For my middle school English and humanities classes, I’m offering the same lessons I would normally do live, but in smaller doses.” Acknowledge the Extraordinary “Don’t stress about that-it won’t do you any good.
“I can tell you, now that we’re in week 7 of online learning, that much of what you will do will be trial and error,” wrote Stacy Rausch Keevan, who was teaching in Hong Kong. Expect it, plan for it, and do your best to make peace with it. It is, in fact, impossible to shift to distance learning overnight without lots of trial and error. There are plenty of strategies and tactics we’re covering at Edutopia-and we’ll continue to-but here are the crucial emotional and psychological scaffolds that our audience agreed would be needed to teach in this new paradigm. In the end, too, there were many fantastic, highly creative teachers providing strategies as fast as the obstacles appeared.Īt the highest level, a shift in mindset would be required-even the most optimistic educators conceded the point. The panic was all perfectly understandable.īut there were plenty of teachers in the mix who had weeks of crisis experience under their belts by that time-several in Hong Kong and Italy and the state of Washington, for example-and others who had long careers in online and distance learning. What if, in the end, the school systems decide that online learning is working just fine, and never reopen? “There is no digital divide, but there is a digital abyss, and America’s rural poor are living at the bottom of it,” said Anne Larsen, with devastating concision. In the next few hours, over 500 teachers joined two Facebook conversations about teaching during the coronavirus pandemic, spilling out their concerns and anxieties: What will we do if the schools close for months? How can I shift to online learning if we’re closing tomorrow, or even in a few hours? How will special education students be cared for, and IEPs administered? What about children who have no internet access, or who will be required, as Keith Schoch thoughtfully noted, to “become de facto babysitters” for their brothers and sisters.
In the pregnant pause that followed, undoubtedly, every teacher tracking the unspooling thread-about the dizzying, rapidly escalating viral crisis that was closing schools across the country-recognized the chasm they were all facing as well, and took a deep breath. The thought ended almost before it started: “This is so overwhelming.” It was all one teacher managed to type before she stopped short, vexed into silence, perhaps, by the sheer size of the problem.