So, I feel like we already covered this “jump out of plane… no ‘chute… land safely on something way, way, way softer than the ground” thing, but if you are remembering Real or Fake #3 like I am, you’ll quickly notice that this video has a distinctly different vibe.
Which leads us to one of two conclusions: 1. This one is WAY realer than the other video… or 2. This one is just done a ton better.
What are your thoughts?
Dan Wizner is a high school social studies teacher. Throughout 2020, his school has been remote sometimes and hybrid sometimes. So, Dan has had to get creative. And his students have had to make some adjustments, too.
In this conversation, Dan describes his plan for making his class more flexible, the opportunities that having his students on Chromebooks so much have brought to the table, and how Fall 2021 might look different because of what he’s learned.
Here Dan shares his story – in his own words.
You can find the rest of our Digital Instruction Network conversations here.
Brittany Oleszczak teaches 5th grade and she’s been teaching remotely for almost a full year now. Despite the struggle, she’s found ways to make this work fairly well for her students and her students’ parents. She’s leaned on a couple of strategically chosen tech tools, patience persistence in leading her students toward high goals, and a steady diet of realistic optimism.
Remember, a lot of things have been said about teaching in 2020 – but this is Brittany sharing her experience in her own words.
If you are interested in hearing more of the conversations I’m having with teachers, you can find the rest of the videos here.
I am the director of a regional educational support organization called REMC 13. It is a regional subgroup of the statewide REMC Association of Michigan. One of the projects we use to support our educators instructionally is called #517EdTech.
Typically, we are able to support teachers and administrators because among the team, there’s a lot of experience in a variety of educational settings. But, when covid shut stuff down in March and we went remote, that wasn’t true anymore. No one (that I knew, at least) had any real experience with remote teaching – not like this. This isn’t online teaching – that is mostly asynchronous. And this certainly isn’t the face-to-face teaching we all have thousands of hours of practice doing. No. This is some kind of third way – live, remote instruction as an routine. No one that I was collaborating with had ever tried it before. And I suddenly had very little I could do to help besides simply train teachers on how to use tech tools and brainstorm with them possible ideas (transparently adding that all of the ideas on the table were going to be used in ways that I’d never seen tried before.)
So what to do?
Well, we needed some experience from the classroom. So, we started having conversations with classroom teachers. What are you trying? What’s worked? What’s not working? What does “it worked” even mean? What has surprised you? What has definitely not surprised you?
Like, let’s call this what it is – we are doing something for the first time and there is one subgroup of people who are developing the effective skill set – I need to talk to those people. And the things those people were sharing needed to be shared with other teachers. See? That’s another thing we’re struggling with at the moment – in most places, collaboration has sunk down to almost nothing. Teachers are reporting feeling quite isolated.
So, we started recording conversations – basically like a podcast. We call it “The Digital Instruction Network”. We’ve been meeting with teachers who are willing and feel like they are being somewhat successful. We record a conversation and put it out for other teachers to hear. Our hope is that…
The conversations are mostly unedited and mostly unrehearsed. These are teachers who have been thrown into some tough situations and are doing their best to make it work. Be patient with them if they make a move that you wouldn’t have made. I know the internet can be a “quick-to-judge, slow-to-forgive” kind of place. I’m hoping we can agree to avoid all of that.
So, with that in mind, over the next couple of… I don’t know… days? Weeks? Months? I’ll be sharing out these conversations. I hope you (or those you work with) find them helpful.
If you can’t wait for the upcoming posts, you can find the whole playlist of them here.
I last taught in the classroom in 2014. From about 2010, I had developed a rather strong series of opinions of homework. The condensed version of those opinions would have sounded like this…
You get the idea. The result was math classes that included almost no homework at all (which the students enjoyed, and then they liked coming to math class more, and I was able to take advantage of that, so they learned a lot…) If you have questions about where those thoughts can from, I’m happy to explain my 8-10 years ago thoughts to you. I still stand by a lot of them right now.
But, what happened this spring raised questions in my mind. Like, how prepared would my students have been for the Covid shut down? Was I simply avoiding an opportunity to help my high school students be better prepared to learn outside of my classroom? Should I have been doing more to help them engage learning more flexibly?
I don’t know the answer to these questions, but I observed Covid turn the entire school system into non-stop homework for weeks this spring (it happened in my home, too.) “Being good at doing homework” is just a series of skills and habits that need to be practiced (like anything else) and students who had 2013 Andrew would have had very little practice doing Geometry at home because I made the conscious decision to make sure they didn’t.
Maybe I was doing it wrong (wouldn’t be the first time). Maybe I wasn’t, but what I was doing worked in 2013 and now it’s Covid2020 and things are different. Possible.
Anyway, for Fall 2020, it seems to me that preparing students and families for the need for the students to have meaningful learning experiences away from school needs to be taken seriously.
The last post I made included a few of my thoughts presented in video form.
Here’s “part II” of those thoughts, which are less about how we might onboard students to prepare for digital teaching-and-learning and more about supporting the students’ needs for learning at home.
Mr. Shauver - Learner Educator 