Remote learning : What we learnt about it from students, parent and teachers

We've been looking at survey feedback from students, parents and teachers regarding remote learning; in a College with 5,500 students, there's a lot of data to look at!  And it's important to look carefully for several reasons.

The most obvious reason is to understand what's going on; always a challenge in any organization, but far more so under campus closure and remote learning.  There are a couple of dangers here, both summarised by this image.  The first danger is to do what most teachers do - focus on the small number of negative comments and let them outweigh the vast majority of very positive ones.  That can lead to knee-jerk responses and must be avoided.   The second danger is equally seductive - to dismiss the small number of negative comments as they are so outweighed by the positives!   When teachers are working harder than ever on the new skills of remote teaching, this might be easy to do.  But as Bill Gates famously said - your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.   So looking at all the data, neutrally (hard, when some comments are so emotive) and thoughtfully is hard, but necessary.

Even more important is to look beyond the individual anecdotes and stories.  Or in the classic metaphor, to look under the waterline of the iceberg of events to see what bigger systems and values underpin them.  The first level of 'pattern-spotting' (see graphic) is to narrow down and aggregate the data - so we find that in our High School:

• 6% of parents say their children are 'struggling to adjust', 41% 'adjusting with challenges' and 56% 'well adjusted',
• 2% say their children are 'not engaged' with 43% 'somewhat engaged' and 55% 'highly engaged' 

We can then begin to ask more interesting questions about the patterns we see:

• What are the specific struggles and challenges?  Is there anything common about the students who are facing those challenges?  If so, what interventions might help?  What has worked elsewhere?  Might it work here?
• We like students to be challenged, so what are the right challenges here?  Is 'adjusting with challenges' something to celebrate or worry about?  Could it even be preferable to 'well adjusted'?
• How we can we measure engagement under remote learning?  Or, for that matter even in class - what would teachers have reported about engagement before remote learning?

One layer down in the iceberg, we get to look at structures.  In HS we are following a school academic timetable, with a mentor meeting followed by 4 x 80 minutes lessons.  But the feedback tells us that everyone finds 80 minutes lessons online to be far from optimal.  We are therefore adjusting lessons structure to include breaks from the screen too.  But that's in the short term - if we were to go on for longer, should we abandon this lesson structure altogether?  Or here's another question; we have class sizes dictated by face-to-face traditions.  But we could have class sizes of hundreds online!  As we are going back in a few weeks, there's no point in disrupting any more than we need to now - but it's a question that is clearly implied as soon as we think of structures.  What would we gain?  What would we lose?  And who would gain and who would lose?

What's been most interesting, though, is to look at the base of the iceberg to see what fundamental mental models emerge when we ask people to reflect on remote learning.  These models express the deeply felt, even often unconsciously held beliefs about what education should be.  These beliefs often come from our own schooling, even though most of us want for our own kids a very different  - that is, better -  experience than what we had all those decades ago!

One mental model that has emerged is that for some, examinations are at the centre of what we do, and how we even know how students are progressing (addressing that was the topic of last week's post).  Another is about how, for some, the tighter the control over students, the better - that any independence leads to the danger that students will waste time.  Also emerging are differing deep-seated ideas of what wasting time even is (topic of this earlier post)!  Furthermore, underlying all these, perhaps, are the different metaphors we use to think about school; are they Factories to turn out a product?  Homes to nurture and care for students?   Or  Prisons to keep them locked up during the day?   These fundamentally and radically different paradigms clearly inform judgements about remote learning from our community (for more on these and other metaphors, see this post).

In any large and diverse organisation it's not surprising that there are divergent views; that's diversity for you!  The challenge is to openly name these divergences, to respect where they come from, and critically to embrace them as opportunities to better understand each other.  They offer the rare possibility for deep and meaningful engagement.  There's no quick solution here, but it's the work that will, over years, make most difference.