Leveraging Cultural Forces While Learning from a Distance

The sudden change of venue for teaching this spring left me very little time to write. So now that I have a few minutes to sit down and reflect, I have the time to think about the opportunities that the new teaching environment provided this spring. I could talk about the ways that it made teaching more challenging, but I think that for the sake of making changes for the better in the fall, I am going to focus on the positive outcomes.

I have been thinking a lot about the 8 Cultural Forces that impact the way we shape our classroom culture. Initially, when we went to Emergency Remote Learning (I feel it is important to label what we did this spring as what it truly was - not Distance Learning, not online teaching - as there was a suddenness to our departure to this form of teaching that was not planned in advance), it didn't seem to me that we could translate the way we were in real space with each other to an online space. I quickly realized that there were ways to create the same culture, we just had to think about it differently. Today I am just going to focus on three.

The force that first came to mind was TIME. We were now thinking about time in a very different way. Schedules packed tight with activities before, during, and after school were gone and students now had plenty of time to devote to things that mattered to them. When at school, my co-teacher and I lamented the loss of choice time/free play - our daily schedule kept getting filled with so many other "necessities" that we struggled to even get them outside as much as we would have liked. As soon as we were at a distance, we started giving the students possible choices to do - every day we suggested something mindful, an outdoor adventure, and creative shenanigans. When we saw them online, students showed us their box forts and models created on Tinkercad. They talked about reading challenges with their parents - some third graders can read Harry Potter books faster than their dads! They told us about the gardens they were planting and lego creations they were building. Some had basketball contests with their siblings and many drew chalk art on their sidewalks. It was so exciting to see how given the time, students could pursue the things they were interested in. The other exciting thing about time was that students could take the time that they needed to think and respond to school tasks. Peer pressure and comparison was non-existent and we saw some students thriving in this context. How are we going to use time in the upcoming year? How can we use what we learned this spring to allow students the opportunities for more free explorations? What can we give up in our schedule to create the time that we need?

OPPORTUNITIES were interesting. We used Seesaw as a platform for students to send us their work, and this was a great way for students to be able to choose how to respond. Some chose to type, some chose to draw with their finger, some chose to use the microphone and record their thinking. This was also true as we commented on their work - students could chose how to continue the conversation. We also found that we seemed to have more opportunities to sit with children 1:1, especially those that needed more guidance. Meeting online was in some ways a more intimate space to have a private conversation about lots of things - school, feelings, pets, toys. There were definitely missed opportunities online, but we had lots of new kinds of opportunities open up. I am wondering for the fall about creating more partner opportunities for students to work with each other even in a possible online space. We are also moving to a new LMS, and I am also wondering what opportunities this new space will provide for learning.

I found that the online space was fantastic for MODELING. We had to make multiple videos on 

what we were asking students to engage in since we weren't going to have them online for 8 hours a day. We found that videos allowed students to go back and review our thinking. We also found that when students made videos or respond in other ways, they were using language and techniques that we used to complete their work. In daily check-ins with the students, we were able to continue aspects of our class culture through jokes and games, sharing the idea that the classroom culture could live on outside of school, because we all were engaging in it with each other.   

The questions all of this leaves me to ponder this summer are - How can we keep the positives we have learned about during this Emergency Remote Learning when we return to school in person? How can we show what we value through how we schedule students' days as an institution? What have we learned that children really need in school at a young age that is both developmentally appropriate, rigorous, and full of joy? How do we leverage the cultural forces while learning from a distance with a new group of students?