are not prepared as teachers to assert any of the above skills and dispositions required for a child to be a successful remote student.  Parents are not prepared to be supervisors of at-home learners let alone teachers of their at-home learning children.

Why is this thus?

Repeat – these skills and dispositions are not tested and thusly not prioritized.

Second, in the competitive realm of school, we allow students to seek their own level of achievement based upon these skills and disposition.  If we disaggregated end of the year data by the filter of motivation, time management, and focus, we would quickly see that these cause and effect relationships.  Children with these traits fly to the top of our data list and children without fall to the bottom.

Can they be taught?  Yes.  Can they be strengthened?  Another yes.

A current pedagogical theme is the gradual release of responsibility (GRR).  The Wisconsin DPI provides a framework for shifting the responsibility for learning from the teacher to the student.  The department sees this as an essential and natural shift in the focus of who is motivating and directing student learning that can be applied to all learners.    

Fisher and Frey have incorporated GRR into the development of student reading capacity over time. 

https://dpi.wi.gov/ela/instruction/framework

https://dpi.wi.gov/sites/default/files/imce/ela/resources/Fisher_and_Frey_-_Homework.pdf

To do

Adapt GRR to the skills of self-motivation, self-direction, time management, focus, self-restraint, assistance seeking, and patience.  Each is a mini-unit that begins with teacher instruction, teach modeling, guided practice, checking for understanding, and then release into independent practice.

For example – Examination of what motivates a student unveils that each child may respond to generalized and personal motivational.  Identifying and creating a self-awareness in children of the common motivators that all children in the class respond to sets a “button” a teacher or a individual child can push.  More importantly, identifying the unique personal motivators that a child responds to creates an individualized button that a child can use.

Aligning task completion and success as a reinforcement of both buttons builds a child’s sense of self-determination.  A child can choose when to push their self-motivation button, create the anticipation of focused work, and the sense of self-satisfaction with completed and successful tasks.

Each component on the list can be its own mini-curriculum.  Because they are inter-related, each will be addressed no matter where attention to this begins.

The important things are:

  1. Do not assume children are motivated.  Provide initial motivations and use GRR to build self-motivation.
  2. Do not assume that children can self-direct.  Provide clear direction at the beginning of a lesson, check that children have the parameters of the task, and GRR children toward their own sense of assignment direction.
  3. Do not assume that children can manage their own time when they are on their own.  Build a daily schedule that orders their work.  Be exact and be demanding and then GRR them to managing small amounts of time that gradually increase.

And, so it goes.  When in school, a teacher sets the tone and dimension for the completion of school assignments.  At home, out of direct contact with their teacher, children need to be taught how to do set the tone and dimension for the completion of their school assignments.  This is an important as the 3 Rs.  In fact, the longer children remain as at-home learners, the more important purposeful instruction, review, and application of these “self” skills and dispositions become.

The Big Duh

A school’s success, more importantly, a child’s success in the Time of COVID will not be related to direct instruction.  Success will be correlated with how well children learn when the Zoom camera is turned off.