This situation has presented an incredible opportunity to flip the education paradigm around and we are missing it. In my opinion, there are two different opportunities that should be explored:
1. Using the "best" teachers from the school district to provide lectures for every student taking that course while the other teachers provide TA-esque support to the students in their "section." If a student is struggling with homework or to understand the lecture, they can go into a video breakout room and get 1:1 support without interrupting others.
2. Education has been focused on in-person lectures with home "work" for decades. Given the current situation, it seems to make the most sense to provide offline/prerecorded lectures and to use the class time to support the students with direct help for their work. Students can listen to a lecture without a live teacher, they cannot ask questions about their work without one.
Are their holes in both of these? Sure. Are they as bad as just moving the existing paradigm online? I don't think so.
I taught master's courses in a mathematical topic for five years, running in-person and online courses in parallel. Online learners in my course were highly motivated, paying a sh&*-ton of money for a degree that could vault them into a higher-paying job. They all had a bachelors degree in a STEM subject. Online learners still performed measurably worse in the course than in-person learners.
We have the "best" teachers already providing materials: they're in books. You can go read Kolmogorov's probability books, you can read the Feynman lectures on physics. You can even listen to the Great Courses and learn whatever the bleep you want there. And do you? Do even adults have, as a group, the discipline, attention, and stamina to self-teach like this? No.
I call it self-teaching for a reason. When I taught, I looked into students' eyes and on their papers. I walked around the room. I had them present on the board. I prodded them to discuss ideas and argue with each other. I made mistakes writing proofs or calculations on the board and made students catch them, even -- yes, this is a skill math profs practice, because it's inevitable and recovering from the fall with grace is a learned skill! Every class in person was an interactive intellectual wrestling match. Video is just not the same. Interrupting others with your questions and discussion is vital to learning.
I'm so glad I'm no longer in the classroom, frankly. Sigh.
Younger students (K-12) need interaction with other students and their teachers, not lectures. I teach some of the most motivated and diligent students you could ask for, but after 3 weeks of online learning they were burnt out.
To further compound the issue, in many places students don't have reliable internet access or a decent computer.
I'm incredibly skeptical that successful people don't just marginalize those who struggle in school when suggesting what's best. Their brains can't help but perceive the issue based on their own experience.
From my personal experience, I do great when I can sit in a classroom and absorb what's being presented. You put the lecturer behind a screen, live or pre-recorded, and I lose most of my ability to stay on track.
I worked for 5 years as an "assistant language teacher" (ALT) in Japan. The idea is that you have the normal teacher teaching the class and an ALT who assists. At its worst you end up with the teacher lecturing and the ALT reading things out of the textbook. However at its best you have this awesome tag-team where one person is guiding the class and the other is spotting confused faces and fixing problems before they get big.
The main problem with this approach is that teachers are generally not used to working cooperatively. They have their "way" and they don't like to deviate from that "way". As odd as it sounds teachers also don't like being observed in the classroom. Teaching is incredibly difficult (by far the most difficult job I've ever attempted to do). The constraints you usually have to work with also mean that failure in at least some forms is inevitable (or to put it another way -- failure is the norm and you take your successes where you can get them). Because of this teachers are often incredibly defensive about how they approach tasks and decisions that they make. As much as I hate it, it is completely usual in my experience that teachers obfuscate what's going on in the classroom. Having other teachers present is really challenging for most teachers that I've encountered.
I honestly believe that team teaching is the way to go, but there are a lot of hurdles that you need to deal with before you can get there. The technology is not really the stumbling block. It's much more the social dynamic and the need for realistic and sensitive teacher evaluation methods. With some students you can literally just lock them in a room and they will learn the material. With other students, it doesn't matter how good the teacher is, they will just refuse to learn (for a huge variety of reasons -- medical, physical, psychological, etc... things that no teacher is realistically able to cope with). Quite a few teachers have realised that they can game the system by simply filtering the students by how easy they are to teach. And because teaching is a very stable job with a reasonable income, you are always going to get a fair number of people who are more interested in gaming the system than teaching stuff. And as is usual in large organisations, people who are good at gaming the system and have no interest in the technical side of the job tend to rise to the top of the decision making ranks. It's quite a difficult problem to solve.
I taught in Boston for five years. Something that almost no one outside the profession seems to understand is that a teacher's number one function is to inspire students to work. For the vast majority of students, that requires physical proximity to their teacher.
If all it took was the best lecturers, we could have been doing perfect distance learning since 1982 via UPS and VHS.
FYI, the second suggestion you list is flipping the classroom and some teachers already do this. The first option is something that does happen in multi-teacher classrooms (in my experience teaching in Japan; unsure about the US).
As for holes - Without thinking too deeply, the main issues I see with breakout sessions and student support in an online environment are:
1. Not being able to see how students are working and struggling requires that students themselves be proactive in seeking help. However, not all schools push students to behave this way nor are all students capable of realizing when they are stuck or going too far down the wrong path.
2. Lower income students are automatically ruled out and/or have a far less optimal experience. The longer remote learning runs with this type of divide, the larger the education gap becomes.
I agree. A huge chance is being missed. However, this opportunity has been missed for a long time already. The pandemic is just making this painfully obvious now.
Schools is about keeping kids and adolescents out of trouble, and free up parents to work. Ideally they also help with development and socialization, and as a bonus - might teach something.
This is very different from colleges - that generally actually focus on teaching stuff (which means students do all the important work themselves).
All the important roles of primary school are hard to accommodate via remote setup.
Hard to take advantage of opportunities when you are treading water. Teachers have met with incredibly frustrating wall after wall, trying to apply tech, trying to adapt to new conditions in which parents are giving their kids unlimited vacation, yet they are expected to keep a spreadsheet of contacts with children... There's a lot of uphill here right up front.
The main upside is that when people can finally take a breather at the end of this, I'm sure that at _that_ point more people can realistically regroup and be creative moving forward.
---"Using the "best" teachers from the school district to provide lectures for every student taking that course"
While theoretically this sounds good, it doesn't work in practice. Kids, espcially young ones (I have a 2nd grader), need that personal interaction with their teacher. Schools are already overwhelmed with the teacher to student ratio. Imporsonalizing this interaction will only worsen an already bad situation.
This doesn't work for a young child on their own (think grade school) but it might (intriguing model that I haven't seen yet) work with smaller groups of kids learning together - say, all the first graders on your block at somebody's house with limited exposure to others.
That said, all of this still requires a fully engaged adult in the room to monitor interactions and help things stay on track and answer questions. My wife plans a full curriculum for all our kids together each day with breakout sessions for grade-appropriate subjects. This has been basically interrupted by the current official video curriculum of our school system - and our system is doing better than most on this subject. I have the luxury of an adult available to teach most of the day. Many do not. But I still want to yank my kids out of official "school" and get homeschooling certified until this ends. It burns you out. I'd welcome the schools closing officially now, and offering optional assignments to pass the time for parents that want to use them but that's not really equitable, it just works best for me.
A video conference is great but it can't help keep a virtual classroom engaged and flow with the kids' questions as well as an in-person room. There just isn't enough bandwidth.
Experience: currently three gradeschool and younger in my house.
With all respect, I used to work in EdTech and had thoughts about Ed exactly like this- before I had 3 kids and got involved in the local public school, sat on the PTA, raised funds, won elected office on the school board and dealt with issues at the policy level.
There is some merit to pursuing these ideas at the paradigm level for various kinds of post-secondary level education, and of course it is already happening- though still poorly.
Before that level- basically before the age of 25- about 1% of what we call "education" consists of "teaching"- having a source of truth utter statements around the intellectual architecture of various "subjects" that we have constructed and partitioned over the long years of human civilization, with varying levels of inspiration and motivation.
That "paradigm" that ideas like these hope to transform- that really is at most only 1% of what education is for the under-25s.
What's the 99%? Mimic-ing, copying, replaying, performing, processing, engaging. School is an elaborate community improv performance, staffed at best with performers whose skills are measured in EQ, not IQ. I regularly witness school staff plan the model of their interactions with the kids down to the minute, down to the second- tho just the model. The actual performance is spontaneous. It is theater. Yes, there is a curriculum, and homework, and grades, and so forth. Those are all part of the act.
There are no "best" teachers. There are only an uncountable myriad of 1-1 relationships and engagements, each of which represents a full spectrum human interaction possibility (only a fraction of the potential of which of course is ever fulfilled). And though I love "work" and do a lot of it and have my kids do a lot of it- that also is just performative. The goal isn't to complete the assignments in an intellectual progression. No. It is in service of developing behavioral- awareness of self- and emotional- empathetic, sympathetic, awareness of others- tools to engage in the world.
Not to put too high a gloss on it, but in digital terms an orchestrated ChatRoulette is a closer approximation to what actually happens in an education context than the Yale lectures and homework helper.
And there is simply no substitute for the all too real, full spectrum chemistry that develops when people are in physical space together.
So changing the digital teaching paradigm is essentially meaningless. And "remote learning" is about the worst oxymoron.
The best thing we can do at a policy level is provide financial liquidity so that parents can afford to devote their full attention to their children, while
we are in this phase where that is required.
I've this "inverted classroom" approach work well, although it can have problems also; if the course isn't self-paced (which I think is much better) you have to make really sure that students aren't overloaded with video lectures, because it's easy to "fall behind." It can't be an excuse for instructors to cram more stuff into an already packed course.
Some other things I've seen and experienced that have seemed to work well and that I'd like to see more of:
- course staff who serve primarily as advisors and guides to provide and help students find, discover and use resources for self-directed learning and to help when students encounter difficulties
- schools that helped students buy cheap paperback books for recreational reading
- scaled out peer tutoring, where the school pays students who have taken a course to tutor students who are currently taking the course
- self-paced learning without harsh penalties for "falling behind" other students or an arbitrary course schedule
What do you do when a significant number of students can't view the video lecture or participate in video breakout rooms for 1:1 support because they lack access to the internet?
This isn't just an issue for those of limited financial means. There are areas where internet access is not available for any price or the cost for internet access to support regular viewing of video classroom content would run into the hundreds of dollars per month.
per your #1, my school district is doing that. One designated teacher [per grade, per subject] is recording lectures that are posted to a central repository. this content is assigned out, along with supplementary work, via Google Classroom at the class level. Each class teacher, then, schedules their own class video meetings to "check-in" and offer support for students who need it.
My experience thus far, having 3rd and 5th graders at home, is that remote math learning is a piece of cake and the quarantine experience has really illuminated for me how slowly public schools move. It has also clearly demonstrated that teacher language arts & writing requires 1) skills I don't have, and 2) direct interaction with a competent instructor.
Note, too, that not all teachers have adequate internet access at home to effectively teach remotely. My 5th grader's teacher is quite rural and has 5mbps down, 1mbps up internet service. She can barely participate in online meetings and cannot effectively upload any video content.
#2: 100% agree, but some classes lend themselves this more readily than others.
Doesn’t work particularly well with early primary school kids though. Interactivity is a big part of learning and that’s close to impossible remotely.
The flipped classroom concept itself is nothing new. My issue is with the “remote” part of that. There is value in kids working on an art project together or working in small groups to create a poster presentation, etc. The lecture-homework paradigm might be appropriate for high school, to for younger grades, there really aren’t lectures as much as interactive discussions and hands-on exploration.
I can't believe no one is talking about MOOCs and how MOOCs are part of our daily lives and yet they have been absolutely toothless in taking over the system.
I personally think MOOC-with-tech-advancements is the future of education. And I have a suspicion brick-and-mortar educational system has played a role in crippling its progress.
I can't read the story, but I'm living this. And I don't blame folks for finding it too tough.
It's crazy that so many commenters here seem to think that everyone is well equipped to be a teacher with zero training or experience. It's hard.
It's even more crazy that no one seems to realize that most parents are acting as teachers, while trying to maintain full time jobs.
This isn't just "teachers not adapting", or "we need VR". This is fundamental to the fact that most households need two working parents just to survive.
For many, they're trying to work, act as teacher, and dealing with disruptive younger children. One of our friends is insanely effective and focused at her job, handles every family stress thrown at her, but neared her wits' end recently trying to handle it all. Capable older child and needy middle child was one thing, but the very distracting youngest tipped it over the edge.
Just had the same discussion with my wife. We are a single income household. My wife, got a degree in early education, but never went into teaching. Our household is very fortunate to be in this position. While I work in my office she is able to help the kids. She spends a lot of time helping them. Even she mentioned how sad it was that lots of kids were not participating in their learning (she talks with the teachers). But I reminder her about how she went to school for early education and she has the time to devote to helping our kids succeed. She agreed. Not easy at all. Without her my kids would not be coping as well as they are. It would be difficult for me to assist as much as she does with my normal day job.
I've been home schooling my son for the past 3 years. The reason why it's "too hard" is because the traditional model of learning in public schools (in the US) translates very poorly to home schooling. Once you stop focusing on grooming for optimal test-taking, a whole world opens up.
Additionally, we don't do common core in our household, so my wife and I have no issues teaching my son math (we settled on Saxon math). I neither have the time nor energy to learn common core math in order to support my son.
My experience with common core has been pretty awesome FWIW. I didn’t see some of the stuff our daughter did in first and second grade till the end of high school and college. No more rote arithmetic applications, it presses for actual comprehension of the material from multiple angles. Challenging, but sometimes even fun for those not mathematically inclined.
I'm unsure of what everyone's concern with common core is. It was way easier to teach my kid's once I realized that it's just what I've always been doing in my head without anyone telling me to.
It's just about breaking apart problems into digestible pieces.
As the spouse of a high school math teacher, I've seen how difficult it is for the last month. Getting kids internet service, a computer or tablet to work with, the software they need, and then just getting them to login and read or do the work. It's a real challenge.
We tweaked my wife's setup and it works pretty well now, though she is dreading if they choose to do live online learning in the fall, as that will be something completely new to tackle. Currently she uses Google Classroom, Desmos, and Kahn Academy for the teaching side. She plans and distributes lessons in Google, uses Desmos for some interactive activities where Desmos scripting allows her to check work and give feedback, and Kahn Academy as some supplemental teaching to her notes. In addition she has certain hours everyday for certain classes and uses an iPad + Google Meet to show notes to her students and work problems they may have an issue with. So far that's been working.
Live teaching would be a little more difficult with this setup but it could work.
I'm a math/science teacher myself, and I've already decided the first thing I'm gonna do is buy a nice big whiteboard if we do online teaching this fall, to try to solve some of those issues. But I pray we don't have to do that, as just so much gets lost doing it at home versus in person.
Disclosure: I have worked with distance/remote learning as far back as 15 years and my wife homeschools our kids.
Schools (and pretty much everything else) were caught completely off-guard by the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns. Setting-up an online education infrastructure takes a lot of work and requires significant mental retooling. Teachers need to adapt as much or more than their students to the new paradigm. Zoom, Hangouts, Teams, or Jitsi are not replacement for in-person instruction.
Part of this is that in remote learning the curriculum materials and assessments need to lend themselves to greater self-guidance than those of brick-and-mortar books and other resources. This is not impossible, but also not easy to do on short notice. I am not surprised that schools are finding it simply too hard to put together packets, distribute them, and trying supplement with video conferencing when the materials are based on a different assumption.
I am optimistic that this will further the reach of remote learning, but I am doubtful that the stagnant style of traditional education will shift to fully embrace it. I foresee a lot more alternative educational institutions emerging as the traditional schools very slowly adapt.
I have a 7 and 11 year old (2nd and 5th grade). With very significant parental involvement it is possible to keep them somewhat engaged and learning, although it is very much sub-optimal.
They miss their classmates. They miss their teacher. They miss most of all the routine, getting to go to school, and all the fun things they got to do during the day. My 5th grader is very sad to be missing out on a graduation-like experience with a lot of end-of-year events that would typically happen for outgoing 5th graders before they leave for the middle school.
This isn't an "opportunity for a new normal". This isn't a situation which can or will last "indefinitely". It is assuredly unhealthy for kids this age (to say nothing of the rest of us) to be isolated from their friends and communicating only over Zoom calls.
My kids are hurting in a suburb with a big back yard, mountains of toys, a stay at home mom, and two dogs to play with. I can only imagine it must hurt the least privileged children hardest of all to have lost access to their school.
I don't expect there's much of any learning going on in general below the high school level. Particularly for households which don't have parents who are willing to dedicate several hours a day to basically run the lessons. I think people who can honestly claim that their under-13-year-old is distance learning without a parent assuming a basically full-time role of teacher, are few and far between.
I wonder how curriculum will adapt to incoming students in the fall. X graders who don't know approximately half of the X-1 grade material. Particularly for younger students where classes are less likely to be grouped by ability, anyone who did actually successfully learn anything from March-July is just going to have to sit through it being taught all over again to the majority of students who didn't.
+1. My next door neighbor is a 3rd grade teacher in a heavily hispanic & underprivileged elementary school. She was telling me today that she still has one student -- one of her best during normal times -- who hasn't been able to get online yet. No internet access at home, lives at home with his undocumented grandparents who immigrated from Central America when his parents were killed by a gang, no one in the house speaks English. School has been closed for >1mo now.
I was talking to my 5th grader's teach last weekend about the next year. She doesn't know, either, but is assuming they're just going to bake in an extra-long review period going into the year. Alternatively, at least in CA, they're contemplating starting the next school year in July rather than August, to provide more time for catch-up. To your point, though, what about the kids who were able to keep pace throughout -- are they going to be forced to repeat half a semester to maintain equity in the classroom? That would be terribly unfair.
Our school district never had a hope of implementing remote learning; they're lucky to keep their WiFi working. Our daughter is in 6th grade this year; all we've heard since the schools closed a statement that school wouldn't be re-opening this year and a date range when parents could come pick up bagged locker contents.
We're lucky in that we've homeschooled before (she went back to public school for the company of other kids), and we've worked out ways to encourage and help focus her natural curiosity already. I just gave her a Debian 10 system and said "holler if you get stuck"; so far she hasn't.
It took me a long time to see the value of school. All through elementary school and high school I didn't give a shit, did what I needed to do to do well, never really cared about things going on at school and didnt really have many friends or anything.
When I got to university it was different, I cared and tried and got involved with everything. It was a totally different experience. It made me regret the way i was in high school a bit and kinda made me wish I'd been more involved. It wasn't as pointless and ridiculous as I thought and there was no reason for me not to other than my unwillingness to.
If I'd actually experienced these things, I might have gotten more out of high school and not been so hostile towards it all for so long, when in the end education only benefitted me and there's a kind of education you can only get by taking part in things with people around you.
I know it's not the same, but I know there's lots of kids out there who didn't wait as long as me and know now, well before I did, what they get out of having other people around. As great as distance education can be, even if you've got your classmates there on video or something, it's still not the same as a group of students getting together and working on homework or studying, the ones that do I mean, and even for the ones that just get together, there's a lot of bonding and forming as people that happens that just can't really be replicated outside truly free interaction with other people. Even if you're all working on school work. It needs to be some kind of natural free setting. Something's missing otherwise. Again, it took me a long time to really get this.
There’s a lot of hope from school systems that they will just be back next year, but hopefully there’s at least some behind the scenes work on making remote learning work. I have a lot of admiration for teachers & students working on switching over right now, in the event of further disruptions next year, they’re going to be so much better prepared.
We're not in one of the harder-hit states but I have some insight into schools here and admin-tier folks are already phrasing it as "if we are back in the fall". They seem to be planning for the possibility of having to start the year with remote learning, or for a second shut-down if there's a rebound of the virus in the Fall or Winter after things open back up.
The school my children attend have been doing a great job with online learning. Teachers have been posting videos and worksheets on Google classroom, they have regular zoom meetings, and they have various online educational software the children can log into and learn things.
The problem is that my elementary school children (who are ADHD and on the autism spectrum) have a hard time sitting there all day on the computer by themselves and learning, so I have to break the day up into lesson time and fun time and regulate that because they're too young to regulate themselves yet. At school they have teachers and peers to interact with, which keeps them interested.
So while working full time from home, I have to also support them in their learning and keep them on task. I also have to help them login to various things, set up zoom meetings, help them out with their work when they get stuck, and get the computers set up for them to do their work. Juggling logins and zoom meeting links gets complicated and time consuming.
If that were my only job, it would be manageable, but trying to work on my work and manage them has proven to be quite a challenge. If they were at a point in their lives where they could manage this all themselves, that would be great, but they're not there yet.
So I think that some students can benefit greatly from online learning, but others struggle.
For my kids, at home online learning is not as good as being with their peers, but it's been a lot better than nothing at all.
I'm looking forward to summer when I don't have to balance both work and managing their school work, but I do plan to keep giving them things to read and math worksheets. Those are the things they can do well on their own.
> have a hard time sitting there all day on the computer by themselves and learning
Is this how your local school is handling it? I can't even make it through full day meetings as an adult and pretty much zone out after 20 minutes of any online meetings I'm in now.
Students learn in a variety of ways. I imagine most of the HN audience excels at lecture based and book learning. To such an audience it makes sense that a single gifted lecturer could immeasurably benefit students through remote learning.
Many students will fail to thrive in such a scenario.
These students need different kinds of instruction. This is one thing that leads to home schooling - the government school does not provide the needed instruction methods, and the parents can either pay for private or do home schooling (or move).
Hmm. This is a shame. Having read "The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way" by Amanda Ripley, I learned that the United States is the highest spender on technology amongst all OECD countries. You'd think with such a big budget for tech, we'd do a better job of transitioning online. If anything, based on this fact, we should be one of the best equipped in the world for it.
I am curious to what differentiates the ones where remote learning is working and to those that aren’t. Because I have been pleasantly surprised to see just how well remote learning have been for my kids. Our kids aren’t really any more or less disciplined as any other kids. They did whine and scared at first but slowly got used to the whole change. They are 10 and 11 doing two hour of zoom per day and the rest turn in homework via google classroom and flipgrid for presentations .
Interesting article. I’ve taught three masters level classes this week and even these motivated students can find it challenging. Most are OK with passive listening, even if that’s not my favorite thing, and having some discussion, but as with in person, there can be issues trying to flip the classroom to make things more engaging and for pedagogical reasons. For example, I noticed that over 10% dropped off the zoom session on Monday, rather than discussing a case with other students in a breakout session for 15 minutes. I much prefer teaching in person where I can see their faces and get some feedback about where they are in terms of learning, interest, tiredness... and where I can more easily push them into doing group discussions that are pedagogically useful and enhance their networking skills. (Business students, not CS.)
We know how much more 'Distance Education' costs to run than normal schooling.
Yet on a few weeks notice we somehow imagined it would work to move every student over? Even if you increased the budget to match Distance Education it takes years to train the teachers/staff and train the students.
And we believe this because we fetishize 'remote' anything and just want it to work?
This also being the worst of remote, it's remote from home.
I have always learned on my own. I’ve spent the last couple of years pivoting from being a development manager, back to engineering.
That may seem to be an odd choice, as I’m an excellent manager, but I don’t like being a manager, and I love engineering. I’m pretty good at that, as well.
There’s really no curriculum for this kind of thing. Schools and training are all about introducing people to a subject “from scratch,” which involves a lot of “substrate.”
I did sign up for an introductory course on one tech that I’m working on, and to which I have had little exposure; but, for the most part, it’s all been self-teaching.
I really don’t know of a way to make that work with primary education. In my case, it’s a very personal journey, fueled by motivation. I don’t think that can be synthesized.
Of course, everything also needs to be measured, which brings in a whole infrastructure for accreditation and metrics.
distraction free? students aren't distracted in the classroom? Whether it's 200 years of passing notes, calculators, a book, or the classmate next to you the classroom has long had distractions.
[+] [-] neonate|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eightysixfour|5 years ago|reply
1. Using the "best" teachers from the school district to provide lectures for every student taking that course while the other teachers provide TA-esque support to the students in their "section." If a student is struggling with homework or to understand the lecture, they can go into a video breakout room and get 1:1 support without interrupting others.
2. Education has been focused on in-person lectures with home "work" for decades. Given the current situation, it seems to make the most sense to provide offline/prerecorded lectures and to use the class time to support the students with direct help for their work. Students can listen to a lecture without a live teacher, they cannot ask questions about their work without one.
Are their holes in both of these? Sure. Are they as bad as just moving the existing paradigm online? I don't think so.
[+] [-] kaitai|5 years ago|reply
We have the "best" teachers already providing materials: they're in books. You can go read Kolmogorov's probability books, you can read the Feynman lectures on physics. You can even listen to the Great Courses and learn whatever the bleep you want there. And do you? Do even adults have, as a group, the discipline, attention, and stamina to self-teach like this? No.
I call it self-teaching for a reason. When I taught, I looked into students' eyes and on their papers. I walked around the room. I had them present on the board. I prodded them to discuss ideas and argue with each other. I made mistakes writing proofs or calculations on the board and made students catch them, even -- yes, this is a skill math profs practice, because it's inevitable and recovering from the fall with grace is a learned skill! Every class in person was an interactive intellectual wrestling match. Video is just not the same. Interrupting others with your questions and discussion is vital to learning.
I'm so glad I'm no longer in the classroom, frankly. Sigh.
[+] [-] kilroy_jones|5 years ago|reply
To further compound the issue, in many places students don't have reliable internet access or a decent computer.
[+] [-] Waterluvian|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryanchants|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikekchar|5 years ago|reply
The main problem with this approach is that teachers are generally not used to working cooperatively. They have their "way" and they don't like to deviate from that "way". As odd as it sounds teachers also don't like being observed in the classroom. Teaching is incredibly difficult (by far the most difficult job I've ever attempted to do). The constraints you usually have to work with also mean that failure in at least some forms is inevitable (or to put it another way -- failure is the norm and you take your successes where you can get them). Because of this teachers are often incredibly defensive about how they approach tasks and decisions that they make. As much as I hate it, it is completely usual in my experience that teachers obfuscate what's going on in the classroom. Having other teachers present is really challenging for most teachers that I've encountered.
I honestly believe that team teaching is the way to go, but there are a lot of hurdles that you need to deal with before you can get there. The technology is not really the stumbling block. It's much more the social dynamic and the need for realistic and sensitive teacher evaluation methods. With some students you can literally just lock them in a room and they will learn the material. With other students, it doesn't matter how good the teacher is, they will just refuse to learn (for a huge variety of reasons -- medical, physical, psychological, etc... things that no teacher is realistically able to cope with). Quite a few teachers have realised that they can game the system by simply filtering the students by how easy they are to teach. And because teaching is a very stable job with a reasonable income, you are always going to get a fair number of people who are more interested in gaming the system than teaching stuff. And as is usual in large organisations, people who are good at gaming the system and have no interest in the technical side of the job tend to rise to the top of the decision making ranks. It's quite a difficult problem to solve.
[+] [-] sopooneo|5 years ago|reply
If all it took was the best lecturers, we could have been doing perfect distance learning since 1982 via UPS and VHS.
[+] [-] hysan|5 years ago|reply
As for holes - Without thinking too deeply, the main issues I see with breakout sessions and student support in an online environment are:
1. Not being able to see how students are working and struggling requires that students themselves be proactive in seeking help. However, not all schools push students to behave this way nor are all students capable of realizing when they are stuck or going too far down the wrong path.
2. Lower income students are automatically ruled out and/or have a far less optimal experience. The longer remote learning runs with this type of divide, the larger the education gap becomes.
I agree. A huge chance is being missed. However, this opportunity has been missed for a long time already. The pandemic is just making this painfully obvious now.
[+] [-] e12e|5 years ago|reply
This is very different from colleges - that generally actually focus on teaching stuff (which means students do all the important work themselves).
All the important roles of primary school are hard to accommodate via remote setup.
[+] [-] themodelplumber|5 years ago|reply
The main upside is that when people can finally take a breather at the end of this, I'm sure that at _that_ point more people can realistically regroup and be creative moving forward.
[+] [-] adelHBN|5 years ago|reply
While theoretically this sounds good, it doesn't work in practice. Kids, espcially young ones (I have a 2nd grader), need that personal interaction with their teacher. Schools are already overwhelmed with the teacher to student ratio. Imporsonalizing this interaction will only worsen an already bad situation.
[+] [-] sailfast|5 years ago|reply
That said, all of this still requires a fully engaged adult in the room to monitor interactions and help things stay on track and answer questions. My wife plans a full curriculum for all our kids together each day with breakout sessions for grade-appropriate subjects. This has been basically interrupted by the current official video curriculum of our school system - and our system is doing better than most on this subject. I have the luxury of an adult available to teach most of the day. Many do not. But I still want to yank my kids out of official "school" and get homeschooling certified until this ends. It burns you out. I'd welcome the schools closing officially now, and offering optional assignments to pass the time for parents that want to use them but that's not really equitable, it just works best for me.
A video conference is great but it can't help keep a virtual classroom engaged and flow with the kids' questions as well as an in-person room. There just isn't enough bandwidth.
Experience: currently three gradeschool and younger in my house.
[+] [-] jonahbenton|5 years ago|reply
There is some merit to pursuing these ideas at the paradigm level for various kinds of post-secondary level education, and of course it is already happening- though still poorly.
Before that level- basically before the age of 25- about 1% of what we call "education" consists of "teaching"- having a source of truth utter statements around the intellectual architecture of various "subjects" that we have constructed and partitioned over the long years of human civilization, with varying levels of inspiration and motivation.
That "paradigm" that ideas like these hope to transform- that really is at most only 1% of what education is for the under-25s.
What's the 99%? Mimic-ing, copying, replaying, performing, processing, engaging. School is an elaborate community improv performance, staffed at best with performers whose skills are measured in EQ, not IQ. I regularly witness school staff plan the model of their interactions with the kids down to the minute, down to the second- tho just the model. The actual performance is spontaneous. It is theater. Yes, there is a curriculum, and homework, and grades, and so forth. Those are all part of the act.
There are no "best" teachers. There are only an uncountable myriad of 1-1 relationships and engagements, each of which represents a full spectrum human interaction possibility (only a fraction of the potential of which of course is ever fulfilled). And though I love "work" and do a lot of it and have my kids do a lot of it- that also is just performative. The goal isn't to complete the assignments in an intellectual progression. No. It is in service of developing behavioral- awareness of self- and emotional- empathetic, sympathetic, awareness of others- tools to engage in the world.
Not to put too high a gloss on it, but in digital terms an orchestrated ChatRoulette is a closer approximation to what actually happens in an education context than the Yale lectures and homework helper.
And there is simply no substitute for the all too real, full spectrum chemistry that develops when people are in physical space together.
So changing the digital teaching paradigm is essentially meaningless. And "remote learning" is about the worst oxymoron.
The best thing we can do at a policy level is provide financial liquidity so that parents can afford to devote their full attention to their children, while we are in this phase where that is required.
[+] [-] TheHegemon|5 years ago|reply
Most of the time spent is just trying to keep the kids on task not actually spent trying to teach.
[+] [-] musicale|5 years ago|reply
Some other things I've seen and experienced that have seemed to work well and that I'd like to see more of:
- course staff who serve primarily as advisors and guides to provide and help students find, discover and use resources for self-directed learning and to help when students encounter difficulties
- schools that helped students buy cheap paperback books for recreational reading
- scaled out peer tutoring, where the school pays students who have taken a course to tutor students who are currently taking the course
- self-paced learning without harsh penalties for "falling behind" other students or an arbitrary course schedule
[+] [-] tssva|5 years ago|reply
This isn't just an issue for those of limited financial means. There are areas where internet access is not available for any price or the cost for internet access to support regular viewing of video classroom content would run into the hundreds of dollars per month.
[+] [-] eitally|5 years ago|reply
My experience thus far, having 3rd and 5th graders at home, is that remote math learning is a piece of cake and the quarantine experience has really illuminated for me how slowly public schools move. It has also clearly demonstrated that teacher language arts & writing requires 1) skills I don't have, and 2) direct interaction with a competent instructor.
Note, too, that not all teachers have adequate internet access at home to effectively teach remotely. My 5th grader's teacher is quite rural and has 5mbps down, 1mbps up internet service. She can barely participate in online meetings and cannot effectively upload any video content.
#2: 100% agree, but some classes lend themselves this more readily than others.
[+] [-] briandear|5 years ago|reply
The flipped classroom concept itself is nothing new. My issue is with the “remote” part of that. There is value in kids working on an art project together or working in small groups to create a poster presentation, etc. The lecture-homework paradigm might be appropriate for high school, to for younger grades, there really aren’t lectures as much as interactive discussions and hands-on exploration.
[+] [-] fizixer|5 years ago|reply
I personally think MOOC-with-tech-advancements is the future of education. And I have a suspicion brick-and-mortar educational system has played a role in crippling its progress.
[+] [-] metal13|5 years ago|reply
It's crazy that so many commenters here seem to think that everyone is well equipped to be a teacher with zero training or experience. It's hard.
It's even more crazy that no one seems to realize that most parents are acting as teachers, while trying to maintain full time jobs.
This isn't just "teachers not adapting", or "we need VR". This is fundamental to the fact that most households need two working parents just to survive.
[+] [-] ngngngng|5 years ago|reply
Only because we created a world where every household had two working parents.
[+] [-] prawn|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] janesvilleseo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bstar77|5 years ago|reply
Additionally, we don't do common core in our household, so my wife and I have no issues teaching my son math (we settled on Saxon math). I neither have the time nor energy to learn common core math in order to support my son.
[+] [-] flatline|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheHegemon|5 years ago|reply
It's just about breaking apart problems into digestible pieces.
[+] [-] hn_throwaway_99|5 years ago|reply
I've seen parents try to work from home remotely, while also taking care of and schooling their kids, and it seems like a nightmare.
[+] [-] pdx_flyer|5 years ago|reply
We tweaked my wife's setup and it works pretty well now, though she is dreading if they choose to do live online learning in the fall, as that will be something completely new to tackle. Currently she uses Google Classroom, Desmos, and Kahn Academy for the teaching side. She plans and distributes lessons in Google, uses Desmos for some interactive activities where Desmos scripting allows her to check work and give feedback, and Kahn Academy as some supplemental teaching to her notes. In addition she has certain hours everyday for certain classes and uses an iPad + Google Meet to show notes to her students and work problems they may have an issue with. So far that's been working.
Live teaching would be a little more difficult with this setup but it could work.
[+] [-] dorchadas|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] basilgohar|5 years ago|reply
Schools (and pretty much everything else) were caught completely off-guard by the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns. Setting-up an online education infrastructure takes a lot of work and requires significant mental retooling. Teachers need to adapt as much or more than their students to the new paradigm. Zoom, Hangouts, Teams, or Jitsi are not replacement for in-person instruction.
Part of this is that in remote learning the curriculum materials and assessments need to lend themselves to greater self-guidance than those of brick-and-mortar books and other resources. This is not impossible, but also not easy to do on short notice. I am not surprised that schools are finding it simply too hard to put together packets, distribute them, and trying supplement with video conferencing when the materials are based on a different assumption.
I am optimistic that this will further the reach of remote learning, but I am doubtful that the stagnant style of traditional education will shift to fully embrace it. I foresee a lot more alternative educational institutions emerging as the traditional schools very slowly adapt.
[+] [-] zaroth|5 years ago|reply
They miss their classmates. They miss their teacher. They miss most of all the routine, getting to go to school, and all the fun things they got to do during the day. My 5th grader is very sad to be missing out on a graduation-like experience with a lot of end-of-year events that would typically happen for outgoing 5th graders before they leave for the middle school.
This isn't an "opportunity for a new normal". This isn't a situation which can or will last "indefinitely". It is assuredly unhealthy for kids this age (to say nothing of the rest of us) to be isolated from their friends and communicating only over Zoom calls.
My kids are hurting in a suburb with a big back yard, mountains of toys, a stay at home mom, and two dogs to play with. I can only imagine it must hurt the least privileged children hardest of all to have lost access to their school.
I don't expect there's much of any learning going on in general below the high school level. Particularly for households which don't have parents who are willing to dedicate several hours a day to basically run the lessons. I think people who can honestly claim that their under-13-year-old is distance learning without a parent assuming a basically full-time role of teacher, are few and far between.
I wonder how curriculum will adapt to incoming students in the fall. X graders who don't know approximately half of the X-1 grade material. Particularly for younger students where classes are less likely to be grouped by ability, anyone who did actually successfully learn anything from March-July is just going to have to sit through it being taught all over again to the majority of students who didn't.
[+] [-] eitally|5 years ago|reply
I was talking to my 5th grader's teach last weekend about the next year. She doesn't know, either, but is assuming they're just going to bake in an extra-long review period going into the year. Alternatively, at least in CA, they're contemplating starting the next school year in July rather than August, to provide more time for catch-up. To your point, though, what about the kids who were able to keep pace throughout -- are they going to be forced to repeat half a semester to maintain equity in the classroom? That would be terribly unfair.
[+] [-] h2odragon|5 years ago|reply
We're lucky in that we've homeschooled before (she went back to public school for the company of other kids), and we've worked out ways to encourage and help focus her natural curiosity already. I just gave her a Debian 10 system and said "holler if you get stuck"; so far she hasn't.
[+] [-] grawprog|5 years ago|reply
When I got to university it was different, I cared and tried and got involved with everything. It was a totally different experience. It made me regret the way i was in high school a bit and kinda made me wish I'd been more involved. It wasn't as pointless and ridiculous as I thought and there was no reason for me not to other than my unwillingness to.
If I'd actually experienced these things, I might have gotten more out of high school and not been so hostile towards it all for so long, when in the end education only benefitted me and there's a kind of education you can only get by taking part in things with people around you.
I know it's not the same, but I know there's lots of kids out there who didn't wait as long as me and know now, well before I did, what they get out of having other people around. As great as distance education can be, even if you've got your classmates there on video or something, it's still not the same as a group of students getting together and working on homework or studying, the ones that do I mean, and even for the ones that just get together, there's a lot of bonding and forming as people that happens that just can't really be replicated outside truly free interaction with other people. Even if you're all working on school work. It needs to be some kind of natural free setting. Something's missing otherwise. Again, it took me a long time to really get this.
[+] [-] awinder|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] karatestomp|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Maultasche|5 years ago|reply
The problem is that my elementary school children (who are ADHD and on the autism spectrum) have a hard time sitting there all day on the computer by themselves and learning, so I have to break the day up into lesson time and fun time and regulate that because they're too young to regulate themselves yet. At school they have teachers and peers to interact with, which keeps them interested.
So while working full time from home, I have to also support them in their learning and keep them on task. I also have to help them login to various things, set up zoom meetings, help them out with their work when they get stuck, and get the computers set up for them to do their work. Juggling logins and zoom meeting links gets complicated and time consuming.
If that were my only job, it would be manageable, but trying to work on my work and manage them has proven to be quite a challenge. If they were at a point in their lives where they could manage this all themselves, that would be great, but they're not there yet.
So I think that some students can benefit greatly from online learning, but others struggle.
For my kids, at home online learning is not as good as being with their peers, but it's been a lot better than nothing at all.
I'm looking forward to summer when I don't have to balance both work and managing their school work, but I do plan to keep giving them things to read and math worksheets. Those are the things they can do well on their own.
[+] [-] beart|5 years ago|reply
Is this how your local school is handling it? I can't even make it through full day meetings as an adult and pretty much zone out after 20 minutes of any online meetings I'm in now.
[+] [-] tomohawk|5 years ago|reply
Many students will fail to thrive in such a scenario.
These students need different kinds of instruction. This is one thing that leads to home schooling - the government school does not provide the needed instruction methods, and the parents can either pay for private or do home schooling (or move).
Source: many family members were teachers.
[+] [-] foofoo4u|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jaequery|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] texasbigdata|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anigbrowl|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ec2y|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aaron695|5 years ago|reply
Yet on a few weeks notice we somehow imagined it would work to move every student over? Even if you increased the budget to match Distance Education it takes years to train the teachers/staff and train the students.
And we believe this because we fetishize 'remote' anything and just want it to work?
This also being the worst of remote, it's remote from home.
It's no wonder the world can't move forward.
[+] [-] ChrisMarshallNY|5 years ago|reply
That may seem to be an odd choice, as I’m an excellent manager, but I don’t like being a manager, and I love engineering. I’m pretty good at that, as well.
There’s really no curriculum for this kind of thing. Schools and training are all about introducing people to a subject “from scratch,” which involves a lot of “substrate.”
I did sign up for an introductory course on one tech that I’m working on, and to which I have had little exposure; but, for the most part, it’s all been self-teaching.
I really don’t know of a way to make that work with primary education. In my case, it’s a very personal journey, fueled by motivation. I don’t think that can be synthesized.
Of course, everything also needs to be measured, which brings in a whole infrastructure for accreditation and metrics.
[+] [-] kumarvvr|5 years ago|reply
Its very easy for the student to be browsing, chatting or gaming with the class going on.
The best way to learn will always be a focussed, distraction free, peer supported classroom.
[+] [-] smileysteve|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fortran77|5 years ago|reply
https://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2020/04/28/...