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DISTANCE LEARNING

By Kendra Capen

Each year it starts with the same question: “You’re already back in school?” Followed by the same answer: “Yup, I work at a year-round school.”

That usually spawns a confused look — so I explain:

A year-round schedule starts earlier in the summer and has more breaks spread throughout the year. The classic school schedule has nine weeks or so of summer break, but we have only four. My school starts mid-July, has a three-week fall break in September, and an extra week at end-of-year “holidays” and spring break.

It’s a great schedule for teachers and students — we all get relatively short breaks from each other at regular intervals, and there’s less “relearning” when we’re all back at our desks. Parents and school districts, on the other hand, generally hate it. So I am surprised each new school year when my medium-large district still lets a handful of schools operate on a non-traditional schedule.

Because a year-round school is kind of a novelty, it often gets overlooked in the normal school-district endeavors. We always like to gripe that nothing is ever ready for us.

But not this year! With the pandemic, most schools were already closed, not to reopen until August or September. However, we were scheduled to restart in July. We quickly became the teaching equivalent of crash-test dummies.

While most parents, teachers, and school administrators were debating how distance learning would look for the new school year starting in late summer, my school had to jump into it a month or more earlier — with frighteningly little preparation. We had to take to the road without a map.

In some ways, we got off easy. The school district and teachers’ union negotiated a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) remarkably quickly. Of the state-mandated instructional minutes (which varied by grade level), teachers would be responsible for about 20 percent “synchronous instruction” — live teaching via Zoom. The rest of the time would be asynchronous: individual learning with worksheets, assigned projects, and/or learning software. The only other requirement was that teachers hold two hours of weekly “office hours.”

The MoU had a fair amount of flexibility built in. We could set our own class times (within existing contract hours), deviate from the standard curriculum, and choose to work from either our home or the classroom. Despite a lot of anxiety leading up to the start, it almost seemed manageable.

To my pleasant surprise, the start of distance learning has been not just manageable, but kind of exciting. After seven years of teaching kindergarten, I’d gotten into a groove — not a rut, but a comfortable predictability.

Now, I’m re-imagining and adapting my formerly set lessons. My grade-level peers and I printed out mini-books and worksheets, we compiled basic supplies like pencils and crayons, and we included more-specific staples such as flashcards and hands-on learning materials. We have organized drive-throughs every few weeks so that parents can return completed work and pick up new assignments.

Obviously, the Internet is a key component of remote schooling. After a slow start, I finally have all my parents connected to the messaging app ClassDojo. I’ve actually used this site to connect with parents for several years now. But this is the first year I have 100 percent participation.

ClassDojo frees me from setting up email lists or giving parents my personal cellphone number. I use the service to post class pictures, send messages to individual parents, alert parents to important events — and send a reminder to Susie that she cannot Zoom while lying down in her bed.

I’ve had good technology support from my district, too. It adopted Google Apps for Education (GAFE) — not for the pandemic, but several years ago. All enrolled students have a unique district username and password.

Over the past four years, a special group of educators — Teacher Technology Leaders (TTLs) — has helped their peers adapt to new technology. As a TTL for my school, I’ve held classroom-tech training sessions for my coworkers, covering topics such as Google Classroom and Google Single sign-on. Unfortunately, too many of my peers were slow to embrace these new avenues for teaching — so when the pandemic hit, it was sink or swim within a few weeks.

Many of the students in my district come from low-income and minority families. Nevertheless, it found the resources to provide every student at my school with a Chromebook and, where needed, a hotspot (for those who lacked an Internet connection at home). That the district could pull this feat off was pure luck. This past February, it had ordered and taken delivery of the new machines to replace aging and dying hardware.

The district also gave my school full access to high-quality educational software, including Raz-Kids (supports reading), IXL (math and language arts), and MobyMax. In past years, the subscription level for this software was set by each school. (Some chose to distribute their funds elsewhere.) Now, every student has equal access to these online learning tools — and the district went a step further by investing in Clever, a single-sign-on portal that lets students use one password for all online resources.

I’m now into a month of distance teaching. A typical day looks like this: My students sign in to their Chromebooks with their Google/school-district credentials. They click the icon for Google Classroom, find the link for Zoom, and join my class at 8:30. We learn together for 30 minutes. This is kindergarten, so I use videos from YouTube and show hard-copy materials with my iPad. We play games and share work — and also do lots of audio muting and unmuting.

We end class by counting down from 10. After the Zoom class, I post an assignment in Google Classroom. I also include a video that walks my students through their assigned work.

A new mom, I teach three days a week from my classroom and two days a week from home. Given the daily stress we all face, it’s nice to have that flexibility.

As I mentioned above, my year-round school was something of a test case for the school district. But now my established workflow is changing. It’s September, and the traditional schools in my district are opening with a new MoU.

It wasn’t easy reaching an agreement between the district and the union. The sticking point? It wasn’t in-person versus distance, it was synchronous (live teaching via Zoom) versus asynchronous (worksheet, projects, etc.) — originally divided 20 percent/80 percent. My new MoU is now 45 percent synchronous time.

This is a dramatic change, but not necessarily a bad one — it should significantly increase the quality of learning. But it could be tough on parents who are juggling work, home learning for multiple kids, and everything else. Still, I’m thankful that my district erred on the side of caution early on. I believe it’s done its best to engage with distance learning in an organized and, most importantly, equitable way.

Kendra Capen teaches kindergarten in California’s San Francisco Bay Area. She loves applied technology that enriches her life and the lives of others. She is also a passionate crafter, and her most visited website is Ravelry.

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