Supporting learning in a time of social distancing
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Discusses the background of the global transition from classrooms to distance learning during the Covid-19 pandemic and offers examples of how teachers, school systems and parents can support children's learning and well-being during this terrible time.
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Supporting learning in a time of social distancing
- 1. Supporting learning in a time of social distancing
- 2. A global health crisis
- 3. What is different about this crisis? • Caused by a novel virus • highly contagious • spreads through person- to-person contact • can live on surfaces • Requires actions to contain the spread: • wash your hands • stay home, practice social distancing • clean and disinfect • wear a mask
- 4. A global education crisis • 191 country-wide school closures • 1,579,634,506 learners in forced isolation (90.2% of total enrolled learners) • Sudden transition to ‘socially distanced learning’ • Exposure of deep disparities in access to and quality of distance learning options UNESCO Institute for Statistics, 2020 Direct impact:
- 5. Pre-existing conditions • 260 million children and young people out of school, 50% in areas affected by conflict • Access broadened, but learning outcomes weak and completion rates low • Deep disparities in access and quality driven by poverty, gender, disability and location • School systems failing to realize education’s promise: to align learning with competencies needed for life and work in the 21st century World Development Report, 2018
- 6. What is ‘socially distanced learning’? ABRUPTNESS of the transition • shifting roles • access • adaptation • expertise • creativity Necessitates a novel form of distance or remote learning
- 7. Stages of the transition to SDL 1. Urgent response 2. Amelioration 3. Innovation 4. A ‘New Normal’?
- 8. Five fundamentals for SDL
- 9. Sample daily routine Patuck, Helen. My Hero is You Inter-Agency Standing Committee, 2020.
- 11. New responsibilities for learners
- 12. Expanding role of teachers
- 14. Distance learning: 3 widely held assumptions Less effective and desirable than traditional schooling Only possible using high technology devices and internet access Cannot facilitate social and emotional learning
- 15. Distance learning: a range of options ç Requirements Media Advantages Drawbacks High tech Laptop, tablet or smart phone with broadband internet access Web conferencing platform, LMS courseware, pre-set home school curricula, social media apps Teacher led Interaction (live or delayed) links to multimedia resources, group collaboration Limited access, cost, learning curve for tech skills, weak substitute for classroom based activities Mid tech TV, radio, DVD player, camera, sound recorder, cell phone and/or landline, SD card Audio and/or video instructional programming, teacher-learner communication setup Teacher led interaction, accessible using existing infrastructures, lower cost Connectivity (low income, weak infrastructure), production time and cost. Low tech Table or floor space, light, paper, notebook writing/art tools and supplies, transport system for delivery/pickup Textbooks, activity packs, reading materials, art, educational games, toys Low cost, locally facilitated learning interaction, creative use of available resources. Labor intensive, delayed feedback, crisis related obstacles (mail, transportation, physical damage, isolation)
- 16. Together at a distance Contact outside the immediate isolated group is limited to: • video chat group video conferencing • texting • email • video (television, YouTube) • radio • telephone • signage • delivery (of messages, learning materials, other resources) • musical performance
- 17. • teacher and system centered • pre-set, rigorous • compliant, conformist • benchmark, summative FormalInformal • learner and facilitator centered • self-paced, flexible • independent, self- reliant • formative, continous APPROACH CURRICULUM LEARNER CHARACTERISTICS ASSESSMENT A window of opportunity?
- 18. What next? • The pandemic and period of lockdown will come to an end • What will the ‘new normal’ look like? • social distancing? • revised curriculum? • different priorities? • more student centered methodologies? • more and better use of technologies? • new assessment practices?
- 19. A message for humanity “We are all interconnected. And if we don’t get that message from this pandemic, then maybe we never will.”
- 20. Resources • CIES 2020 welcome address by Iveta Solova https://vimeo.com/ciesmedia/cies2020welcome • Global Partnership for Education. Mitigting Covid-19 impacts and getting education systems up and running again: Lessons from Sierra Leone (blog post) https://www.globalpartnership.org/blog/mitigating-covid-19-impacts-and-getting-education-systems-and-running-again- lessons-sierra • Hetchinger Report, 2020. How to reach students without internet access during coronovirus: Schools get creative. https://hechingerreport.org/how-to-reach-students-without-internet-access-at-home-schools-get-creative/ • cnet, K-12 online classes and activities https://www.cnet.com/how-to/k-12-online-classes-and-activities-to-continue-school-at-home-during-coronavirus/ • New York Times, How to home school during coronovirus https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/20/parenting/home-school-coronavirus.html • Spectacle Learning Media, 2020. Socially distanced learning in the time of COVID-19 (blog post). https://spectaclelearningmedia.net/blog/socially-distanced-learning-in-the-time-of-covid-19-tips-for-isolated-teachers- parents-and-learnersl • World Bank, 2018. World development report: Learning to realize education’s promise. https://www.worldbank.org/en/publication/wdr2018
Editor's Notes
- The main points are that in the time of this novel virus, and so has given rise to a novel form of learning that has continued to evolve, moving ahead from urgent responses to adaptation to innnovation in a range of different contexts in which both teachers and families have expanded roles. So in this photo, we see a teacher delivering more than education using a bus that carries not only food for distribution, but also Wi-fi access, books and packets of print materials. Credit: Kershaw County School District, South Carolina, serving mostly rural and relatively poor families.
- This is a global health crisis, spreading from one part of the world to the next with unprecdented speed As of April 29, infecting over three million people and claiming 208,112 lives Countries impaced most heavily have been in Asia, Europe and North America. Current outbreak is highest in the US. Fear and anticipation that the virus will take hold in devleoping countries in the Global South, where it will cause even greater loss of lives and livelihoods. The rapid spread of the coronavirus has taught us, among other things, that this pandemic requires both local and global responses. Given that we now live in an interconnected world, it is essential that the virus be brought under contraol everwhere, as even a few cases active in any country is capapble of spreading worldwide.
- Covid-19 is an infectious disease caused by a novel virus for which there is no vaccine is highly contagious and causes respiratory illness spreads rapidly through person-to-person contact Requires actions to effectively contain the spread The most comparable event in recent history was the global pandemic known as Spanish flu of 1918-1919, which affected 500 million people worldwide and like Covid-19, was highly contagious., Efforrts to contain the spread of the virus included isolation, quarantine, personal hygiene, and use of disinfectants and limitation of social gatherings. I have not been able to find much iinformation on how education was affected during this time, but one study reported that early school closures in some 43 cities in the US were effective in limiting the spread. Whether or not children and their parents were supported in learning at home is another question, and one I hope to keep investigating.
- Along with cost in human suffering has come the impact of the pandemic not only on livelihoods and the global economy, but also on education in virtually all of the countries it has invaded or threatens to invade. Schools have closed, some indefinitely, in 191 countries a million and a half learneers have gone into forced isolation, either at home or in shelters US: Schools, colleges and universities have closed in all 50 states, 42 have extended through the end of the school year. Sparked a sudden transtion to learning in place, or ‘soially distaned learning’ draws on previous forms of remote or distance learning suh as ‘home schooling’ draws on strategies and practices grounded in emergency education, such as piortitizing learners’ emotional and social well-being Has exposed deep disparities in access to and quality of distance learning options, e.g. In Washigton, DC, for example, educators iare n the process of launching the transition to remote learning found that 30% of the city’s students had access at home, e.g. story told by a 16-year-old student who had to split here day between caring for her 3-year old brother, sharing the family’s only laptop with her other brother, and trying to keep up with her own work in the late afternoons in the family’s carl.
- According to the World Bank and other international organizations, the world was already in the midst of an education crisis long before the onset of the pandemic. Numbers are from the World Bank Report 2018: Learning to Realize Education’s Promise. Examples of competeinces needed for life and work: critical and innovative thinking, teamwork, negotiation and communication
- SDL is distringuished by abruptness of the transition from school to home, left no time for preparation, training or planning. because learning must take place at a distance, both teachers and learners are deprived of face-to-face social interactions (fundamentally human) causes the roles of all involved to shift problems in access to tools requires quick and agile adaptation new kinds of expertise, e.g. coaching parents, oonsoling students, tecoming a tech wizard creativity The crisis is unprecedented, requires development of an unprecedented or novel form of distance learning. Not the same as home schooling or online coures (both of these are replictions of fae-to-face classroom learning and are options chosen by students or their families, although this novel form draws from both of those). All of these have begun to emerge in the amazing stories and reports of how families, children and teachers have made SDL work and the difficulties they have faced over the last 8 weeks.
- From these stories and reports, social distanced learning seems to be evolving in four stages (read). stages are overlapping, first three are currently taking place, moving in the direction of innovation and beginning to anticipate what stage 4 might look like. Something like” repairing an airplane mid-flight.” examples from across the US Across the US, the first few weeks consisted of urgent responses, i.e. how to provide access by expanding existing infrastructures and rapidly mobilizing other avenues for making learning happen under lockdown. As in other experiences, this urgent response phase took shape with incredible speed and though the combined effort of ‘education first responders’ includng school administrators, teachers, counselors, librarians cafeteria workers and bus drivers together with non-profit groups. This phase was, and continues to be, about finding out what students and their families need, putting into place the tools to make it happen, and supporting students mental and physical health, while the seond phase ‘amelioration’ focuses more on how to improve the quality of learning, for example by figuring out what combinations of online learning, other educational media such as television and radio, distribution and pickup of print materials, and social and emotional support are most responses to family and community needs. We are in more or less the eighth week of socially distanced learning at every level, with hope fading that schools will physically reconvene until September at the earliest. Ideally, this will usher in a new phase of the transition that will inspire innovation, both technical and educational, for example new tools for continuous or formative assessment and data gathering that will result in a much better and engaging experience, better avenues for addressing and supporting the learning of children with special needs.
- Based on the many testionies and reports from parents, teachers and learners on how things are going, which range from terrible to more or less OK, advice can be boiled down to five underlying guiding principles, not just for socially distanced learning but for life during lockdown. Could also be put, “How to live thorugh this without going insane.”I am doubtful these guiding princples would solve all problems, but just a way of keeping on course while maintaining a sense of direction during these very difficult times. Be kind – to yourself and others, give yourself a break. Listen to children and encourage them to express their emotions and develop strategies for regulating them Have a schedule and stick to it, Again, applies to everyone involved in the teaching-learning cycle. Revisit regularly to see what needs to be adjusted to meet changing demands, maybe more play time is needed or more play time, more strucutred learning time, or less screen time. Stay healthy, this is perhaps the most fundamental. Practicing all of the actions, including social distancing as well as exercising, eating well, staying away from screens ½ hour before bedtime. Pace yourself, try not to become obsessed with meeting impossible goals, take breaks, balance different types of tasks. Stay connected. Even though we are separated physically from students, and students are separated from each other, maintain social contacts using whativer tools available. Not only video chats and texts, but telephone calls, snail mail, publicly displayed art work, signs or concerts, children performing on a balcony for elderly neighbors, teachers driving by the homes of their students with large signs, waving from their cars.
- Ideal, but would require close supervision is it possible for parents who are themselves working? Might be able to transition of a self-monitored and self-paced routine. The sample story book here is an example of the many new resources available for parents and children by different organizations and media producers to help fill in gaps and, in this case, to provide children with more understanding of the virus and to manage their feelings and emotions.
- Teachers in most instances are the orchestrators (not always) in that they set up the learning goals, plans and assignments, but parents (or older siblings) are the facilitators. Must manage time, act as teaching aides, procurers of supplies and equipment, enforce healthy preventive actions, and provide nutritious meals and snacks. As much as possible, engage children in these chores. making them into a learning experience. In this case, the child is helping make a shake but also counting and working with shapes and colors, maybe even engaging with the technology. Added to all this, parents in coordination with teachers may be responsbile for assessing and recording data on the child or children’s progress.
- In order to thrive on distance learning of any kind, learners must become more self-reliant and mature. With the added restrictions of socially distanced learning in which learners are quaranteened together with other sibligns and adults with their own obligations and responsibilities, one objective of the the teacher-parent support team is to come up with activities that build self directed learning skills, such as research into a topic involving different forms of media and activities. Not easy, but if possible draw upon or build up a bank of such projects suitable for each level and aligned with the school curriculum. Give support (rewards) when children show that they are learning to self-pace and accomplish things on their own or in small or pairswith minimal supervision.
- Teachers are in the front lines of the urgent response, suddently confronted with situations in when they must become tech wizards adept at managing virual clsssrooms, conferencing frequently with distraught parents, consoling an counseling students. May be the main creators as well as curators of content, as in this example from China, in which the formal lassroom experience is moved to YouTube or an educational television channel.
- This possible framework for setting into motion the ‘amelioration’ stage, following ‘urgent responses’ for providing access and continuity. After the urgent response, how can we make the learning experience more responsive to the students’ needs in in this particularl time of the Covid-19 emergency? This graphic suggests a framework for possibly rethinking priorities, for example in a direction that focuses on building skills for emotional well-being and healthy social relationships alongside knowledge and skills for maintaining physical and mental health to help students understand and deal with the situation they are in. At the same time, cognitive knowledge and skills should occupy a strong space in the socially distanced learning plan, more so in the higher primar and secondary levels, so that students will be able to successfullly merge back into the school curriculum once the pandemic is over and schools are re-opened. Overall, in the process of adapting plans for learning at a distance, the hope is that more of a balance among these four lerning areas can be achieved in ways that both help students cope with their current situation as well as prepare them for the transition back to a ‘new normal’.
- Socially distanced learning is by definition a form of distance learning, the main difference being that it must take place in isolated groups, usually in the affected countries thus far small, nuclear families consistng of 2-5 members. Distance learning with a twist, i.e. the restriction that prevents children from social contacts with other children and adults. Three assumptions about distance elarning. To date, enough solid, unbiased research to prove that this is the case. Evidence is largely individual and anecdotal. Definitely untrue, has been operating widely since the 1700s as paper and print driven ‘correstpondence schools’, later using low techologies such as two-way radio, eductional television. Unknowln, one of the most salient questions that ‘Socially distanced learning in the time of COVID 19 will address.
- This chart shows the range of options in deploying distance learning hardware and software, together with the advantabes and drawbacks of each. The question is, how to use the options, in what combinations, to best respond to learner needs? If the objective is to run live classrooms, then the high tech solution using web conferening platforms like Zoom or Google classrooms is adventageious, but it has drawbacks Most distance learning programmes, whether or not in emergencies, make use of more than one level of technology and combine different forms of media. For example, two-way radio combined with textbook, worksheets and other activities have been operating successfully in Austrailia since the 1950’s. Mexico has a well established educational TV channel now adapting to provide lessons in line with the curriculum. In another, health crisis related example, durng the Ebola outbreak in parts of West Africa in 2014, 1 million children were reached through radio education while in isolation. This program provided radios, programming, and trained young adults as facilitators to lead ‘listening groups’ within the isolated communies. During the amelioration and innovation stages, SDL is drawing from a full range of options, not relying solely on online platforms.
- Mandated and enforced by governments a greater or lesser degree to contain the spread of a pandemic, so learning facilitated by teachers and others outside the family group is restricted to these channels. Yet there are signs that people are becoming more connected than ever, albeit in different ways.
- Both the pandemic and school closures will come to an end, but how will the ‘new normal’ look like? What lessons from SDL might be applied to school and classroom based learning? Continuum, formal school based learninga at one end. Distance learning models reflect either approach, but often have components of both. Example: televising classrooms contains elements of both, is teacher cetnered, aligned with the system curriculum, but flexible in terms of delivery and can use etiher continuous or summative assessment tools, Zoom or Google classroom replicates the in-place classroom environment, but can also foster student cetnered learning, for example by having children show and discuss a self-made video. ds Do we throw out the old while embracing the new? Is more and higher technology always better? Independent reading using an old-fashioned, print book.
- We can be fairly certain that the pandemic will come to an end and that schools will re-open. When is another question. In my state, they will not re-open until September, and that is contingent upon whether or not there will be a second wave. So the question ‘What will the ‘new normal’ look like? If schools begin to re-open in the coming months, as they have in Sweden, Denmark and Japan, will there still be a need for social distancing? In closing, I’d like to concur with the idea that has been floating in the interntional eduction community for some time now, and especially since the adoption of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and that is that the global education crisis opens an window of opportunity for change toward vision of education for global citizenship and sustainable development, or more simply put, educaton for people and planet. The sudden onset of the Covid-19 pandemic and the havoc it has wreaked in our lives should teach us how to be better prepared for the next one, whether it is another health crisis, and economic disaster or the ongoing environmental disaster caused by climate change. As put by Ivana Solova , president of the Comparative International Education Society, ‘the business as usual of education has been fundamentally disrupted’. Can we begin re-imagine education in the context of our schools and lifelong learning settings in ways that reduce inequities and root out the caues of conflict and environmental degradation. At the level os schools and classrooms, can we learn from the experience of socially distanced learning in ways that bring parents and the community into more central roles Can we help to make our human socieiies kinder and more caring places to live and work Or do we simply return to the old normal?
- Is there a silver lining? In the view of Dr. Jane Goodall, , the renowned primatologist , what happens next is up to us, but we must listen to the message mother nature is sending us. Dr. blames the pandemic largely on the exploitation and trafficking of wild animals for food, stressed again in her Earth Day message to the world d again the importance of teaching generations how interconnected we are with the natural world. We are all interconnected. And if we don’t get that lesson from this pandemic maybe we never will.”
- Internet is exploding with free resources for parents, teachers, and (more limited, by and for learners) This is just a sampling of some that shine light on some of the issues I’ve touched on during this talk.