The ability of instructional leaders to identify high quality teaching, hold it up as exemplary, and support all teachers in making incremental progress toward being exemplary remains crucial under the social-distancing regime, but it’s more difficult than ever because everybody’s designing.

State boards and their bureaucratic hordes convene in dimly-lit video conferences to conjure the new timeline for standardized assessments; in the same inky darkness of uncertainty, LEAs Google-doc their way to flexible learning programs featuring x hours of synchronous touchpoints and y hours of independent student work; operations officers re-purpose school busses to deliver apples, turkey sandwiches, and laptops instead of students; teachers with personal lap-children peck out retrofitted curricula, like equipping a sedan with a main-mast and asking it to sail the open ocean; parents, whose circumstances range from hungry to bored, gamely arrange desks, paper, and pencils, investing in these structures the magical hope that learning might result; and the students themselves re-design their parents’ designs, hide under desks, use pens as darts, and eat cheese sandwiches, feeding the turkey to the cat.

If you’re looking for learning at the business end of this design chain, and looking for the practices that bring it about, you have a difficult job.

And yet, strobe-lit moments when students are doing the intellectual work and when they have chances to shine, as captured in CRPE’s piece on Success Academy’s efforts to deliver flexible instruction, light a familiar path.

Who’s Doing the Work?

The estimable educator Steven Wilson audited several courses at Success Academy at the end of March and found that through the design and execution of their distance learning plan, Success’s students were neither passively listening nor engaging in low-level tasks, but were in fact doing the intellectual work.

Wilson narrates the crisp start of a pre-AP (?!) world history class:

Class begins with an engaging online poll on the investiture controversy in medieval Europe. Who would prevail, the poll asks, in the installation of high church officials: the nobility or the papacy? Within seconds, 72 students have cast their votes.

One might argue that such a question on 31 March 2020 is not just beside the point but insane, but one can’t argue that answering the question and preparing to defend your choice is in fact intellectually demanding, and the sort of thing that helps brains grow.

In a math class, Wilson observes the process for pushing students to explain their reasoning. While students mark up problems on Kami, teachers use Slack to “identify emerging misconceptions.”

The “s” at the end of “teachers” denotes the fact that several co-teachers instruct 112 students simultaneously, reviewing work live and interjecting with timely redirection and corrections, some personalized and some addressed to the entire group.

The teachers are working too, of course, but their work is to get students to work, as opposed to entertaining students, delivering information via lecture, or wasting time on overly baroque logistics.

Who’s Shining?

The other notable feature of the classes Wilson audited and brought to life was that students had opportunities to shine. In the math , for example, after the teachers sort through student work, “Kaitlyn is welcomed as a “guest” to present her thinking to the class.” In another instance, the teacher identifies some particularly fine reasoning and invites the student to share:

“Kevin, can you tell us why your exponent is n divided by 4?” Kevin instantly comes on the screen and ably defends his thinking.

In the history class referenced above, after a brief period of independent work, the teacher

calls on one student, Tiana, who with one click appears on screen and presents her work. It’s impeccable: “When empires failed to unify their land and people, violence, instability, and conflict arose,” Tiana had written. 

In both cases, these students are empowered to share and explain their work, a process made even easier, perhaps, by the newfound teacher power to zap students to the front of the class with the click of a mouse.

Designing opportunities for students to shine may be less obvious, but no less important to good teaching, than getting students to do the intellectual work.

Having students share work individually and by name asserts their basic humanity, as they become, for a few moments, the lead actor in their own drama. It also symbolically and concretely decentralizes authority, thereby increasing the group’s investment in the co-construction of knowledge. And when structured well by the teacher, it creates a welcoming psycho-social atmosphere where each student knows that she will have the chance to shine at some point.

One more point of emphasis: Tiana, Kevin, and Kaitlyn do not draw teacher attention because of misbehavior, or because of their refusal to work. Teacher attention, and the entire class’s attention, centers on the work and who produced it, which underlines the purpose of their coming together that day.

What does good teaching look like from a certain distance?

Based on Wilson’s reporting, Success Academy seems determined to re-create the highly scripted purpose and order of their clock-driven, physical classrooms. The classes are structurally arranged to foreground intellectual depth and help students shine.

In other less constrained settings, teachers themselves have more agency in determining the structures, and amidst the frenzy of design, those two very worthy elements of student experience can get lost in the shuffle.

How? All sorts of ways, actually. Overly elaborate instructions that require multiple clicks before students get to depth of thinking, for one. Rituals that result in extended time spent processing surface-level feelings. Idiosyncratic focus on certain students while ignoring others.

Sometimes these pitfalls result from the best of intentions and, in fact, the desire to exploit what’s best about teachers and students co-designing learning experiences: the ability to engage student interests directly, to shape lessons around student questions, to do authentic work connected to local challenges and global problems, to support students in processing emotions and contemplating their futures.

But even in such environments, can’t one still expect that Steven Wilson, and instructional leaders, would find students consistently plumbing intellectual depths and stepping, even if only in two dimensions, into the spotlight?