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NPR Ed
The Biggest Distance-Learning Experiment In History: Week One
By Anya Kamenetz
March 26, 2020
For 6-year-old Sadie Hernandez, the first day of online school started
at her round, wooden kitchen table in Jacksonville, Fla. She turned on
an iPad and started talking to her first grade teacher, Robin Nelson.
"Are you ready to do this online stuff?" her teacher asks, in a video sent to NPR by Hernandez's mother, Audrey.
"Yeah," Sadie responds.
"It's kind of scary isn't it?"
"Kind of."
Sadie's teacher reminds her that they'll be using the educational
software that she is already familiar with from her face-to-face
classes at Ortega Elementary School: "It's iReady, so we've got that.
And we've got WritingCity. And now you know how to meet me in the
morning."
Every state has closed at least some public schools to fight the spread
of coronavirus, and some are starting to say they expect to be closed
through the end of the school year.
Thrown into the breach, public schools are setting out on an
unprecedented experiment: With little training and even fewer
resources, in a matter of days they're shifting from a system of
education that for centuries has focused on face to face interaction,
to one that works entirely at a distance.
Diana Greene, the superintendent of Duval County Schools where Robin
Nelson teaches, sent an email to her staff on Friday, March 20 that
illustrates the magnitude of the effort educators around the country
are faced with:
"It is amazing to me that it was just 3 days ago that we made the
decision to close schools. In less than 72 hours, Team Duval moved the
entire district to an at-home, virtual instruction model. We have
managed to troubleshoot the mobilization of meal programs, lack of
technology equipment, online teacher training, and a whole host of
issues that come with a change of this magnitude. Three days!
"Three days to create, print and distribute about 5 million pages of
instructional content. Three days to load classes onto an online
platform. Three days to gather online resources so aligned instruction
could continue to take place. Three days to train about 8,000 teachers
in a whole new way of work. Imagine that!
"Three days to conduct a survey of technology needs from 130,000
students and to prepare thousands of computers for student use. Three
days to prepare for neighborhood delivery of school lunches and snacks
on our buses so children would not go hungry. Just three days to
mobilize a community of partners and volunteers to assist our schools."
Some families, like Sadie's, are adjusting reasonably well. Her parents
are both working from home, still earning paychecks. When Sadie has to
concentrate on her lessons, they turn on "Daniel Tiger" for her little
sister Kate. There's a backyard swimming pool for cooling off when
lessons are done.
But as a crisis often does, this one has exposed existing inequalities
— among schools, among districts and among students. Just over half of
the nation's public school children are from families considered
low-income, and an estimated 12 million lack broadband Internet access
at home.
Robin Nelson, an educator with 10 years experience, says one of the
students in her class has special needs and needs significant
accommodation, and the family also struggles financially. "I've spoken
to his mom. There's another little one on the way, if not already
arrived."
And, Nelson notes, for that family and many like it, "survival is a
priority and not, you know, accommodations right now for him." Nelson
thinks the student may end up repeating a grade. She's also concerned
about children whose parents must go out to work, and who are sending
their kids to home-based daycares that remain open.
She tears up talking about her "babies" and how much she misses
greeting them at the door with a fist-bump, handshake or hug. Sadie
Hernandez wrote a note and drew pictures to leave on her beloved
teacher's doorstep.
Because of these inherent inequities, some researchers are advocating
that public schools focus on making up lost learning when things get
back to normal — through summer school and other remediation. That will
take extra funding, including money to pay teachers. Douglas Harris, an
education researcher and fellow at the Brookings Institution, has
written a post calling for school districts to focus on making up time,
not on teaching remotely.:
"Studies of online learning suggest not only that students learn less
in online environments, compared with in person, but that disadvantaged
students learn the least. And that's true even when online teachers
have experience and training with online teaching. Under the current
emergency, most teachers will not have any experience at all with this
approach."
Nevertheless, with its latest guidance, the federal Education
Department has encouraged schools closing due to coronavirus to pursue
distance learning quote "creatively" and with "flexibility", even if
they can't reach every student that way.
Reminding everyone that this is an unprecedented situation, "No one
wants to have learning coming to a halt across America due to the
COVID-19 outbreak," reads the guidance, "and the U.S. Department of
Education (Department) does not want to stand in the way of good faith
efforts to educate students on-line."
The Senate coronavirus relief package passed on Wednesday includes
$13.5 billion earmarked for schools, which they can use to keep paying
staff as well as to buy new technology.
As they wait for clearer direction, materials, and training, states and
districts are choosing different paths. In the Philadelphia area,
districts may use up snow days left over from the mild winter. In
Chicago, teachers are offering enrichment resources only, instructed to
make sure there's "no new learning." Harking back to an earlier era of
distance education, Los Angeles Unified is partnering with the local
public television stations to pair educational broadcasts with some
online resources.
Florida, where Robin Nelson teaches, is an example of a state that has
moved swiftly to transition as much instruction as possible online.
Partly that's because it is home to the Florida Virtual School. That's
a public, nonprofit K12 school that has been around for over two
decades, and has a solid reputation — its students do about as well as,
or a little better than, other students in the state.
Before the outbreak, FLVS directly enrolled 200,000 students, primarily
in Florida but also across all 50 states and overseas. Now they are
looking to double that direct enrollment by the end of April. And the
school is also training at least 10,000 Florida teachers to transition
their own classes online — via live online trainings and pre-recorded
webinars.
"We've partnered with the [state] Department of Education to work with
the school districts to support teacher professional development at the
district level, to help them ramp up and to be able to teach students
online," says Courtney Calfee, executive director for global services
at FLVS.
Nelson says she and other teachers at Ortega Elementary cobbled
together online lessons from various sources: "It's teachers going
through and kind of pulling out their materials, saying, hey, PBS has a
good thing over here ..."
Paula Renfro leads professional development for Duval County Public
Schools, the district where Nelson teaches. She says that in making
this swift transition, they decided to lead with their existing
"blended learning resource library," including software programs and
digital textbooks.
"Really, when we considered how this rollout was going to look, we
needed to provide tools, especially in the beginning, that teachers and
students had a high comfort level with."
Another big consideration for schools making this transition is how
much time per day to attempt to connect live with students — known as
"synchronous", or real-time, learning — versus putting out assignments
for students to complete on their own — known as asynchronous learning.
Where schools and communities have more resources, they seem to be gravitating more toward the synchronous model.
NPR put out a call on Twitter and Facebook, and among the responses
were families with students at a dozen private schools around the
country that are holding live online classes via video chat for up to
five hours per day.
Interestingly, Justin Reich, an online learning researcher at MIT, says
this isn't necessarily the best approach to use, especially in the
younger grades. "Young people don't have the attention or the executive
function skills to be able to sit and learn online for hours every day
on their own."
He advocates instead a pattern sometimes known as "hybrid," "blended
learning" or a "flipped classroom." It's a combination of relatively
short, live video check-in meetings and self-paced work, with teachers
available to students over email, phone, text or any other method that
is convenient to both. In fact, if you are working remotely right now
as an adult, it might look pretty similar to that.
That's more or less what Robin Nelson is doing with those of her
students who are able to connect with her. They do a version of
"morning meeting" using Microsoft Teams, videoconferencing every
morning at 8:30. There, she gives them the assignments for the day.
After that, Nelson makes herself available for virtual "office hours"
from 9 to 11 a.m., so parents can check in. Families are also
contacting her throughout the day on their smartphones using ClassDojo,
a program she was already using to keep in touch. She's encouraging
parents to read to children every day, and even to have some kind of
recess.
Florida Virtual School does something similar with what it calls its
"high teacher touch" approach. Assignments are designed to be completed
on students' own time. The teacher holds live lessons via video chat
either weekly or daily, depending on the course, where students can
also talk to each other. At FLVS, some courses also have what's called
"discussion-based assessment," where the teacher has a live video
conversation with the student to check for mastery.
There's one big caveat. This model, Reich says, overwhelmingly relies
on a parent or caregiver who can serve as a coach, cheerleader, IT
support and general troubleshooter. Until you get perhaps to late
middle or high school, there is no such thing as independent solo
school via computer — most students just aren't developmentally capable
of it.
Most of all, Nelson is wondering why her district threw "a ton of work"
into creating an online model when many of the students she calls "her
babies" don't have adequate resources to connect right now.
"Some of them have laptops. Some of them have siblings that will be
sharing that technology. So, you know, that will make it more
difficult." Others, she says will be using a parents' phone at best.
"But if the parents are trying to work from home or whatever they're
trying to do, it's not gonna be a priority."
These students who told the school they lacked connectivity, for now,
are getting paper homework packets, handed out along with free food
from the school lunch program. The plan is to collect the packets in
two weeks. The district, like others around the country, is lending out
laptops and mobile hotspot devices, but in Duval County middle and high
school students get priority over the elementary school students.
For the paper packets, "Who's collecting and who's grading it? How are
these kids getting feedback on what they're doing?" Nelson asks. "All
that's just pretty gray right now." She said that during the first
week, out of 19 students, "I have 12 that are working online for at
least some (if not all) of the assignments, four that have packets
only, two more that have packets but plan on picking up a computer from
the district to borrow, and one student that is AWOL."
Renfro, who works for the district, notes that this is early days, and
the district hopes to continue getting resources out to students who
need them. For students who don't have computers yet, "we are
contacting families through email, telephone each day," she says. "We
still have our hands and our arms wrapped around them to support them."
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