Virtual school

 "To ensure that kids keep progressing on both the academic and social-emotional fronts, it’s critical that educators provide live teacher-led video conference sessions. These need to optimize both academic coverage and social interaction. A baseline would be two or three 30-to-45 minute sessions in each of the core academic subjects each week. These should not be broadcast lectures, which are not particularly engaging even in person, much less over Zoom. These sessions need to drive conversations between students and teachers and among the students themselves. Teachers should do cold calling to ensure students are on their toes and to pull them out of their screens. Teachers need to constantly ask students to work on questions together and share their thinking. Ideally, virtual breakout sessions will allow students to debate and help each other.

Let me give a concrete example of what I’ve seen many teachers do effectively along these lines during this past spring. Imagine a sixth-grade math Zoom session in which the teacher provides a challenging problem that can be solved in more than one way. The teacher spends two to three minutes presenting the problem and then asks students to spend the next 10 minutes trying to solve it. After 10 minutes, the teacher asks students to submit their answers over the videoconference chat or polling function. Based on the responses, the teacher then sorts the 30 students into five student virtual breakout groups of six each for 10 minutes. Each group will be asked to reconcile answers and methods of solving the problem. This will allow the students to socially interact with one another and allows for strong peer learning. Finally, the 30 students will be brought back together to report out what each breakout group learned.

I have also seen teachers use high-quality asynchronous online tools to ensure students get sufficient practice and content coverage that can’t all happen over Zoom sessions. With these online resources, students receive practice at their own time and pace, ideally for 30 to 45 minutes per day per subject (with priority given to math, reading and writing). The teacher gets real-time reports on who is engaged and progressing and who needs help. Through personalized practice, each student can work on the skills that are most appropriate for them with a focus on the gaps that they may need to fill. Ideally, parents should also have access to the data to ensure their students are on track.

I’ve noticed that some teachers are replicating their lectures in YouTube video form, and this has been incredibly time consuming and depleting for them. But doing this isn’t necessary. After all, video lessons on almost every topic already exist on the internet. Teachers’ time is valuable and should often be used instead for maintaining interaction and connection with students. Teachers should be given the liberty to focus on how to create more interactive touchpoints with students, more than trying to recreate online resources similar to those that already exist. This isn’t just healthier for the students; teachers will also get more energy from interacting with their students than they do from spending time in a home recording studio making Khan Academy-style videos.

Finally, distance learning has made it much more difficult to ensure that students are doing their own work. To avoid a situation where students either get credit for knowledge they don’t have or vice versa, educators need simple mechanics to authenticate student work. For example, teachers could ask students to submit recordings of themselves thinking out loud while taking an exam."

Of course, the most important job of an educator is to instill in students the desire to find and memorize their mistakes and to teach them to avoid those mistakes in the future.