With students geographically dispersed, school schedules disrupted, and standardized tests delayed or cancelled, teachers have opportunities to explore creative paths for designing meaningful student learning experiences.

With limited emotional and material resources, what ought they prioritize during this time?*

Here are three teaching and learning priorities to consider:

• Building community
• Integrating student interests into the curriculum
• Providing opportunities to share work and learning

These priorities ought to be evergreen, but they’re especially important during this extended winter.

What follows are brief explanations of why these are important to flexible learning, as well as examples of relevant practices. I hope educators conclude this reading with practical tips to deploy immediately, and also a heightened sense of what’s still possible, even at a distance.

Building Community from a Distance

The reality of physical distance is a one-two punch: 1) it obliterates the daily interactions that constitute a considerable portion of the psychic rewards of attending school and 2) it heightens the hurdle for feeling a shared sense of purpose with your peers and colleagues.

In this context, students benefit from the concrete, felt presence of a community of peers and teachers. How do we bring about that feeling?

Checkins are Essential

With limited synchronous time, teachers may be tempted, for the purpose of consistent messaging about instructions and course content, to use meetings for logistics and direct instruction. Logistics and lectures, however, don’t build or energize a community (I’ve written about this before). Since students will need to sustain independent work, any synchronous gatherings should invigorate students and help them feel connected.

Devoting the beginning of sessions for checkins, on the other hand, can help create the community students and teachers crave. Morning greetings, one-word proverbs (or almost anything from Stanford d.school’s stoke deck), virtual tag, dress-up day, and home-object-show-and-tell all can serve the purpose. Ask students to share more about themselves by playing two truths and a lie. Ask them to present micro-resumes that capture their strengths and skills. Structure the checkins so that every student has the chance to listen to peers, and to be heard.

Group Tasks

Self-directed, solo work has value, but group tasks are still possible. Students can create endings for one another’s stories, provide feedback on work produced, and share ideas about open-ended math problems.

Changing groups and partnerships frequently for these tasks has benefits: students get to know more of their peers and those who have difficulty participating, for whatever reason, do not impose their absence on one particular peer for an extended time.

Group Project Work

If connectivity and the school’s curriculum allow, extended collaboration is also possible. Students can form critical friends groups to help keep one another engaged and learning. They can work as a team, for example, to create a video on gravity, with one student in charge of the filming, another creating a soundtrack, and a third working to graphically display the experimental data.

Integrating Student Interests

When teachers have the opportunity to tinker with what students learn and do, focusing on student interests seems a promising path.

In their 2019 book In Search of Deeper Learning, Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine shared evidence from school visits and interviews that depicted students as most engaged and learning most deeply when participating in extracurricular activities such as clubs, athletics, student newspaper, mentoring, internships, and etc.

These conclusions make intuitive sense, since one would expect increased engagement when educators honor students’ choices and interests.

Reflecting this month on the challenges and opportunities of distance learning, Mehta encouraged educators to tilt the curriculum toward students:

Intrinsic motivation matters more in the online space, and thus there is more of a premium on finding tasks which engage students’ interests and curiosities.

from “How to Deliver Deeper Learning During the Coronavirus Shutdown.” EducationNext, April 7, 2020

Choice and Interest

One way to capitalize on interests is to allow students to demonstrate their learning in formats of their choosing: artwork, songs, infographics, poems, essays, films. A choice of medium allows students to work with tools that interest them, and encourages them to use the materials available at home.

A related approach is the hub and spoke, where all students learn a core set of skills and content, and then extend their exploration in a direction of their own choosing. For example, a unit on globalization, after building a shared understanding of core concepts and research skills, could then allow individual students (or small groups) to dig deeper into the role of technology, culture, race, politics, or economics, according to what moves them.

Make Student Interests the Curriculum

More radical approaches might also be worth exploring, especially in contexts with supportive leadership or, frankly, when the student participation rate is low enough to contemplate drastic measures.

Could teachers ask the students what questions they have about the world and about themselves and build a project or unit around those questions? Middle school teacher Bobby Shaddox did exactly this and captured valuable takeaways here.

Another approach, for secondary schools, might be to suspend “regular” classes for a month or more and offer smaller, co-taught interdisciplinary projects designed around student interests. Student could choose into projects such as “What does it mean to me to be a powerful female?,” “How can we reduce the use of straws in our city?,” and “How long will it take to make a vaccine for coronavirus?”

Providing Opportunities to Share Work and Learning

Submitting work via a thin cable in the wall can exacerbate a student’s fear that what she or he creates is unimportant and quickly forgotten. This fear has consequences: it prevents students from participating, it teaches them not to value school, it drives them elsewhere, to places they hope will provide more meaning.

When the students who are most in need of help are most likely to tune out, teachers must prioritize finding meaningful and supportive ways to highlight student work and share it with audiences.

The most obvious and immediate audience consists of the peers within a student’s class. Whether synchronously or asynchronously, a regular rhythm of sharing student work to celebrate bright spots and, diplomatically, identify growth areas serves to foreground the importance of student creation and production.

In video calls, teachers can click students to the front of the class and ask them to share their work. Teachers can also make a habit of beginning emails and other communications with highlights from student work.

Expanding the audience might be, in some ways, easier than in physical school. Students can be encouraged to present work to parents and caregivers, perhaps even formally via a student-led conference. Shareyourlearning.org has curated toolkits and resources specifically for helping students present work to audiences during flexible learning.

Synchronous meetings could allow parents, grandparents, and outside professionals to listen in, review student creations, and provide feedback. In these cases, teachers must be sure to frame the discussions by setting norms and insisting that feedback begin by identifying bright spots.

Takeaways for Tomorrow

How might one measure the impacts and outcomes of focusing on the priorities of community building, student interests, and sharing work?

In addition to the crucial data point of student participation rate, teachers can obtain, via student surveys, a sense of the extent to which the students themselves felt part of a community, and that their interests and curiosities were honored.

Including open-ended questions such as “What’s a major takeaway for you?” would help teachers isolate what mattered most to students, thereby helping to deepen an understanding of the students as individuals and inform practice going forward, whether online or in person.

Teachers can track who saw, celebrated, or provided feedback on student work, and they can also gauge the impact an audience had on the quality of the work produced. Teachers can collect exemplars and identify spaces, digital or otherwise, to display them. In this way, flexible learning assessment veers from accountability toward curation, a move that may turn out to be important.

The books about teaching and learning through the coronavirus pandemic have yet to be written, but hopefully they will be filled with examples of inspiring student creations and anecdotes and stories from students and teachers about impactful and meaningful learning experiences.

If the books do include those things, there may be a better chance, on the other side of all this, of spending more of our time on priorities that matter and less of our time on ones that don’t.

____________________________________________________

*It should be noted that schools, as community hubs, are well positioned to help provide nutrition, internet connectivity and computing hardware, and formal and informal opportunities for students and teachers to process their experiences and emotional responses related to the unfolding global challenge. Many are doing exactly that. In addition, most schools are attempting to provide some sort of flexible learning, and that’s what the balance of this article addresses. I do recognize that distinguishing between school-as-community-hub and school-as-learning-delivery-institution is somewhat problematic, but remain hopeful that the ideas shared support teachers working in challenging circumstances.