Virtual Teaching: Six weeks and counting
Reyna at altSXSWEdu
Setting up a virtual teaching system: tips from a six-week veteran at an international school in China, and why good virtual teaching will help us focus on what really matters in education—online and in the real world
by Eve Becker and Reyna Lazarou
Reyna Lazarou is an American tech integrator and innovation coach at a K-12 international school in Guangzhou, China. She was on her honeymoon in the Philippines during a school vacation when she got the email from her school’s director: Because of COVID 19, her school would be closed for two weeks following the break. Teachers and staff, who were spread out all over the globe during vacation, immediately set to work launching a plan for online learning. They didn’t know that the two weeks would extend indefinitely, becoming, in Reyna’s words, “a long term online learning experiment.” They have been teaching virtually for six weeks, now, without a clear finish line in sight. Reyna’s role at the intersection of digital and face-to-face learning puts her at the heart of this experiment.
Reyna flew home to the U.S. at the encouragement of her administrators, and has been working out of various relatives’ homes since her school shut down. We met in Austin, at altSXSWEdu, a DIY education conference for a small group, who were there for the cancelled and vastly larger SXSWEdu. I am a secondary school English teacher from New York. I attended Reyna’s session, in which she shared lessons learned from her school’s month-and-a-half online. “What would I do if I had it to do over again?” she considered. What’s working? What’s not? “What conversations would I have started? What questions would I have asked? What teams would I have put together to respond and be more prepared than we were?”
As I listened to Reyna’s thoughtful presentation, I was struck by how her school’s experiment amplifies the most critical issues in education today. Equity, teacher agency, student voice, parent involvement, social-emotional wellbeing, accountability and authentic assessment all need to be discussed and examined, by any school or district trying to make their online learning program work. Reyna’s insights and advice are invaluable for us in the U.S., as we start this experiment six weeks behind her. Even more importantly, there are implications that go far beyond the current crisis.
Reyna and I sat down to discuss her experiences over the past six weeks, and her recommendations. The larger issues in education were manifest throughout our conversation. Here, I attempt a short recap.
Four pillars
Reyna suggests building four pillars to support an online learning program: infrastructure and logistics; teaching and learning; well-being and social emotional considerations; and documentation and evaluation.
Infrastructure and logistics
Who has what?
It’s no surprise that the first thing schools need to do is to reach out to parents and students to gauge what kind of technology they have available. This, of course, brings equity issues to the forefront instantly. Online learning doesn’t work without good hardware and connectivity. And for younger students, an adult who is able to stay home. It doesn’t work if you have more important concerns, like lost family wages, or you’re dependent on school breakfast or lunch. There’s a reason independent schools in New York were shuttered well before the public schools.
Reyna works in an affluent school community, though the timing of her school closure meant that lots of people were away from home, and had varying degrees of access. In addition, as a Chinese school, many tools and platforms available in the U.S. are off limits to them. “How prepared are you from a systems level?” Reyna asks. “Have you explored IT platforms? How embedded is the learning management system in your school? How skilled are your teachers and students? Is the community comfortable using these tools?”
Also consider server capacity and bandwidth. Take a hard look at your school’s acceptable use policy for technology, and see if it needs to be modified for a fully online learning environment. Revisit it with students and families. Consider child safety issues.
Lines of communication are essential. What will happen by email? By phone? By text? How will your school’s website function? What information do people have to seek out? What will be pushed to them? Who has questions? Who needs help? Reyna has had great success with virtual parent coffees, for example, as her school has ramped up their online learning.
A training system is crucial. “Online learning is new territory, especially for younger children. Who are the tech savvy teachers who are stepping up and can help other teachers? Are you offering webinars? Can you outsource this from existing platforms?” Here, too, budget implications are clear, and equity issues are underlined. “Online learning requires training. Full stop.”
Teaching and learning
“Regardless of this situation, pedagogy has to be at the heart of what we do,” says Reyna. “There is no scenario where technology is going to come in and save everything. There are amazing tools, but you’re not going to replace good practice and good pedagogy.”
The educators at Reyna’s school are making sure that this is not about just putting students in front of a screen. “This is about Intentional learning. We are we using tech to connect students. We want to get away from the consumption of media or the rote online learning we sometimes see with educational websites that have a really high subscription fee and don’t meet the needs of students. I don’t believe in digital babysitting. I am an advocate for inquiry and agency, for valuing teaching and learning and best practice,” says Reyna.
Many of us have been experimenting with blended learning, recently. I’ve been creating blended learning experiences in my middle school English classrooms for the past four or five years. This is the moment for our efforts to shine. “Give students a chance to step away from their screens,” says Reyna, “engage in meaningful offline learning activities, and reconnect when it’s time to share. We’re trying to honor that paper and pencil.”
I took a wander through some of the twitter feeds of educators doing inspirational work—at Reyna’s school and across the globe, students sharing books they’d made, conducting science experiments together, learning dances, making connections to other students around the world in a similar situation.
These projects are teacher-created, implemented through teacher-made videos and materials and using new technologies to bring out student creativity and voice. This is where the real work of education is happening—in the classroom, virtual or real, driven by teachers and students, and this is where real education reform begins.
In an era when money flows not to schools and educators, but to educational corporations creating tests, packaged curricula, graphics to hang up on classroom walls, one-size fits all goals, grading rubrics and more forms than a federal courthouse, our learning is being driven top-down and from the outside in. Teacher agency and expertise is key to active, effective learning tailored for a particular group of students.
“This could function as a reclaiming of our profession,” says Reyna. “We are the experts. It’s about time to give credit where credit is due, and we know what best practice is, we work daily on the front lines, no one knows better than we do what’s working and what’s not, and what the future could and should look like.”
Well-being and the social-emotional realm
Looking back, perhaps the biggest misstep, Reyna feels, was to not prioritize the social-emotional implications of going virtual. Conversations about social emotional learning “are often held superficially or in pockets of school,” notes Reyna. “We now have students who haven’t left their apartments in two months.” The social isolation is huge, younger children whose social life is largely at school, older students who aren’t going to put on the play they’ve been working on all year, or finish their championship model U.N. season. And more essentially, there are those whose lives have been impacted by fear, illness, financial stress or displacement.
So, too, we need to prioritize the well-being of teachers and parents. “We’re thinking of our students,” says Reyna, “but the teachers and the parents have been so hugely impacted. This is something to get out in front of if you can, looking after and supporting all members of our community.” Rely on counselors and learning support staff. “Maybe you have teachers who are very in tune with mindfulness.” Reyna’s school is organizing virtual meet-ups and yoga classes. “Someone ran the equivalent of a marathon around his dining room table,” says Reyna.
“It’s crucial to find balance and promote the offline,” says Reyna. “Honor your sleep. Honor your health. Tech-free initiatives, especially when they’re coming from leadership are so important.” Reyna’s school has instituted a Mindfulness Monday, where people post pictures that capture how they’re taking care of themselves. “We’re looking for ways to model the unplugging.” This is advice we would do well to attend to, even beyond our current crisis.
Documentation and evaluation
Finally, “What is the impact of this large-scale human experiment?” Reyna asks. How will we know how and why we’ve been successful, and how and why we have not? What does assessing and documenting this look like, for a school or for the larger educational community? What does it mean to be accountable for our teaching and our students’ learning right now? A week or so before the New York City schools were closed, we had parent-teacher conferences online. Some states have already suspended standardized testing requirements for the school year. What will schools do about report cards? Accreditation? Standards and benchmarks?
The discussion about authentic assessment has been ongoing, in recent years--the ways that narrative feedback and portfolios of student work value real learning, the need to reassess our emphasis on numbers and letters and scores to paint a more nuanced and accurate picture of a student. Evidence collection in the digital sphere offers new opportunities and new hurdles.
As of March 16, 516,615,598 students worldwide have been affected by school closures. [UNESCO website] That’s nearly twice the entire population of the United States. “That’s a very large data sample for those who are interested in research,” notes Reyna.
“I think this will give rise to a lot of new thinking,” she offers. New thinking both on and offline, we agreed.
I want to close with my vacillating feelings, at this early juncture, about virtual schooling. I teach because I fully believe in the power of education to build community, grow thoughtful, active citizens, and promote solutions to the profound issues of our time. I love my work. But if we close our schools down entirely during these difficult months—offline and on—for the greater good, or because online options aren’t working for everyone, perhaps it will be alright. Students will learn—as will we—from Italians singing on their balconies. From a parent helping an elderly neighbor. From the ways, both positive and negative, that we respond to this crisis. Some of the learning will be heartbreaking. Some of it will be a light coming through a crack.
And then again, maybe the connections we are facilitating, and the tiny semblance of normalcy are our contributions during this time. Maybe they're consequential.
Reyna’s links for active virtual learning:
Curated, Crowdsourced Materials via Wakelet (by Justin Ouellette)
The Motherload of a Blog Post (by Kathleen Morris)
Resources from International School Services (ISS)
Collaborative Google Doc from 100’s of Educators (by Levi Allison)
By Educators, For Educators- Resources (by Eduro Learning)
If I had it to do over again/What we wish we knew (Shared by Dana Watts)
by Eve Becker and Reyna Lazarou
Reyna Lazarou is an American tech integrator and innovation coach at a K-12 international school in Guangzhou, China. She was on her honeymoon in the Philippines during a school vacation when she got the email from her school’s director: Because of COVID 19, her school would be closed for two weeks following the break. Teachers and staff, who were spread out all over the globe during vacation, immediately set to work launching a plan for online learning. They didn’t know that the two weeks would extend indefinitely, becoming, in Reyna’s words, “a long term online learning experiment.” They have been teaching virtually for six weeks, now, without a clear finish line in sight. Reyna’s role at the intersection of digital and face-to-face learning puts her at the heart of this experiment.
Reyna flew home to the U.S. at the encouragement of her administrators, and has been working out of various relatives’ homes since her school shut down. We met in Austin, at altSXSWEdu, a DIY education conference for a small group, who were there for the cancelled and vastly larger SXSWEdu. I am a secondary school English teacher from New York. I attended Reyna’s session, in which she shared lessons learned from her school’s month-and-a-half online. “What would I do if I had it to do over again?” she considered. What’s working? What’s not? “What conversations would I have started? What questions would I have asked? What teams would I have put together to respond and be more prepared than we were?”
As I listened to Reyna’s thoughtful presentation, I was struck by how her school’s experiment amplifies the most critical issues in education today. Equity, teacher agency, student voice, parent involvement, social-emotional wellbeing, accountability and authentic assessment all need to be discussed and examined, by any school or district trying to make their online learning program work. Reyna’s insights and advice are invaluable for us in the U.S., as we start this experiment six weeks behind her. Even more importantly, there are implications that go far beyond the current crisis.
Reyna and I sat down to discuss her experiences over the past six weeks, and her recommendations. The larger issues in education were manifest throughout our conversation. Here, I attempt a short recap.
Four pillars
Reyna suggests building four pillars to support an online learning program: infrastructure and logistics; teaching and learning; well-being and social emotional considerations; and documentation and evaluation.
Infrastructure and logistics
Who has what?
It’s no surprise that the first thing schools need to do is to reach out to parents and students to gauge what kind of technology they have available. This, of course, brings equity issues to the forefront instantly. Online learning doesn’t work without good hardware and connectivity. And for younger students, an adult who is able to stay home. It doesn’t work if you have more important concerns, like lost family wages, or you’re dependent on school breakfast or lunch. There’s a reason independent schools in New York were shuttered well before the public schools.
Reyna works in an affluent school community, though the timing of her school closure meant that lots of people were away from home, and had varying degrees of access. In addition, as a Chinese school, many tools and platforms available in the U.S. are off limits to them. “How prepared are you from a systems level?” Reyna asks. “Have you explored IT platforms? How embedded is the learning management system in your school? How skilled are your teachers and students? Is the community comfortable using these tools?”
Also consider server capacity and bandwidth. Take a hard look at your school’s acceptable use policy for technology, and see if it needs to be modified for a fully online learning environment. Revisit it with students and families. Consider child safety issues.
Lines of communication are essential. What will happen by email? By phone? By text? How will your school’s website function? What information do people have to seek out? What will be pushed to them? Who has questions? Who needs help? Reyna has had great success with virtual parent coffees, for example, as her school has ramped up their online learning.
A training system is crucial. “Online learning is new territory, especially for younger children. Who are the tech savvy teachers who are stepping up and can help other teachers? Are you offering webinars? Can you outsource this from existing platforms?” Here, too, budget implications are clear, and equity issues are underlined. “Online learning requires training. Full stop.”
Teaching and learning
“Regardless of this situation, pedagogy has to be at the heart of what we do,” says Reyna. “There is no scenario where technology is going to come in and save everything. There are amazing tools, but you’re not going to replace good practice and good pedagogy.”
The educators at Reyna’s school are making sure that this is not about just putting students in front of a screen. “This is about Intentional learning. We are we using tech to connect students. We want to get away from the consumption of media or the rote online learning we sometimes see with educational websites that have a really high subscription fee and don’t meet the needs of students. I don’t believe in digital babysitting. I am an advocate for inquiry and agency, for valuing teaching and learning and best practice,” says Reyna.
Many of us have been experimenting with blended learning, recently. I’ve been creating blended learning experiences in my middle school English classrooms for the past four or five years. This is the moment for our efforts to shine. “Give students a chance to step away from their screens,” says Reyna, “engage in meaningful offline learning activities, and reconnect when it’s time to share. We’re trying to honor that paper and pencil.”
I took a wander through some of the twitter feeds of educators doing inspirational work—at Reyna’s school and across the globe, students sharing books they’d made, conducting science experiments together, learning dances, making connections to other students around the world in a similar situation.
These projects are teacher-created, implemented through teacher-made videos and materials and using new technologies to bring out student creativity and voice. This is where the real work of education is happening—in the classroom, virtual or real, driven by teachers and students, and this is where real education reform begins.
In an era when money flows not to schools and educators, but to educational corporations creating tests, packaged curricula, graphics to hang up on classroom walls, one-size fits all goals, grading rubrics and more forms than a federal courthouse, our learning is being driven top-down and from the outside in. Teacher agency and expertise is key to active, effective learning tailored for a particular group of students.
“This could function as a reclaiming of our profession,” says Reyna. “We are the experts. It’s about time to give credit where credit is due, and we know what best practice is, we work daily on the front lines, no one knows better than we do what’s working and what’s not, and what the future could and should look like.”
Well-being and the social-emotional realm
Looking back, perhaps the biggest misstep, Reyna feels, was to not prioritize the social-emotional implications of going virtual. Conversations about social emotional learning “are often held superficially or in pockets of school,” notes Reyna. “We now have students who haven’t left their apartments in two months.” The social isolation is huge, younger children whose social life is largely at school, older students who aren’t going to put on the play they’ve been working on all year, or finish their championship model U.N. season. And more essentially, there are those whose lives have been impacted by fear, illness, financial stress or displacement.
So, too, we need to prioritize the well-being of teachers and parents. “We’re thinking of our students,” says Reyna, “but the teachers and the parents have been so hugely impacted. This is something to get out in front of if you can, looking after and supporting all members of our community.” Rely on counselors and learning support staff. “Maybe you have teachers who are very in tune with mindfulness.” Reyna’s school is organizing virtual meet-ups and yoga classes. “Someone ran the equivalent of a marathon around his dining room table,” says Reyna.
“It’s crucial to find balance and promote the offline,” says Reyna. “Honor your sleep. Honor your health. Tech-free initiatives, especially when they’re coming from leadership are so important.” Reyna’s school has instituted a Mindfulness Monday, where people post pictures that capture how they’re taking care of themselves. “We’re looking for ways to model the unplugging.” This is advice we would do well to attend to, even beyond our current crisis.
Documentation and evaluation
Finally, “What is the impact of this large-scale human experiment?” Reyna asks. How will we know how and why we’ve been successful, and how and why we have not? What does assessing and documenting this look like, for a school or for the larger educational community? What does it mean to be accountable for our teaching and our students’ learning right now? A week or so before the New York City schools were closed, we had parent-teacher conferences online. Some states have already suspended standardized testing requirements for the school year. What will schools do about report cards? Accreditation? Standards and benchmarks?
The discussion about authentic assessment has been ongoing, in recent years--the ways that narrative feedback and portfolios of student work value real learning, the need to reassess our emphasis on numbers and letters and scores to paint a more nuanced and accurate picture of a student. Evidence collection in the digital sphere offers new opportunities and new hurdles.
As of March 16, 516,615,598 students worldwide have been affected by school closures. [UNESCO website] That’s nearly twice the entire population of the United States. “That’s a very large data sample for those who are interested in research,” notes Reyna.
“I think this will give rise to a lot of new thinking,” she offers. New thinking both on and offline, we agreed.
I want to close with my vacillating feelings, at this early juncture, about virtual schooling. I teach because I fully believe in the power of education to build community, grow thoughtful, active citizens, and promote solutions to the profound issues of our time. I love my work. But if we close our schools down entirely during these difficult months—offline and on—for the greater good, or because online options aren’t working for everyone, perhaps it will be alright. Students will learn—as will we—from Italians singing on their balconies. From a parent helping an elderly neighbor. From the ways, both positive and negative, that we respond to this crisis. Some of the learning will be heartbreaking. Some of it will be a light coming through a crack.
And then again, maybe the connections we are facilitating, and the tiny semblance of normalcy are our contributions during this time. Maybe they're consequential.
Reyna’s links for active virtual learning:
Curated, Crowdsourced Materials via Wakelet (by Justin Ouellette)
The Motherload of a Blog Post (by Kathleen Morris)
Resources from International School Services (ISS)
Collaborative Google Doc from 100’s of Educators (by Levi Allison)
By Educators, For Educators- Resources (by Eduro Learning)
If I had it to do over again/What we wish we knew (Shared by Dana Watts)
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