We’ve been through seven weeks of remote learning, and the voices of the students are starting to be heard. I encourage educators to read “Distance Learning is Better,” an opinion piece by Veronique Mintz in The New York Times of May 5, 2020. Mintz, an eighth grader, has some next steps for us as we reset education in the fall. (Mintz and the paper refer to is as distance learning; I refer to it as remote learning.)
In her piece, Mintz writes that she learns more at home because her middle school classmates are so disruptive, and some teachers are so ineffective, that remote learning is working better for her than classroom learning. (She’s only identified as an eighth-grade student; the paper does not reveal her school or district.)
I’ve worked as an interim administrator and a consultant in some very tough middle schools, perhaps like the one Mintz attends. I get it. As an administrator, I spent most of my time going into classrooms and calming disruptive students or removing them so the teacher could teach. If you have 28 students in a classroom, and three or four them are talking across the room as the teacher is speaking, throwing things, pestering their classmates, walking around, lying on the floor, or constantly going in and out of the classroom, it’s really hard for the teacher to teach and the students to learn.
This is what Mintz encounters daily in her school. She says she takes tests in classes over material the teacher never got to teach because of all the disruptions. Mintz has three recommendations for us when school when classroom learning returns in the fall. (My comments are written after her quotes.)
“First,” she writes, “teachers should send recorded video lessons to all students after class (through email or online platforms like Google Classroom).” One of the lessons for educators coming out of this COVID spring is that some students have thrived in remote learning. The digital teaching genie has been released from the bottle. Students will want elements of remote learning interwoven into classroom teaching. More digital learning, and perhaps video interaction, will be part of the new normal.
“Second, teachers should offer students consistent, weekly office hours of ample time for 1-to-1 or small group meetings.” Students are having to work more independently this spring, and some of them are having 1-to-1 video conferences with teachers. They’re getting office hours. A lot of students will want more individual interaction with their teachers in school.
Finally, Mintz has a suggestion for improving discipline in classrooms. She tells us some of her teachers are very effective, and these teachers should be asked to assist others. “Teachers who are highly skilled in classroom management,” she writes, “should be paid more to lead required trainings for teachers, plus reinforcement sessions as needed.” She, and I imagine her peers, are almost pleading for the good teachers to help the others.
Mintz adds another point about her teachers who can’t control their classrooms: “Unfortunately, the same teachers who struggle to manage students in the classroom also struggle online.” This means some of her teachers can’t figure it out in the classroom - or out of the classroom.
Teaching is hard, and leading schools is hard. It takes extreme amounts of talent to teach in tough schools. As school leaders implement changes like the ones Mintz proposes (which are all valid), they will encounter staffing issues, pay issues, technology issues, personality issues, time issues, and some teacher unions will try to block them.
Mintz is also encountering what I’ve called the New Digital Divide, which is the wall between teachers who are adept at using technology and those who aren’t. Teachers who have kept up with the changing times made technology one of the foundations of their teaching; they quickly transitioned into remote learning. Those teachers who didn’t adapt, for whatever reason, have been more likely to struggle. Students like Mintz are paying the price.
We’re headed for a reset in education. Some things can be learned about where to go in the future if we look back at this period to see what worked and didn’t work. We can use the lessons learned during this school closure to move forward, or we can ignore the lesson like the ones Mintz is trying to teach us and fall further behind.