More Questions Than Answers - Teaching and Learning From Home

Hard to believe we are into our fourth week of learning from home for Term 2. It has been incredible seeing the thinking that is coming out from the community around learning from home.

I have loved the blog posts from several educators and in particular, Robin Sutton. In his latest post, he spoke about a hunch he had, and many educators from around NZ agreed with the idea.

Excerpt from Robins blog post in blue

His hunch went like this.
"We can divide our learners into four groups.
1. Those high flyers who will be just that, regardless of how we 'deliver' or 'cause' their learning. Here is an example of that from Jessica. We have many others.
2. Those students who sit in the middle, whose engagement in school is variable, from whom we get the usual range of work from poor to great results, dependent on how successful we are in grabbing their attention and engaging them (in my opinion their range of engagement is more a result of what we do .. as a system .. than what they do).
3. Those students who attend school some or most of the time but with whom we struggle to get much meaningful engagement.
4. Those students who do not engage, and with whom we work hard as we support them through a range of social and psychosocial issues created by anything from poverty, to mental or physical health challenges, to those who have been seriously damaged by societal problems that are beyond their control".

Thinking about supporting children's learning, I reflected on what I have seen in the work I do with Manaiakalani and as a parent to my children.
I have listed some of the powerful things that I have noticed. I believe learning at home has so many variables that we need to be very flexible and agile to meet everyone's needs.

Here are my thoughts.

Leaders and Teachers

• Limit the links - Manaiakalani's consistent message since the start of lockdown
• Plan carefully to empower your staff, and community, e.g. make all the school learning sites a similar design to support navigation. Ensure the layout for learning is consistent and doesn't change drastically from lesson to lesson or over time.
• Communicate with your community regularly via live streams, video and text, especially at the start - e.g. Jo Earl - principal message to the community.
• Use platforms that do not require passwords or class codes, e.g. Google Site compared to Google Classroom - remove as many barriers as possible for the whānau.
• Get parents, teachers and student voices, especially now we have settled into this new space.
• Regularly reflect on what is working and what is not.
• Offer parents, teachers and student's a chance to share their voices.
• Share your own experiences and learnings about Learning From Home.
• Take time to create for yourself - experiment with the tools your staff and students are using, see what the enablers and barriers are.
• Support other teachers and students by making your teaching visible - we have a wealth of knowledge, so let's share it
• There are days it just will not work! Relax, take it easy - tomorrow will be better.

When you connect the questions below with the four groups Robin speaks about, how would these questions look for each group?

Questions for Leaders and Teachers

• The hook - how are you enticing learners to engage? Why should they engage?
• Do your students have a choice about their learning at a deeper level than just being able to click different learning links? Is there a learning focus to go with the links? Do the learners know the purpose of the learning? What learning do you want to cause with the activity?
• Are you catering for all four groups - some kids won't want to learn - how could you engage them?
• What are you doing to connect with students and whānau and further develop these relationships? 
• Are your expectations at the right level for all four groups - how do you set expectations so all learners feel they can succeed?
• Are some of your students ready for face to face discussions and critical thinking about learning online? How can you extend these students while supporting the others? Does collaborative space have more opportunities to do this with multiple teachers?
• Are there rewindable learning opportunities created by you using interactive sites (e.g Google Arts and Culture), video, audio and text to engage students?
• Do you offer opportunities for students and whānau to connect with you? How do you manage this while still balancing daily workload?
• What opportunities are there for students to share and celebrate their work?
• How do you support Whānau to support their children in self-managing their learning at home?

There are lots of questions in this post and depending on where your school was before the lockdown some will be more relevant than others.

This is an exciting time to be involved in education and I really look forward to what the future holds for all our learners.