Kimberly Thompson is a Spanish teacher at Magnolia West High School in Magnolia, Texas. I’ve been lucky enough to visit her classroom on numerous occasions, and she’s one of those super sharp, on-the-cutting-edge teachers I go to when I want advice on teaching or when I want to hear about the latest app that’s sweeping through her classroom.
I reached out to her to ask what’s working as she teaches Spanish in remote learning. Here’s what she told me.
“Consistency, systems, communication, phone calls, follow-thru, relevance feedback, feedback, feedback. Teaching parents how to use tech. Student choice is still doable. This helps. Supporting one another is an absolute must-have as a staff.”
See what I mean? Isn’t this the sort of teacher we want teaching our students and helping our staff members? In her brief answer, Ms. Thompson quickly rattled off 10 themes of successful remote learning.
1. Consistency: All kids need it, especially Gen Z. Let them know the routines and what you expect.
2. Systems: Great teachers don’t do it half-way. They keep the end in mind and the steps they need to get there.
3. Communication: When that kid is learning ten miles away, the teacher has to stay in touch.
4. Phone calls: All young people, including high school students, feel good when they hear their teacher on the phone asking them, “How ya doin’?”
5. Follow-thru: The great teachers aren’t taking many Hulu breaks; they keep on teaching.
6. Relevance: Make it relevant. In class, teachers are competing with student phones. In remote learning, they’re competing with student phones, Play Stations, YouTube, and all the other diversions of Gen Z.
7. Feedback, feedback, feedback: This tactic is so important Ms. Thompson wrote it not once, not twice, but three times. Feedbackfeedbackfeedback…
8. Teaching parents: One of the big “aha” moments of our COVID Spring, the need to bring our parents up to speed on what’s happening in the remote learning space.
9. Student choice: Different abilities, different interests. Choice is the secret weapon of remote learning.
10. Supporting fellow staff members: No teacher is a remote learning island. In tough times, teachers lean on each other, even if it’s digitally.
But Ms. Thompson wasn’t through. She added a second answer for me to ponder.
“One more thing. What made this bearable was that my kids are already used to my techy ways. They know how to access their class on LMS. They know how to sign into programs. They know how to access websites I am using now because we did before. I am grateful for the wok I had already put in. We are already in the tomorrow we need our kids ready for.”
How about that last line? “We are already in the tomorrow we need our kids ready for.” Wow.
In my blog, The New Digital Divide (April 18, 2020), I wrote about the gap between teachers who know how to use technology and those who don’t. Two students from the same school could both be sitting at home with Chromebooks and the internet, but only one of them might be using digital tools in the remote learning lessons. In other words, one Gen Z kid might be surfing, recording, and creating while the other one is filling in blanks. One kid might be exposed to the best practices of 2020, while the other one is being exposed to the best practices of 1995.
As Ms. Thompson points out, she inadvertently started preparing for this school closure on the first day of school last August. When teachers everywhere come back to school, the 1995 teachers have some catching up to do. Luckily for them, all-stars like Ms. Thompson will be there “supporting fellow staff members.”
I would call her to congratulate her, but I doubt I’d be able to get through. She’s probably on the phone with one of her students.
