What to Realistically Expect From Distance Learning This Year

 As students head back to school most parents face a difficult choice. We know our public school system doesn’t have the resources to handle proper distancing and cleaning, especially with budgets shrinking. But, for many online learning didn’t keep their child on track in the spring. 

First, the cobbled-together spring experience didn’t represent proper distance teaching in any way. Teachers did the best they could with limited resources, training, and planning.  Children had no time to adjust and be taught proper distance learning protocol and responsibilities. And, unfortunately, many schools this fall will not offer any better experience. 

School cannot be entirely planned in one week of pre-planning. While some teachers do take summer entirely off, most teachers use the time to improve their skills, learning new teaching techniques, plan their classroom, and other preparation activities. With the constant uncertainty of how school would look this year, many teachers couldn’t focus on what new skills they would need this year. While some school districts offered distance skills courses, few made them mandatory. So, some teachers will come back with improved distance learning skills, not all had the incentive or opportunity. 

Even fewer families spent the summer ensuring their child acquired the skills needed to succeed in distance learning. Students provide a large part of the equation for successful learning and schools spend a lot of time (especially with younger children) teaching them the skills they need to become better learners.

For in-person learning, that means learning how to sit in your space and ignore the distractions of others around you, how to know when to pay attention to the teacher and when you should know what to do on your own, and how to interact with the teaching tools of a classroom.  Most of us don’t think of this as behaviors that support in-person teaching, but we all understand behavioral issues at schools can be roadblocks to learning.

Distance learning requires other skills from students. Students are less likely to be distracted by the other students, but procrastinators may push off completing a task, because the schedule for different activities is not so rigid when you're not trying to get 25 children to stay on a task together. Also, few students feel they need to take notes, because online environments allow them often to replay things if they miss something the teacher says. Not writing things down adversely affects learning.

While families cannot control how the teachers or schools choose to offer an education this year. What you can control is how you help your child deal with distance learning. For the next few weeks, I will focus on skills for children that will make distance learning more effective.  I'll start tomorrow with writing things down.