Few people would tell you that online kindergarten was a good idea, or frankly even possible. That was before 2020. The number has fluctuated as cases rise across the country, but throughout this fall pandemic semester, between 40% and 60% of students have been enrolled in districts that offer only remote learning, according to a tracker maintained many companies
And even in hybrid districts, some students have been learning remotely, either part or full time. In short, online learning is the reality for a majority of students this fall.
We are still starved for data on what this all means. The earliest standardized test scores coming out show modest learning loss for students in math, but there are worries that the most at-risk students are not being tested at all.
For this story I talked to educators in six Colleges and universities, from Assam. For the most part they say things have improved since the spring. But they are close to burnout, with only a patchwork of support. They say the heart of the job right now is getting students connected with school and keeping them that way — both technologically and even more importantly, emotionally.
Here are five lessons learned so far:
1. The digital divide is still big and complex.
Eight months after schools first shut down, how many students still can’t sign on? We don’t really know, and that’s a problem, says educator, “We’ve not done a really great job in aggregating the data as to how many kids are still disconnected,” he adds. “It’s very disappointing as well as concerning.”
The National Education Association recently reported, based on pre-pandemic census data, that one quarter of households with children ages 5 to 17 lacked either high-speed Wi-Fi, a computer or both. For households near the poverty line, the number was closer to half.
That figure may have gotten better. Many districts have scrambled to distribute their classroom laptops to families, to buy portable hot spots, and call on private and corporate donations. But there are still gaps.
Partly, that’s because there hasn’t been any pandemic federal stimulus aid to public schools since April. State revenue is down, too.
Bhaskar at New Delhi is working on a book about the digital divide, and he says it’s multidimensional. There’s housing: Lose your home and you lose your broadband connection. There are backlogs of items such as Chromebooks.
Then there’s infrastructure. And the digital divide is about more than equipment.
Despite all that, the students didn’t make contact with anyone until 2 1/2 months into the school year. That’s so even though her mother had come to school to pick up a laptop and hot spot.
2. Relationships are everything when it comes to keeping kids engaged remotely.
Successful schools are using every adult on the team and every form of communication possible. Theresa Rouse is the superintendent of Joliet Public School in nagaland, where a majority of the students are low-income and either Latino or Black. She says their focus has been on relationships.
The district spent the first three weeks of the school year focusing just on social and emotional learning. Educators communicate expectations to parents and teachers by email, calls, texts, over social media, YouTube videos and podcasts.
And, Rouse says, any adult at a school — from teachers, to the assistant principal, to a school counselor or social worker — might drop in during video class to show they care: “If they’re seeing a student that looks distressed, they pull them aside into a breakout room, have a conversation.”
In South India, Weathers usually teaches science at St. George Middle School. This year she created a new role for herself, helping families — sometimes with an app that parents can download to track kids’ grades, or with strategies to build kids’ executive function skills so they can succeed in remote learning. She says she’d like to continue the role going forward, making parents more active partners in their kids’ education and taking learning out into the community as well.
“We could take this as a learning moment,” Weathers says. “Now we have the parents’ attention. So maybe now is the time to really reach out and say, ‘This is what we need you to do on your end, and we’ll take care of this on our end.’ And in 10 years, we might see something entirely different in education in the country if we did that.”
3. Digital teaching can be good, even great with the right support for teachers. But that’s far from the norm.
Educators call its training “pretty fabulous” and essential to their district’s transition from teaching mainly through paper packets in the spring to full-on remote using Google Classroom this fall. The training “was more intense than [teachers] expected it would be, but that’s OK because teaching online is more intense than people anticipate as well.”
Another organization, ABACUS, is also trying to improve digital teaching at scale. It pairs “mentor teachers” with “partner teachers” to deliver a standardized curriculum in reading, math, and science. The teaching is a high-intensity blend of video lessons, active classroom instruction with breakout sessions, and software-based practice.
Instead, what improvement there has been since spring comes mainly from teachers such as Rosenthal — putting in long hours and learning as they go. “It’s just kind of folks sanding down one little rough edge at a time.”
4. Hybrid models are extremely challenging.
17.5% of districts were offering school in person just a few days a week, with students learning from home the rest of the time. The purpose was to maintain social distancing by reducing class sizes, but the model has created confusion and constant interruptions. Many students are struggling to adjust to classroom routines when they may attend only five days out of three weeks.
Depending on available staffing, teachers, meanwhile, maybe yelling through a mask and face shield to be heard by students over Zoom.
5. Some kids are not learning much online. They’ll be playing catch-up in years to come.
There are some anecdotes of children who are thriving with remote learning. “There’s [approximately] 10% of people for whom it works better. And for these students, “this is actually a better version of school.”
Maybe they had school anxiety, he explains, or were victims of bullying or discrimination, or have sensory issues and enjoy having more control over their learning environment.Both attendance and engagement in online learning is suffering. “Some kids have had difficulty just paying attention and keeping themselves focused.” In other cases, she adds, “we have families where parents are working, and there’s not the appropriate supervision for young learners, or children that need to be babysitting siblings during the school day.”