The 3 Rs of Remote Learning- Relationships, Routine, Reflection

Crack. Splash. Gasp. That’s the response to ice giving way and being plunged into the frigid water. The body’s natural reaction is to panic, flail and draw in air as fast as possible. One has little time to plan a way out and must rely on instincts and training. That was about how my body responded when the Governor announced face to face schooling would be canceled for the remainder of the school year. What do I do now? How can I still be a teacher? How do I care for, and support these students that I won’t see again?
Much like making it out of the ice-cold water, the next step is to avoid system failure. When a person has made it to shore the first step is stopping the body from going into shock from hypothermia. When the body begins to go into shock it shuts down extremities and only focuses on running the essential organs. Once again that was the metaphor I faced, my team faced and school systems in general had to grapple with in rapid time. What are the “essential organs” of what we do? What must we focus on to keep the system going?

Relationships

My first answer is relationships. In the middle level, relationships are essential to the success of the student. Relationships have been at the heart of middle level best practice for years. My team and I have been doing daily advisory this year with a variety of activities for each day. Monday is relationship day, Tuesday is trivia, Wednesday is a check in survey, Thursday is a restorative circle and Friday is games. When the face to face schooling stopped, we started meeting with our homerooms on the very first Monday. We let kids know how much we missed them and also told them we would stick to our normal advisory routines as much as possible. My team has been running remote daily advisory now for 5 weeks and we have kept attendance records, we average around 95% engagement every day. Our school sent out a survey to families as well and the overwhelming response was how much the families and students liked advisory keeping going. We have done so many other things to interact with students (office hours, live classes, etc.) and nothing has seen the engagement that our daily advisories provide. By taking attendance we are able to follow up via email to students who we do not see and report back to the school on any student we don’t see for a few days. Luckily that has been a very small percentage to date. Students thrive when they feel connected. They are eager to see their peers every morning and many join early or stay late just to have informal conversations with each other. We have noticed many students connecting that had not previously been in peer groups while at face to face school.

Routine

Maintaining routine has been equally important. In times of trauma the response we hear as professionals is to keep routine. Keep things predictable. There is no question that the cancelling of face to face school has been a traumatic event. Traumatic for us all, teachers, families and students alike. So keeping a routine became something that was a necessity and our best response for our students. We kept advisory days the same, adapting of course, for what was needed to be done remotely. We kept other things the same as well. In ELA, students blog on Mondays, and they still do. We converted our schedule this year to a double block format and since we have been on remote learning, we have kept our daily tasks as double blocks- math and science on one day, humanities on the other. Every Thursday we have students send emails home about what they have been doing at school that week and since we have been remote, students have still been sending their emails, except now they send them to their parents and to their homeroom teacher. Not a lot of students are reaching out for tech support or specifics of what is expected because they are doing tasks and using platforms that they are familiar with and have been using all along. This has also helped with the stress levels of the families for the very same reasons.

A look at our weekly grid

Reflection

Having students reflect daily has become our link between our commitment to relationships and routine. I was having a meeting with Scott Thompson from the Tarrant Institute as our Governor announced the change in how school would happen. We had an idea the announcement was coming, but I remember looking at Scott right after the announcement and saying, “Now what? How can I keep connecting with them and asking them to learn new things?” And in his normal way, he said “I think I may have something.” What he produced was a reflection document that he had worked on with another school in Vermont as they too were preparing for remote learning. The document was grounded in a list of activities and experiences that students could choose from and then at the end of their learning day would reflect on all they had done. I absolutely loved it. And in the true Vermont education (#vted) way I was told to adapt and use in any way I saw fit. I brought the document back to my team and we all agreed this was a very manageable way to document learning. Each of us took responsibility for our homeroom group of students. We build our learning for the week on the top of the document, with links to videos, and resources where appropriate. Students can link to office hours, morning meetings and other classes from the document grid as well. Students go in at the end of their learning day and check off the boxes of tasks they completed and include a written and/or photographic reflection of evidence. 

We as teachers go in through Google Classroom and leave comments and ask questions to keep the dialogue going. Students that do not do the reflection for a particular day get an email from their homeroom teacher. The email is not punitive in tone, but rather a welfare check-in. We ask how they are doing, did they forget to do the reflection, is there anything we can do to help? If a student misses a second day of reflecting within a given 5 day week we email again and “cc” the family as well. We ask similar questions but include a reminder that we are hoping to see the reflection done regularly. This second step seems to have a pretty immediate response. Families appreciate the reminder and it keeps the loop closed in terms of accountability.
In terms of work flow the reflection document keeps things simple for everyone. Students are able to record their learning on one document, and teachers are able to provide meaningful feedback to a smaller set of students. For example, I’m responding daily to 20 student reflections as opposed to 80 student responses for an assigned Humanities task. This also helps reinforce our relationships with our homeroom students. We know them best, we know when they could provide a more detailed writeup, or when it writeup with a small level of detail is their best independent work. It allows us to get more meaningful feedback when sending those reminder emails. If a student has had a rough day, they will tell us as their homeroom teacher. They know we care and we are not trying to punish them, but we want to see them succeed in this challenging time of learning. Students and families know we are not “grading” any of these reflections, yet we see close to 80-85% of these completed on a daily basis.

I cannot imagine operating with traditional grades at a time like this. I am not sure how it would be possible to collect enough authentic work to give a letter or number grade. Thankfully, I work in a school district that has shifted to a proficiency-based approach to looking at student work. What a difference that has made in terms of making remote learning work. As part of the daily reflection, on Friday’s, students complete a self-assessment on one of our “Habits of Learning” targets. My team created this so that students could understand what we expect for work quality. We have been using this target for 2 years now, so when we introduced it as part of our reflection and remote learning plan it was easy to adapt and something students have had no problem working through. They simply look back on their reflections and work from the week, click the appropriate boxes below each level of the target and see where they land. From there they write a few sentences about something they did that they are most proud of and another few sentences setting a goal for next week.

Weekly goal setting is something they have done in their Thursday email home and with their Personal Learning Plans as well. Again, adapting successful routines to make meaningful reflection happen in a different setting. We are using similar models as well in our curricular courses. We are seeing students be able to advance their thinking in content areas without the external motivator of grades. They want meaningful tasks and meaningful feedback during the learning process more than a letter or number at the end.
The convergence of these 3 Rs- Relationships, Routine and Reflection- has allowed our students to adjust successfully to remote learning. The level of detail in their daily learning reflections and the survey responses from families has given us the feedback that we made the correct choices. I am especially proud how quickly we pivoted, but I understand that it was because we only needed to adapt our systems rather than creating something brand new. One thing that has been reinforced to me during all of this is that my students crave relationships, they want more to connect with me and their peers than anything else we do. The content is in the back seat until their need for relationship is met. Once that is established, the content can be achieved through routine and reflection. It is a great reminder and opportunity to reset as a whole system as we have conversations about what face to face school will look like when the time comes. It is an opportunity to finally fix the plane while it is grounded, as opposed to what is commonplace- fixing the plane while we are still flying it. Remote learning is an opportunity to focus on the “essential organs” of what the middle level does best so that when we come out of the icy water and begin to warm up we are healthier and stronger. We know middle school is not a building, it is a set of beliefs and universal strategies that meet the needs of the middle level learner. When we employ these beliefs, we can teach middle school when it really is not in a building.
So be safe, and be well. Know that feeling will return to those extremities. We have made our way out of the initial cold plunge and are starting to warm up to this remote learning thing. I begin each workday by listening to my favorite Coldplay song, “Everyday Life”, and the lyrics ring true now more than ever. “What in the world are we going to do? Look at what everybody’s going through. What kind of world do you want it to be? Am I the future or the history?... Got to keep dancing when the lights go out. Hold tight for everyday life.”