Remote Schooling in a Pandemic

One lake’s width away from the American epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak, my K-12 independent school knew we’d have to respond quickly and in concert with peer schools to deal effectively with the crisis. As the Director of Technology, I felt all eyes turn to me when words like “extended closure” and “educational continuity plan” began leaping back and forth across the conference table.

How do we keep running our program (or most of our program) when it’s too dangerous for students to partake in the part of school they like the best? That is: hanging out with their friends. If students are about to be thrust into a radically different context, why would it make sense for teachers to assume they can deliver program in the same manner?

I knew from the outset that this would take more than continuity. It would take ingenuity. We were going to have to rethink how to engage with each other, not just figure out how to offer our quizzes online. Teachers were beginning to express panic and use reams of paper to copy worksheets that they had no evidence would carry students through a closure of unknown (and possibly extending) length.

When my Head of School texted me over the weekend to ask whether an in-service day of tech training would be a good idea, I knew it would, but that tech training would be deadly. This was never going to fly if we only thought about cramming teachers’ brains full of as many online learning tools as we could in a mercilessly short timeframe. No amount of me thinking I had the answers was going to work. So we rethunk.

After one day of in-house professional development and launched remote schooling this week. Guess what: it worked. (Mostly.) Our schedule for the day is here, but that won’t really explain why we did it this way.

How did we start?

First, we avoided thinking about technology as long as possible in order to center student experience. This required reframing how we spoke to faculty. Instead of an “extended closure plan” or “days off,” we spoke of “campus closure” and “remote schooling.” Instead of holding “technology training,” we offered a design thinking charrette followed by tools & techniques workshops and time for prototyping with colleagues.

The core task was to reimagine the experience of our students in the new context in which they find themselves, as well as our part in continuing to craft a valuable part of it while they were away from us. For this I adapted this design charrette format from the University of Washington’s department of Human Centered Design and Egineering. In order to identify qualities of student experience at different ages and to minimize the focus on content, we asked teachers to group themselves similarly by grade level, and differentially by subject area.

Then we gave them a key challenge: Design an at-home learning experience that helps a student maintain a sense of community.

Individually, teachers brainstormed different kinds of students they might need to serve: the wiggly kid, the serious kid, the class clown. They aggregated these into personae and chose one persona to focus on.

Ideating needs that students might encounter through the day, we thought about the activities students might be engaging in at home into which we’d eventually weave our educational challenges to them. We stack ranked these needs, thinking about the needs that were the most pressing for students and those on which we might have the most impact.

Again, we aggregated needs into categories and translated these into problems to be solved: How might we engender a sense of community? How might we lift spirits? How might we create touchpoints when we can’t see each other?

Finally, for our chosen student persona, we drew their journey from waking in the morning right up until the moment they engage in our learning experience for them — but not the learning experience itself (yet).

Teachers shared with each other, both virtually and in person. And as I listened to the widely varied views on student experience, I felt deeply moved by the ingenuity of my colleagues and confident that we were entering this challenge from an empathic angle. In the end we had generated too many insights to share, and the pump was primed for beginning to prototype with student experience at the center.

Rebuilding the Box

With teachers sufficiently outside their comfort zones and focused on the needs of their learners, the task became helping to build a new box that honors their educational objectives, even as it responds to the new context of the students.

Our Academic Dean helped me to craft the plan for the PD day, and her suggestions included stopping the design charrette right before the prototyping phase and more time for working with peers by faculty choice, which is perfect prototyping time anyway. So that new plans could be dynamically integrated with new skills, we wrapped ample prototyping time around two sessions of Tools & Techniques workshops.

A technology integrator from each of three divisions and two librarians joined me in offering a slate of skill-building hour-long workshops designed to get teachers up and running quickly with a focus on how to use the tool to manage student experience. This worked much better than guiding them to a slough of online “resources” that didn’t have our school pedagogy and culture in mind. It also allowed them to identify exactly whom to contact with questions about each tool.

By the end of the day, the mood was palpably calmer, and teachers were eagerly sharing tips with each other and expressing more gratitude than panic.

Achieving Liftoff

The following day was open for teachers to finalize plans and align expectations for students. The IT team checked out equipment to families needing additional technology resources, and I spent the day being late to every meeting I’d scheduled.

We had already determined that keeping tabs on the emotional health of students would be one of our biggest challenges. So, perhaps most important was my meeting with our Support Services department, where we identified and implemented systems that would enable our counselors and learning difference specialists to be maximally available to students.

I found myself doing more on-demand application-level tech support than I had in years, and it gave me a concrete sense of how to scale that support in subsequent online trainings and targeted tutorial videos.

The subsequent days were a scramble of implementations that I thought we might not need for years, including off-site IP telephone consoles, school-wide teleconferencing accounts, pen tablets, online whiteboarding options, and automated closed captioning for video conferencing.

At the same time that it was important for the IT department to let go of some of the well-established communication channels to accommodate panicked teachers who saw their task as unprecedented, it was also key to create communication methods tuned to the circumstance, including a catchment for family needs and faculty/staff needs. So we allowed folks to bypass the help ticketing system with personal emails, and built online forms to quantify equipment needs for families and implementation and deployment needs for faculty.

So how goes it?

After three days of remote schooling, families are giving positive feedback. Teachers’ learning has progressed tremendously, and they are now making very specific asks of IT, aligned with their educational goals.

We plan to assess this coming week, after one full week of schooling, as we go into parent conferences (also to be held online). The admin team will meet to write the questions. I’ve asked technology integrators to join us in writing those questions so that they can keep tabs on how effective their support has been.