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O, Brave New World!
Wherever you thought the 2019-20 school year would take you, it probably wasn’t huddled over a webcam in your living room teaching students scattered across your city. But here we are, doing what educators always do even as news about the COVID-19 pandemic and shelter in place (for California) plans change daily: doing more with less, learning on the job, and honing our craft a little more every day.
Even for the most optimistic among us, however, these changes are a lot – especially when we factor in caring for ourselves and our families as well as our students. The technology and logistics alone can seem intimidating, but we’ll adapt with time. What is needed now are the same skills that brought you to the classroom in the first place: your flexibility, creativity, warmth, humor, and steadfast commitment to doing right by the students in your charge. You are more than qualified to meet the challenge of the current moment, and our hope is our HomeRoom newsletter will be a forum to help us get there together.
What Do You Need?
Gateway Impact’s mission is to serve as a free resource and partner to educators across the nation – and that means you! Email us with a distance learning challenge you’d like help troubleshooting and a Gateway educator will address your question in a future issue.
Alternatively, is something going well? Find a great resource to share? Let us know and we’ll highlight your bright spot.
The Big Picture: Core Beliefs and Feasible Goals for Distance Learning
At Gateway, we’re on Spring Break this week. It’s certainly one for the history books, but it’s also a good opportunity to reflect and take stock before we dive into a new distance learning model from next week until… well, until we can return to our classrooms.
Educators everywhere are working around the clock to plan distance learning experiences for the next several weeks and months that will ensure students have the best experience possible, but the reality is that there is no replicating the experience of a real live classroom. Given that, it’s important to name our priorities upfront: what MUST we do for our students to feel good about our work and our school community, while prioritizing their well-being, along with our own? When the dust clears and we return to our campuses, what will we want to have been true about how we spent this time?
We are navigating brand new territory, but if our values and goals are clearly articulated, we can make tough choices easier and devote our energies where it matters most. After several rounds of collaborative discussion, the team at Gateway settled on three major goals the duration of our distance learning program:
Provide engaging, accessible, differentiated, student-centered learning experiences
Provide structure and routine, connection to community, and space to attend to our humanity
Support students to gain proficiency on a feasible set of Q4 learning goals given the challenges of the moment
These goals, along with the beliefs and context that shaped them, can be reviewed here.
Any educator can benefit from similar exercises, whether developing shared priorities as a school community, as a grade or subject level team, or simply articulating your goals as an individual practitioner. This Context and Core Beliefs resource from Gateway Impact will guide you through a series of questions about the challenges and opportunities of the present moment for your school community to help you identify what is feasible and what is necessary for your student. The second page helps you translate your core beliefs as an educator into concrete practices for your new remote “classroom.”
In addition to the excerpted reflections discussed here, the Gateway Public Schools Distance Learning Plan can be viewed in full at Gateway Impact. In the coming weeks, we’ll break down additional components of the plan and speak with educators about what distance learning looks like in practice.
Video: How to Use Google Classroom for Remote Teaching
We’re fortunate to have 6th grade Humanities and Learning Seminar Teacher Sam Kary as our resident ed tech guru, and now so are you! Gateway, like many schools transitioning to distance learning, uses Google Classroom as the primary platform for teachers to organize assignments and communicate with students. It’s fairly user friendly, but can take a little getting used to. In this 15 minute video, Sam demonstrates how to set up your classroom for the first time, as well as some tweaks that can help you make the most of this very useful tool. Check out his Youtube Channel and Blog for more great tutorials!
Resource: Build Your Own Virtual “Help Desk”
In the midst of so much change, you and your colleagues are bound to have lots of questions about tech, schedules, logistics, and more over the coming weeks. One way to streamline questions and answers is through using this Help Desk Spreadsheet with your team.
Upload a copy of this template to your Google Drive or other shared folder, and use it as a parking lot for any questions you may have. Tag your question with the built-in topics like “Student Communication,” “Grading/Instruction,” or customize with your own labels as suits your context. Knowledgeable staff and school leaders can provide answers or correct misinformation -- over time your “help desk” will evolve into a useful FAQ.
Has your team created a helpful resource to ease the transition to distance learning? Send it our way and we’ll share it in a future issue!
Clearing the Technology Gap
The best tech tools are only so useful if all students can't access them. The current moment is forcing schools and communities to reckon with the reality that 1) Internet access is no longer a luxury, but an absolute necessity for engaging in public life and 2) our students who most need to maintain strong connections to their school community are those least able to do so without assistance.
Any effort to engage in distance learning over the next several weeks has to account for and surmount those obstacles if we are to stay true to our mission of providing all students with a meaningful public education.
At Gateway, we assessed family need by distributing a technology survey to all families, staying mindful that the families who we most needed to hear from would require personal follow-up via phone in order for our data to be accurate. This helped us determine that about 10% of our students would require help either securing a device to access and complete schoolwork, securing internet access, or both.
Family feedback also helped school leaders make an important decision early on, committing to avoid mandatory synchronous class sessions (i.e. Zoom lectures). Teachers are encouraged to organize optional synchronous activities for the purpose of enrichment and maintaining community bonds with and among students, but given each family’s unique schedule and home situation, tying grades to whether students can participate in activities at specific times could inadvertently punish students with limited internet access, or families with multiple people working and studying from home, sharing one connection. Rather, assignments are distributed each morning and can be turned in any time before midnight, allowing families to schedule schoolwork as best fits their needs.
As many schools are organizing their own technology pick-up events, we wanted to share some successes and lessons learned from ours, which was held on Wednesday, April 1:
Designate a number parents can call day-of, and plan on having volunteers who can call or text families who miss their pick up window (you can anonymize staff cell numbers through Google).
Note that many parents who need tech support will be classified as “essential” workers and likely will be arriving before or after their work day. Schedule accordingly (i.e. 8 a.m. - 6 p.m.).
If you have multiple school sites, post signage at all sites directing families to the tech pick-up, in as many languages as are prudent for your community. Have interpreters on-site throughout the day as appropriate.
Follow all safety and social distancing protocols: keep families in their cars if they drive, or six feet away if they walk up. Don’t require signatures to avoid sharing pens. Keep electronics wipes, hand sanitizer, etc on hand.
We plan on holding two more tech pick-up days over the next few weeks. How is your school ensuring students have access to the technology and materials they need? Share your successes and we’ll highlight them here!
We’re certainly not the first to stress the importance of self-care for educators in these unprecedented times, but we’re the first to admit finding the time can be TOUGH. As an incentive, our school leaders developed this very official sticker chart to inspire staff to take a break every now and then. You can complete it on your own – and treat yourself to something lovely when you finish it – but we highly encourage you to take it up with your colleagues! As it becomes clear that what we thought was a relatively short break is to be instead a longer haul, it’s more important than ever to find those little things that sustain us – after all, your joy will bring joy to your students.
That's it for this week! Next time, we'll take a closer look at planning asynchronous online learning, family roles in distance learning, and more!
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