These words from “How the Pandemic Might Play Out in 2021 and Beyond,” an August 2020 feature article in Nature magazine, portray a time of great challenge ahead of us as we seek to curb the spread of SARS-CoV-2. The authors emphasize that two key yet-to-be-determined pieces of data—what it will take to create herd immunity and how long immunity to the virus could last—will be the drivers of what the months and years ahead will look like. They speculate: “If immunity to the virus lasts less than a year…similar to other human coronaviruses in circulation, there could be annual surges in COVID-19 infections through to 2025 and beyond.”
The implications for schools are profound. We must prepare to pivot effectively between face-to-face and online learning for the foreseeable future. Parents will have increasingly higher expectations for both options, and our students will need us to excel at both if they are to thrive.
A Challenging Spring
When schools closed their physical doors in the spring, most had to move to some form of distance learning overnight. Although few were prepared for that, independent schools performed well in parents’ opinions, given the challenging circumstances. According to a survey NAIS administered throughout the spring, 57% of responding parents said their school’s remote learning was going better than expected. However, parents were concerned about the long-term implications for their children, with 59% worried about their children missing important social interactions at school or with friends, and 54% concerned that the switch to remote learning would negatively impact their children’s education.To understand the student experience with remote learning, Youth Truth, a national nonprofit that elevates the voices of students to help education leaders build healthier school systems, conducted a survey through the spring and summer with public school students. (We hope to work with them to conduct similar studies with independent school students.) Not surprising, the overall takeaway was that those students who felt more personally affected by COVID-19 reported less positive learning experiences and less positive well-being overall. Those students who thrived the most in remote learning were self-motivated, preferring outcomes-based assignments, the ability to set their own pace, and having control over their time. The study also uncovered interesting differences by age. When asked if they learned a lot every day during this period, 56% of fifth graders responded in the affirmative, but those numbers declined steadily to a low of 25% for 12th graders.
YouthTruth, "Students Weigh In: Learning & Wellbeing During COVID-19," June 2020
To explore mental health and resilience in both students and faculty at independent schools during remote learning, NAIS partnered with Authentic Connections, a research firm that aspires to maximize student well-being and resilience through data and insights. As reported in the forthcoming Fall issue of Independent School magazine, the study identifies four common themes among schools that excelled in supporting student and adult mental health during the pandemic: They fostered a strong sense of community, communicated clearly and consistently, prioritized mental health, and frequently sought and addressed feedback.
A Year Ahead in Face-to-Face and Virtual Environments
Given the challenges with student learning and well-being during those first months of the pandemic, public and private schools alike put their energies into reopening face-to face in the fall. As the virus raged through July and August, however, that became less of a reality for many schools, with a significant number opening either fully online or in a hybrid model.As we face the possibility of a year ahead filled with periodic closures, we must find ways to support our students more effectively in all types of learning environments. In an interview published on the Education Next blog, Brad Rathgeber, head of school and CEO of One Schoolhouse, noted that the approach most schools took in the spring was distance learning. He described that, “In a distance-learning model, you’re taking the components of a typical school day and moving them to some type of online or remote-learning equivalent, and you’re using the same pedagogy that you use in face-to-face courses. You’re trying to create a remote-learning equivalence of what you would do in school classrooms.” However, with time and some investments, we can do much better. If our schools were to develop an online learning model, Rathgeber said, teachers would “adopt a different pedagogical approach to use time and space differently.”
He continued, “Often the courses are asynchronous and class-paced. Meaning that kids have great flexibility over the course of any given week to complete the learning and the assignments. Some online classes are totally student-paced, where they have even greater flexibility across the course of a quarter or a semester or perhaps even a full year. So you are really rethinking the learning environment from a much broader perspective.”
Likewise, Michael Nachbar, executive director of Global Online Academy and NAIS board member, suggested that schools need to make intentional investments now to ensure that students have a good experience in this challenging year ahead: “This is a time for schools to move their faculty in a direction that is laser-focused on helping teachers acquire, apply, and hone their skills in designing and facilitating online learning experiences. We know that designing for online allows educators the flexibility they need as they move in and out of different environments. This is also a chance for schools to further professionalize the teaching profession and to think about how to finance 12-month salaries so that training and continued learning can be built into the job. High-quality online learning lays bare poor pedagogy, and if our schools are going to successfully serve their students, they’re going to need to be explicit about what great teaching and learning looks like at their school.”
In a May 2020 EdSource article, “We Can Make Online Learning a Positive Force in Education,” author Glenn Kleiman notes how important teacher preparation is to school and student success, highlighting that the rush to online learning without proper preparation could leave many parents and students accepting the fact that online will always be a poor substitute for face-to-face. Kleiman suggested that there is an optimistic scenario, however, in which the potential of online learning will become widely recognized as a means of teaching and learning that has different advantages and disadvantages than face-to-face classes if we make the following needed investments:
- “A strong online presence and continuous connections with their students, using multiple forms of communication including video conferencing, real-time (synchronous) and discussion-forum (asynchronous) communications, along with collaboration and social media tools.
- Clear expectations, instructions and guidance, which are more critical when the teacher is not in the room to monitor students as they do their work. Done well, this can help students become more self-directed learners.
- Multiple resources to support learning, including “micro-lectures” that chunk the material into small, coherent modules; online videos, multimedia presentations, and readings; interactive online explorations and offline hands-on activities; and other resources appropriate for the content and the students. These provide students with alternative ways to learn and enable teachers to enrich the learning experience for all students.
- Modeling and facilitation of online exchanges in order to convey appropriate ways for students to interact and work collaboratively online.
- Approaches to personalized instruction for students, providing flexible pathways through the material, alternative means for students to complete and submit their work, and resources and tools for students with learning differences or learning disabilities.”
