Remote Learning in the time of pandemic
The Covid-19 Pandemic was a worldwide tragedy and effected every aspect of our lives.
Schools around the world were amazing in their creative responses to supporting students and families.
At school, students feel safe, have stability/structure & are surrounded by friends & teachers who care about them.
The challenge for schools was to focus on the best ways to remotely & creatively replicate their normal systems of support & learning to continue and engage students/families at a distance.
Simple put - during Covid-19 lockdowns we were physically distant, but we needed to be emotionally close.
Schools were able to implement a variety of apps and platforms to engage students - in our mind the app or platform utilised was not the key thing. Teachers need to reach out each day to their students and provide them with engaging, enjoyable activities whilst catering to the students emotional needs and well-being.
We believe that aspects of remote, flexible learning done well, reflected many facets of our S.O.L.E. philosophy.
Students who were experienced with S.O.L.E. were able to self organise aspects of their learning. They were more comfortable because they knew about making their own decisions and thinking their way through different challenges.
Our hope is that the Covid-19 disaster promoted more progressive paradigms of learning.
Systems and teachers showed their capacity to adapt and adjust. Whether schools and systems were able to embrace future learning possibilities which empowered students once students returned back to school fulltime is another challenge.
Remote online learning revealed many things and one was social inequity - students from vulnerable families who didn’t have a suitable device or WiFi tended to fall further behind despite the best efforts of the teachers. For those students who already were disengaged or at risk the outcomes may be irreparable.
It is so obvious each day... Teachers & Schools make the difference... relationships and emotions are the most critical things in learning.
We were blown away with the variety of student responses using online platforms - creativity & lateral thinking is obvious in student choices of learning evidence through video, photos, writing, online interactive tasks, sound bites, journals etc. Students are Self Organising many of their responses... self organising learning provides choice.
Choice = Engagement = Learning.
Variability in teacher attitudes & capacity to develop warm, trusting relationships with students was highlighted even more in remote learning - no surprises that students who had been encouraged & supported by positive teachers and who were comfortable enough making more decisions about their learning adjusted reasonably well to the new landscape and embraced the change.
Translating term planners created for face-to-face learning into engaging experiences delivered remotely to students was challenging on many levels; so too, the urgency to develop new skills to enable this - that’s what many teachers around the world were able to achieve. Kudos to our great "chalkies".
In order to advance you have to be creative, otherwise, you just repeat the things that have already been created or commonly adhered to - your thinking is the same as it always was... Covid-19 certainly gave teachers a reality check in terms of creative responses, trying new things to engage students and as a result there was more trust and control given to students. Teachers really were forced to do this.
The question now is what positive aspects of this experience have teachers adopted into their individual practice and has a return to the old status quo meant a return to the same old, same old?
How many Principals & teachers will revert to the same teacher centered processes they’ve always used?
How many will use the learnings from this Pandemic experience to move closer to empowering students and implementing aspects of self-organising?
Let's hope the lessons learned will drive positive changes in schools. We can go back to "normal and tradition".... or we can...???
Schools around the world were amazing in their creative responses to supporting students and families.
At school, students feel safe, have stability/structure & are surrounded by friends & teachers who care about them.
The challenge for schools was to focus on the best ways to remotely & creatively replicate their normal systems of support & learning to continue and engage students/families at a distance.
Simple put - during Covid-19 lockdowns we were physically distant, but we needed to be emotionally close.
Schools were able to implement a variety of apps and platforms to engage students - in our mind the app or platform utilised was not the key thing. Teachers need to reach out each day to their students and provide them with engaging, enjoyable activities whilst catering to the students emotional needs and well-being.
We believe that aspects of remote, flexible learning done well, reflected many facets of our S.O.L.E. philosophy.
Students who were experienced with S.O.L.E. were able to self organise aspects of their learning. They were more comfortable because they knew about making their own decisions and thinking their way through different challenges.
Our hope is that the Covid-19 disaster promoted more progressive paradigms of learning.
Systems and teachers showed their capacity to adapt and adjust. Whether schools and systems were able to embrace future learning possibilities which empowered students once students returned back to school fulltime is another challenge.
Remote online learning revealed many things and one was social inequity - students from vulnerable families who didn’t have a suitable device or WiFi tended to fall further behind despite the best efforts of the teachers. For those students who already were disengaged or at risk the outcomes may be irreparable.
It is so obvious each day... Teachers & Schools make the difference... relationships and emotions are the most critical things in learning.
We were blown away with the variety of student responses using online platforms - creativity & lateral thinking is obvious in student choices of learning evidence through video, photos, writing, online interactive tasks, sound bites, journals etc. Students are Self Organising many of their responses... self organising learning provides choice.
Choice = Engagement = Learning.
Variability in teacher attitudes & capacity to develop warm, trusting relationships with students was highlighted even more in remote learning - no surprises that students who had been encouraged & supported by positive teachers and who were comfortable enough making more decisions about their learning adjusted reasonably well to the new landscape and embraced the change.
Translating term planners created for face-to-face learning into engaging experiences delivered remotely to students was challenging on many levels; so too, the urgency to develop new skills to enable this - that’s what many teachers around the world were able to achieve. Kudos to our great "chalkies".
In order to advance you have to be creative, otherwise, you just repeat the things that have already been created or commonly adhered to - your thinking is the same as it always was... Covid-19 certainly gave teachers a reality check in terms of creative responses, trying new things to engage students and as a result there was more trust and control given to students. Teachers really were forced to do this.
The question now is what positive aspects of this experience have teachers adopted into their individual practice and has a return to the old status quo meant a return to the same old, same old?
How many Principals & teachers will revert to the same teacher centered processes they’ve always used?
How many will use the learnings from this Pandemic experience to move closer to empowering students and implementing aspects of self-organising?
Let's hope the lessons learned will drive positive changes in schools. We can go back to "normal and tradition".... or we can...???
