Standards and Rigor Within Remote Education

Posted on 10/07/2020 by

I observe three examples of how remote educators are addressing academic standards and rigor.

A high school science teacher is adhering exactly to his traditional, standards-based curriculum guide. All students are receiving a streamed, synchronous and recorded, daily instruction that matches the level of teaching they would receive if sitting in class. There is no deviation in presentational pace. All students are Zooming as classes or as chat groups or as individuals with the teacher. Students are able to call, text, or e-mail the teacher at any time and he responds to all. He prioritizes “talking” with students about their daily work to ensure they stay engaged. Recorded lessons do not replace live lessons; they allow students to check what they are learning with the original instruction. Class work assignments are supported with on-line or school-bus delivered materials. Quizzes and tests remain on a schedule that will assure that all students will receive a full annual curriculum, including AP level courses.

A middle school teacher is streaming three synchronous Zoom sessions each day – ELA, Math and Science/Social Studies. Each session is a presentation of new instruction. All class work is posted on the class on-line platform. Most posts are practice exercises related to the new instruction. The assignments are a combination of school-approved curriculum and vendor/on-line materials. Students receive enough daily material to keep them busy for six to seven hours each school day. Submitted assignments are checked and graded and grades are posted on the student’s personal school account. Student calls, texts and e-mails are answered in the following days.

An elementary teacher posts three lesson each day – ELA, Math and Science or Social Studies. New instruction, alternating with instructional review, is presented about every other day. Instruction is derived from an on-line, commercial curriculum. Daily class work is posted on the class on-line platform and provides practice exercises for the teacher’s instruction. Most students complete their daily work in 30 to 45 minutes. There is little opportunity for children to communicate via phone call, text or e-mail with their teacher. Assignments are reviewed by the teacher and percentage/grades are posted on the student’s personal school account.

Academic rigor and standards-based instruction are not at the top of a school’s priority list these days. They lie well below the daily demands of deciding whether children will be in-school or at-home or managing the amount of time a child is in either place. They lie below the challenge of maintaining daily teaching when faculty and classroom support staff who quarantined due to positive tests of contact tracing. They lie below the demands of daily mitigation protocols necessary for schoolhouse doors being open to any person. Like a debt that is ignored over time because the need for daily living expenses are more demanding, the issue of academic rigor will one day need to be paid.

Most states have waived traditional, statewide K-12 testing regimens due to the pandemic. End-of-year tests were not administered in the spring of 2020 and typical baseline tests were not administered in the fall of 2020. Waivers or work-arounds abound regarding attendance, rules for daily physical activity, and minutes of required instruction in subject areas. Nothing has been removed from the statutes, department of instruction regulations, or even school board policies. Waivers are the rule of the day.

We are left with the “in the mean time” problem of preparing children for the day when the waivers are lifted – for the day the assessments return. And, they will return. It is probable that our state will not enforce statewide testing in the 2020-21 school year, but my money is on a reinstatement in 2021-22. How will the education provided during the pandemic serve our children after the pandemic?

There is a sweep of articles being written about the “lost generation”, children in school during the Time of COVID whose education has been disrupted or up-ended. This is not a lost generation. The term is a misapplication of a label applied post-World War One to those whose innocence of the world had been shattered by the war’s death and destruction. It is interesting that the generation of young Americans who fought and survived World War Two were labeled the “Greatest Generation”. What new label will be attached to our children today – certainly not “lost”.

That said, the reality that academic rigor and fidelity to educational standards will be reinstated should cause us to re-think the education we are providing today. Will a child a year from now, pencil or keyboard in hand, facing an academic assessment whisper to her test question, “We did not learn this in our pandemic classes”.

If your school district has demanded that all remote education for its children will be standards-based and that the school’s quality requirements will be upheld throughout remote education, stop reading now. You are on the right track at the right time. If not, please keep reading.

When children are at-home learners, faces on a screen that seem totally unschool-like, it is easier to dismiss daily rigor and standards. Just getting connected is a success. Just getting a lesson presented is a success. Getting responses from a child is a success. Engaging remotely with children is a real success. Rigor and standards? Not so much a success.

But, that is the problem we will face tomorrow and every day after that tomorrow if we don’t address rigor and standards today.

As a thought, ratchet up rigor and standards in your remote education a little each week. Begin with the standards. Assure that a growing number of assignments point at the appropriate academic standards for your children. Look again at assignments children already have completed to verify standards that have been addressed. On your annual checklist of grade level or course-specific academic standards, do a check-off of what has been and has not been addressed in September. Get back on a standards-based track. Before long, all assignments will be standards-based.

Gradually increase your demands for rigor. Move from pass/fail back toward your traditional quality requirements. No longer count connected engagement as an end-success but as a beginning for success. Correct responses and corrected responses improve correctness. Push children to move from good to better to best.

I congratulate our local school district where the Board confirmed that all teachers will provide instruction using the district’s standards-based curriculum only. In the past week, elementary teachers began administering the school’s academic screening tests for reading and math to ascertain individual and class status on annual performance expectations. Secondary classes will begin their annual series of ACT-battery assessments by the end of the month. None of these are high stakes assessments, but will be used to adjust instructional targets for children. Standards-based instruction and assessment measured rigor are the the order of the day for the duration of remote education.

The real end goal when we transition from remote or hybrid education back to in-person learning is that all children will be ready for success in resuming a standards-based and rigorous education. Make these two goals, standards-based instruction and rigorous learning expectations, your constant normal to assure children become “academically “lost” as a result of the pandemic.

Remote Ed is Prime Time For Independent Learning

Posted on 09/30/2020 by

It is easy to grumble about what children cannot do as at-home learners. Instead, let us consider what they can do. In fact, remote education is prime time for learning that requires children to work independently, requires practice, lends itself to asynchronous collaboration, and requires one-to-one teacher assistance. Consider the kinds of school assignments that a child typically does as an independent student – just me, myself, and I. I will highlight several and know that all PK-12teachers will quickly identify more. In each, a teacher provides clear instruction and demonstration of new learning and checks for student understanding. Then, teacher and children disconnect from the Internet and work independently.

Before we go further, all at-home learning can be informed by academic standards and assist children to become competent and proficient in those standards, just as if they were sitting in school and in class everyday.

Student Writers and Peer Editing. Some children love to write and others would rather go to the dentist. However, all students write. And, all students submit their writing. Let us start there. Writing begins and finishes as a solo endeavor. The assignment may be to write a paragraph or an essay, a poem, or a short story, to answer a question or make an argument. As a writer, picture a child with a pencil and paper or at a keyboard pondering what to write, beginning to write, considering her writing, editing her writing and making corrections and changes. Envision a child focused on writing, stand up to stretch and move about, return to the writing, tear up a page of paper or delete it from her screen, begin again, and persevere until she has a composition. Writing, or the writing of a first draft, is a very private and independent process and fits the isolation of at-home learning very well.

She writes or thinks “The end” at the end of the assignment. But, not quite.

Remote education also is a wonderful setting for peer editing. Writing and peer editing go hand-in-hand in theory. However, when children are in-school, time for peer editing often is omitted. Peer editing takes time and, although editing is a specific assignment, it takes children time to focus, to read, consider and make comments. This editing process can look like some children focused and others fully checked out, hence class time, a limited commodity, too often is eliminated for peer editing.

Remote peer editing is flexible time – children do it on their time not on the classroom clock. Online classroom platforms allow children to write and maintain their writing in a personal folder and then share their writing with other students. This sharing option is made for peer editing. It is easy to share a written document with several classmates, for those peer editors to read and make marginal comments on the document and for the author/student to read peer comments. No one needs to move. No paper is handed back and forth. This is truly a digital routine and children complete this task on their time.

Peer editing not only helps a student/author improve her writing, it helps the peer editor see how other children interpreted and completed an assignment. It extends their understanding and requires peer readers to be critical readers and clinical in their comments. Peer editing helps a teacher to understand how children understand the assignment as writers and skillful and insightful peer commenters.

Musicianship, Solo and Aggregated Performance. Elementary music classes, secondary bands and orchestras, and secondary choirs illicit in-school images of large group instruction and performances. Social distancing and remote education seemingly shattered large group music instruction and performance. Maybe not. At-home learning provides a music teacher the opportunity to focus on the musicianship of each individual child with a specificity that is not present in-class. Many of us may remember being called upon by our music teacher to sing or perform, especially while we stood in the middle of the chorus or sat in the middle of the band room and every other student waited, listening only to us. “Again”, the maestro required. After the third “again”, we could not shrink to a smaller psychological low. This is not just my inglorious memory – I hear about similar moments from many.

A Zoomed individual music lesson allows a child to sing or perform just for the teacher and for the teacher’s individualized comment. It allows the teacher to critically assist a child to understand and undertake the incremental steps of improvement required. And, without peers.

A child at-home can audibly and/or visually record practice time, review her own performance, and forward it to her teacher. There is no limit to the amount of practice time and recorded practice time an at-home child can accomplish. The key is to make a record, forward it to the teacher for review and comment and then wait for next instruction.

Zooming to a large group allows a teacher to provide academic musicianship instruction and individual Zoomed appointments allow the child to demonstrate her understanding of that instruction.

Practicing voice or instrumental lessons may have been harder to schedule in pre-pandemic times. In the Time of COVID, practice time helps to structure a child’s time at home and a teacher can listen to each recording at the teacher’s leisure.

Math Reasoning. One of the most effective math teachers I have observed wonderfully used “show me” and “explain to me” requests in causing children to excel in high school math. In-school, she had students at the board – chalk or white – displaying and then explaining their solutions. It was all about reasoning and using mathematics to create clear and concise answers to quantifiable and qualifiable problems. Children watching learned from the reasoning of others and confirmed or reworked their own rational solutions based upon the work of their peers. Eloquent reasoning is a trait of mathematical problem solving that requires time and practice and critical review.

Remote learning changes nothing. Children are provided quality, synchronous instruction by their teacher on new mathematics. The teacher uses the synchronous time to verbally check for understanding. Independently, a child works and resolves practice problems. She submits electronically to the teacher her “show me and explain to me”. This is a one-to-one conversation and the teacher provides personal feedback on the math application and reasoning. Depending upon commendation or recommendations, the student then resolves other problems or reworks the existing problems using the teacher’s comments. This process takes time, but time in remote education is an available commodity that is well worth the depth of individual understanding and learning that is accomplished.

Drawing, Painting, and Design. Many teachers and children have created at-home art studios. Supplies are delivered by school bus to children’s homes where kitchen tables or card tables or corners in garages have become independent art rooms. Once again, teacher instruction is delivered synchronously to the art class of at-home learners. Clear demonstration of technique and expectation are presented and children are checked for their understanding. Then, children have independent art time to draw, paint and design at home. They do not need other children or a teacher to do this – they work independently. Completed work is submitted to the teacher electronically or returned via school bus pick-up.

Extended and Intensive Reading. Because in-school time is limited to class periods or segments of a morning or afternoon, time for children to read in-school is reserved for short assignments or to begin them on assignments to be finished at home. Children seldom have time in-school to read a full chapter of a book or reread any parts they did not understand. And, children almost never read an entire book using in-school only. Extended reading takes time and at-home learning provides the time for a child to read, take a personal break, return to reading, consider reading, and read more.

Consider the traditional readings of literature in-school, such as The Miracle Worker, Night, Great Expectations, Of Mice and Men, Scarlet Letter, The Crucible, Julius Caesar, and Romeo and Juliet. Some works are assigned to all children and others are child-selected.

Consider children in elementary classes taking a trade book to sit in a soft chair, stretch out on a floor cushion or walk around while silently reading. Consider a child of any age reading aloud so she can hear the words not just see them. Consider a child reading all the parts of a play and moving around to semi-act them out. Now think of a child having extended time at home to read without a school bell or the need to close the book and move on to a math lesson. Remote education promotes extended and intensive reading.

Natural Observations. Children at-home have the opportunity to be observers of what naturally happens in the world around them. No matter where – in a rural home in the woods, a suburban home in a neighborhood, or an urban home in a city – life happens. Observation of life can cause learning. Children can observe people. They can observe weather. They can observe plants. These observations can be planned for in an at-home curriculum based upon academic standards. Science, social studies, mathematics, the arts, behavioral sciences – all and more can be crafted into at- and around-the-home observations. Children see. Children make notes. Children write or talk about. Children learn from.

Astronomy. Lastly, school time and astronomy do not live on the same clock. Unless a school has access to a planetarium, it is difficult for children in-school to observe the stars and planets and heavens. However, as at-home learners, children have access to the nighttime skies. Synchronous instruction and direction can prepare children for sitting or laying out on the ground at home to watch the sunset and the night skies appear. They can identify and become familiar with constellations, meteor showers, planets and stars. They can observe and record the seasonal rotation of the skies. They can report and share their observations on Zoom chats with classmates and their teacher. They can learn first-hand what otherwise would be largely book learning. At-home learning can definitely promote a learning of astronomy.

It is hard for me to write, but I do, that there are many things that remote education with at-home learners allows us to accomplish that we could not when all children were in-school. It must be our decision and design to cause all children to learn in this new educational setting.

September’s Dilemma

Posted on 07/17/2020 by

School in the time of COVID has four groupings of school families to address and satisfy in preparing for the 2020-21 school year. Three groups readily define themselves and a third is in flux. The challenge is how to satisfy all four at the same time. Or, not.

One group of families wants at-home schooling for their children. They are not satisfied or do not believe that in-school attendance is safe from the spread of COVID. Some parents in this group are able to maintain a parent at home to supervise and assist children with at-home instruction. Their homes typically have adequate Internet connectivity. They also want at-home instruction to equal in-school instruction in scope, quality and attention to individual child needs. Their wants are very reasonable.

A second group of families wants in-school instruction for their children. They are satisfied or believe that monitoring and safety protocols can create an in-school attendance that is safe on a daily basis from the spread of COVID. Parents in this group want school in the time of COVID to resemble normal school as much as possible. Their experiences with remote education this spring cause them to believe that at-home instruction in an inadequate education for their children. In-school families recognize or accept that if health conditions warrant their children may become at-home students. Their wants are very reasonable.

A third group of families do not have options for anything but in-school instruction for their children. These parents must work away from home on a daily basis and there is no supervision for at-home children. Or, they do not have adequate Internet connectivity required for synchronous teaching and learning. Or, their experiences with emergency remote education this spring convince them that at-home education completely disrupts their family – no one in their home was happy. Their wants are very reasonable.

A fourth group of families very understandably cannot clearly support at-home or in-school programming. They want in-school instruction with guarantees that everyone will be safe. They are caught in the middle with valid reasons for both and cannot declare for either.

Responses to any school-based survey of its community clearly identify these four groups to be present in the discussion of how to school children in September.

Our local school understands, recognizes and empathizes with parents in each group, because each group reflects truths about school in the time of COVID. The issue public education faces is that children in each group require educating in the 2020-21 school year.

Consider these statements.

Schooling can be adjusted for lost time and opportunity but a lost life or lost health cannot be adjusted. Safety in the time of COVID is paramount.

Educating children is essential. Whether a child is in-school or at-home, the requirement for successful education does not change. Students in K-3 learn to read. We know that children who are not proficient readers by the end of grade 3 will require significant assistance if they are to succeed with complex and complicated reading material after elementary school. An abundance of education studies point to a child’s reading proficiency after third grade and subsequent success or lack of school success in grades 4 – 12. Every child in these grades needs a strong reading instruction this year. Students in grade 4 tackle fractions. Fractions have been a challenge for children forever. Children who master fractions have a sound foundation for Algebra-based math beginning in middle school. Children who do not have significant difficulty with higher math. Every child in 4^th grade needs a strong instruction in fractions. (The specific grade may vary by school.)

The point of these two statements, and many more like them, is that the decision about how to provide every school-age child with a safe 2020-21 education is more than complex and complicated. Happiness for all parents is waned but it may not be achieved.

Consider a Venn diagram graphically displaying similarities and differences of four circles representing each of the four groups described above. We start with the intersection or overlays of the common interests wanted by parents in each circle with designs to successfully provide schooling that each group holds in common. Then, we work outward toward the differences. In the end, there will be differences that cannot be satisfied. Will these differences make or break the agreements we can reach around what we hold in common?

In a nation that now demonstrates for its disparate points of view, a completely different outcome is possible. There will be no school in September.

Remote Education: How To Improve From What We Learned

Posted on 06/04/2020 by

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

Posted on 05/29/2020 by

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.

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.