To Meet or Not to Meet? That is the Question!

To Meet or Not to Meet?

That is the Question!

A White Paper by Art. Play. Learn.

It is a curious time. We are all balancing our need for protecting our personal health and welfare with protecting our livelihood. Some have a wider safety net on the livelihood side that allows them a less stressful balancing act. Others are riding a proverbial tightrope. For those of us who administer educational programs, we find ourselves constantly encountering the question: to meet or not to meet.

And it is not an easy question to answer.

On the one hand, there are real public health dangers to congregating, especially in enclosed spaces and made more dangerous with a rise in attendance and a longer amount of time involved. Here is a really great, in-depth analysis of the situation if you’re interested1.

On the other hand, there is eventually going to be a whole community of parents who have not been able to telework and who will need to go back to work as soon as their businesses are allowed to open. We have already seen what has happened as Governor Hogan has announced Phase 1 openings which included an announcement that day care spots will be available to the parents who are now “allowed� to go to work and the backlash from the day care industry2. It appears that only some day cares have been given the green light to open at all and that the expectation is that they maintain social distancing requirements while continuing to serve the families of essential workers and

adding the children of “non-essential” workers. The confounding logistics of this appear to have gone unconsidered.

There will inevitably also be parents who don’t need child care for their kids but who want some distance from them. These parents aren’t as concerned about infection, possibly because it has been widely circulated that kids are at less risk of acute illness and death.

Here are my concerns.

1. Most kids haven’t been exposed to any germs outside of their own household for about 2 months at this point. We know that the first thing that happens when you put your child in their first environment where they mingle with people from other households is that they get sick. They bring those germs home and everyone else gets sick- usually three or more times sicker than the child who brought the germs home. So just by opening day cares, much less schools, we are likely to see the number of new cases sky-rocket, assuming people are able to be tested.

2. There is a “new” variant or perhaps better stated as a new observation of how COVID19 has probably been affecting children that was not talked about widely up until now. It is an extreme inflammatory response now being called MIS-C or Pediatric Multi-system Inflammatory Response. Doctors are still calling it rare even though it was documented in at least 7 other countries, has affected at least 123 children in New York, 20 children in Washington DC and undisclosed numbers in at least 17 other states.3

If we look at the two concerns together, it makes for a troubling scenario for the fall when schools are scheduled to reopen. We are potentially taking thousands of kids in our local area surrounding Washington DC who have not been exposed to any germs outside of their own house since midMarch and exposing them to children from at least 19 other households, not to mention the households that the adults come from.

Before you say, “yeah, but the rate of kids getting infected at all is relatively low and doctors are saying MIS-C is rare,” consider this. It is very likely that the reason most kids around the world did not get infected at all is because we immediately isolated them at home. The general level of exposure to COVID19 for kids has been quite low compared to adults who continued to go to work and/or on errand running. There is no way to know just how many kids will get sick once they return to an enclosed space for 6 hours per day surrounded by people they do not live with. The rates of infection may have looked very different if we had kept schools open in March under the impression that kids won’t get it anyway and if they do it will be mild. Numbers of infections in school-aged kids might have been much higher. Add to that the seriousness of MIS-C and it makes for quite a conundrum for education administrators.

This is not easy.

There is incredible pressure from many sides to get back to in-person instruction, between parents who feel/ are ill-prepared to support learning from home and educators who freaked out at the onset (and have yet to let up) about the inevitable learning loss and the parents who are then put into a frenzy by these freaked-out educators.

So let’s put it in perspective.

1. Well-planned, well-executed distance learning can be as or more effective for most students.11 When we were thrust into the COVID19 shut-down, we had little to no time to prepare, little to no understanding of just how long we would be out of school, and little to no understanding of how state/federal laws regulating schools would be adjusted in response to needing to keep schools closed for the duration of the school year. Some places and some teachers were better positioned than others which meant that there were lots of equity issues that emerged.

The situation for the fall is completely different. We have solved some of the biggest issues in most places by providing devices and internet access to many who did not have access when schools first closed. Are there still some students who are in need of support on that level?

Yes. But there are far fewer than there were. Additionally, we have all summer long to adjust curriculum, train teachers on how to provide high quality instruction (not just materials, resources and assignments), create materials that work in a distance learning environment, learn which tools actually help and which are a waste of money, train parents and students on how to continue to learn without going to a school building, and to solve how to reach the small percentage of students for whom the obstacles still stand. The sooner we commit to a strategy the better the preparation for it will go.

Distance learning in the fall should not look anything like what it looked like on March 17th.

Distance learning affords us the tools to meet all students where they are rather than having to, for logistics-sake, group students by age and move on whether everyone is with us or not or hold back students who have already mastered the objectives. More on this later.

2. Taking a step back and restructuring what we teach and how we teach is long overdue anyway.

We have been stuck in a hamster wheel in education for the past 20 some years ever since No Child Left Behind broke the system on a fundamental level. In addition to the percentage of time educators and admnistrators are now required to dedicate to what I call “education accounting” in and of itself that keeps them from practicing the work of educating and administrating an educational environment, it has also contributed to the following.

Lack of Family Engagement The mistrust between parents and school staff on both sides has fueled a disconnect that does not serve anyone. Schools do their best to keep parents out, except for fund raisers, to limit “interference” and complaints about how things are done.

Parents, feeling like glorified wallets, lose trust in teachers and principals, not to mention administrative offices. Teachers fear having to talk to parents. Parents are frustrated with the lack of knowledge they have about what goes on in the classroom and the school. School staff blame everything on parents. Parents assume school staff are incompetent or just don’t care. The cycle undermines everyone and unties our community connections that we so desperately need during a pandemic.

Modeling Insecurity The insecurity we have internalized about how inferior our schools are to schools in other parts of the world is actually largely unfounded. Research has clearly shown that the one thing that

directly affects how much and how well students learn is social support such as universal health care, free undergraduate education or vocational training, free/ subsidized child care, justice systems that rehabilitate rather than punish etc. Yet it drives us into a frenzy about our kids missing the “opportunity” to have their noses to the grindstone for 6 hours a day, 5 days a week. Reality is that keeping kids from fresh air4, freedom of movement5, structured and unstructured movement based activities6,7, social contact with other students and choices about what and how they learn actually stunts their brain development, leading to poorer academic outcomes.

Additionally, by modeling our insecurity, our students internalize it and believe that no matter what they do it will never be enough and/or that they cannot acheive as much as students elsewhere in the world.

School-to-Prison Pipeline In a panic to raise standardized test scores (tests that only test language arts and math skills), we have created environments that function more like prisons than like educational institutions. Our very mindsets are entirely punitive, always discussing what we will do if people don’t comply, rather than being motivational, discussing how we can create access to systems and environments that allow for self-directed, curiosity-driven learning.

Lacking Agency

Instead, of thinking about motivational strategies, we focus on grades which are not only 100% punitive (you lose points for various infractions or lack of pleasing the teacher with what they perceive to be your level of effort) but are also 100% biased8. All grades are biased because they are based on human-generated assessments and all humans are biased. Period. Everyone. Even me. Every assessment is set up to benefit a student who functions well in the skill set that the assessment requires as a matter of completing it. Written tests favor those who can sit still and focus on print, people who are visual learners, people who see well and those who find making legible marks on a page a task that takes little to no cognitive focus9. Multiple choice tests favor those who don’t need to “know” the answer to figure out which one is most probably correct. Physical tests favor those who are more hands-on than analytical. Interview tests favor extroverts. I could go on forever.

There is no such thing as an unbiased assessment and since grades are based on assessments (formative and summative), there is no such thing as an unbiased grade. When practice assignments are graded for either “effort” or accuracy, it turns them into tests. Some classrooms have no space where students can afford to not turn in perfection without losing points on their grade. Yet, we know that having the space to fail without reprisal is one of the most essential qualities of an effective education program. So by focusing so much on documenting “acheivement” (which is really just assessment bias), we are losing an essential component of an environment that fosters learning. This also affects some student more than others and it always has. This inequity has become highlighted during the emergency school closure in a way it never has been before. When we focus on grades, we are motivating students to fulfill goals made for them by others in exchange for external rewards- in other words: grades are bribes. On the other hand, if we created systems where the reward was achieving the educational objective itself, we would be supporting students’ agency. Agency fuels curiosity. Curiosity fuels self-directed learning. Students do better when they are taking part in lessons because they want to. Every teacher knows this.

3. Individualized learning systems require use of technology anyway.

Many schools have been adopting educational technology tools over the years in pursuit not of preparation for distance learning during a pandemic but to be able to personalize teaching for each student. Gone are the days when it was enough to make adjustments for those with IEPs. We have realized that all of our students need different supports. This trend will only serve to make things better and more equitable for students with disabilities, delays and disorders in much the same way that the anti-gluten trend made life immeasurably easier for those with Celiac Disease by making labeling on products mandatory, and by making the “special” products more available, better known and in demand by those without a medical need to avoid gluten. While it is imperative that technology does not attempt to replace person-toperson instruction, it is very much necessary to meeting the individual needs of so many students.

This pandemic has created an opportunity for us to completely reimagine how education works in our country and what role our schools play.

Ideas for the future

1. Do not open schools for all students in any district. Not even on an increment by grade band, A/B days, or A/B weeks.

Instead, open school buildings with staff who are not in the most vulnerable demographics (including those with underlying conditions and those who care for sick or elderly family members in their home) for students who need to be in a school building, on a voluntary basis.

• This means that parents have a choice as to whether or not they want their kids to be potentially exposed to germs outside of their house.

• This takes care of the need for childcare and satifies those parents who want their kids to go somewhere else.

For the school districts in Sydney, Australia, this is what the school closing actually looked like from the beginning. After achieving several weeks of a < 1 community transmission rate, they have started allowing high school seniors back on campus to prepare for exams. 10 The fact that the country as a

adults to all of the kids.

whole managed to acheive several weeks of a < 1 community transmission rate speaks to how the strategy appears to have gone well, keeping in mind they also continued sterilizing the schools, maintained social distance and implemented a contact tracing cell phone app that informs you if someone you were in close proximity to over the past 2 weeks has a newly confirmed case. All learning is still done via distance learning but this gives students who lack adult support at home the access to adults who can support their learning while not exposing all kids to each other or the

2. Reconfigure “schools” and “classes” so that students can access live, online instruction many times per day at their level.

We know from the mountain of research performed before COVID19 ever struck that the single most effective strategy for distance learning is live, human instruction11. Therefore, in order to progress academically, our students need live, online classes.

One of the obstacles I have heard about why some schools have not provided live online instruction is scheduling. It is very complicated to try to schedule a second grade English class for 20-some students that does not conflict with anyone’s sibling’s need to attend their own class or anyone’s parent’s need for device use or bandwith to telework. If, as a district, you break down the walls, you can provide live instruction online in a manner that most students should be able to attend. There will always be a small percentage who still don’t have consistent enough bandwith or other technical issues but that is not a reason to keep this resources from every one else. It does mean that somebody has to be reaching out to those students with solutions.

Here is how it works: A. Pool all teachers in each subject at each level and have them self-select a time of day that they would like to provide live, online classes. [Ex. 2nd grade classroom teachers, 8th grade math teachers, high school music teachers etc.] Some teachers do not have the consistent internet access to be able to do this. That’s fine. Put them in the group that creates materials for the teachers who are teaching live and/or provides extra support to students in need (see below).

B. Have office administrative personnel (Curriculum & Instruction/ Academics/ Instructional Support- whatever you call it) create materials to be assigned for reinforcement between live sessions and make them available to the general public on the school system’s website. This will require that the administrative personnel and the teachers of each subject(s) at each level collaborate and communicate effectively to ensure that follow up assignments are well aligned with the strategies and content taught in live classes. If these materials include school-system generated videos, broadcast them on local TV and post them on YouTube for best public access.

C. Create a calendar system that allows all students to access it via existing student portals.

D. Offer the same lesson per grade level in 3 “accessibility zones” (students who need supports, grade-level students, and above-grade level students/TAG/IB/AP). Each hour have 3/6/9/12

teachers scheduled to each teach a section of up to 9 students. The number of sections will depend on the size of the school district. Because the same class is being offered 12 times per day, class sizes can be smaller. Teachers have already signed up for the hours they prefer to

teach. Students go to their student portal the day before and reserve a spot in their preferred classes. Teachers will teach several sections of the lesson over the course of their preferred hours. You should be able to get a good distribution of teachers who would like to start and finish early in the day to support their own children, teachers who prefer “regular working hours” and teachers who prefer not to start until later in the day. Offer these classes between 7am and 7pm, Monday through Friday. Any student can reserve a spot in any teacher’s class regardless of which school or program the teacher and the student each usually attends. Make adjustments according to demand. In order to see where there is unfulfilled demand, set up waiting lists for preferred times of day.

E. Offer 3 subjects per day including or integrating “specials” so that a student has the ability to access physical education, art, music, dance, guidance and more at least once per week each.

Use as much integration as you can both to maximize instruction time for all subjects and to be efficient with students’ time for attending classes and completing post-class assignments.

F. Have teachers who are not providing live, online classes, not only create materials for teachers who are, but also hold office hours to support students who still need help over the phone, online or in-person at the schools (one-on-one), depending on teacher vulnerability and access to necessary technology. Materials for each class only need to be created once for all of the teachers who will be teaching it. This will leave plenty of time for these teachers to also support students.

3. Bring in choice to increase family engagement.

I’m not suggesting a free-for-all where tax payer funds wind up being taken away from public schools and used to pay private schools. That is what a lot of people think of when they hear the word “choice” when it comes to school. I am suggesting that public schools allow parents to choose to temporarily but officially homeschool rather than take part in school-district organized distance learning. There will still be some people who will be stressed out by full-time distance learning and who will feel better about their child’s ability to learn if they can choose their own strategies. Some parents are fleeing public schools in favor of homeschooling anyway. More are considering it but would prefer that their kids could return to the specific school or program they were attending preCOVID once opening school buildings is viable again. They are afraid, however, that designating homeschooling now will kick them out of specialty programs or transfer schools. By asserting that everyone’s spot in ‘building school’ will be preserved, these parents can feel secure in providing individualized instruction for their children at home, while relieving some of the stress from the school district-organized distance learning program. These parents can choose to utilize the same materials their child would have gotten in school by accessing the materials database created for distance learning and made accessible to the public on the district’s website. Studies show that allowing parents choices engages parents in exactly the way we need to improve family engagement for when schools can safely open again. Not only does the school system lose nothing here, but there is actually quite a lot to gain in terms of good feelings, mutual trust building and supporting the best solution for each family.

4. Replace grades with self-directed learning motivational systems.

The debate about how to equitably give grades has been up and running since schools closed in March. The emergency closing is shining a bright lgiht on inequities and inefficiencies in our school systems that have always been there. Grades are no equitable but pass/incomplete does not engage students. Here is the solution. Switch to a competency badge earning system in place of traditional grading. Currently the IT world already relies on self-motivation by coders in building their skill sets and keeping up with new tools and technologies through a badge system. Every time a coder takes a short course and acquires a new skill, they recieve a badge that tells current and future employers that they have the necessary skills to participate in a particular project. Educational technology games already use this to hook students and keep them motivated to continue even when the material gets more challenging. In this system, what is required to show competency is laid out before a student signs up for a class with several modes of proving competency included to accommodate a wide variety of learning styles. Offer short courses that target a specific skill and content area: bonus points (to the school system) for integrating at least 2 subjects. The course must provide the student with at least 90% opportunities to utilize the skills and content and 10% or less listening or reading. This might look something like this:

Playwrighting for Beginners This course will teach you the basics of writing a short play set in the Gold Rush. We will learn about the historical background of the Gold Rush era, everything from what society was like, what transportation was like, what the value of money was, what was different between then and now on levels of gender expectations and the way people of color were seen and treated.

Then we will take a systemic journey through developing characters, setting, plot, actions and dialogue. By the end of the course, you will have created a short play based on the Gold Rush.

For a final project, you may submit 1) written or typed descriptions with a script, 2) illustrations

and storyboards, 3) a video that you produce using friends/ family and/or fellow students, or 4) an animated video of your script.

This course will require you to attend 10 online class sessions and to complete 6 hands-on projects along the way, in addition to your final project submission. You will have the opportunity to receive competency badges for:

• • • • •

American History: Understanding life in the past, ELA: Character Study, ELA: Settings, ELA: Story Structure, and Theater: Actions & Dialogue

for each corresponding assignment. If you turn in all 7 assignments, you will also receive a competency badge for Arts Integration: Playwrighting & Social Studies worth 2 credits in ELA and Social Studies.

Students are required to accumulate a certain number of competency badges in each subject but can accomplish this using any combination of short courses they choose. Every age group is capable of making these choices although the younger students will need more guidance on keeping track of what they have fulfilled and what they still need to choose.

As a parent, I am not personally very excited about the prospects of bringing my child to a school building in the fall. As an administrator, my teachers have expressed fear and anxiety about being asked to be in an enclosed space with kids from other households and the parents of our students have mostly agreed- mostly. As an educator, I am always reading research and trying to apply it to my teaching practice. Putting all of these perspectives together lead me to ponder what solutions could help us all maximize our safety and our learning concurrently. If we jump in too soon and wind up having to weather another ill-prepared emergency closing, nobody benefits. Taking initiative now, when all of our conventions and habits are out the window anyway, is the way to make serious gains in the efficacy and equity of our education systems.

Meredith Kaunitz is Chief Education Officer at Art Play Learn, an education services company that finds innovative solutions to education problems. Meredith has been creating and teaching curricula for live, online classes and asynchronous courses for the past 2.5 years, on top of administrating a brick-and-mortar Homeschool Tutorial that had to transition to online learning due to COVID. She uses her 27+ years of teaching experience with almost as many years experience administrating in her role as an education consultant, helping other educational institutions and coaching teachers and administrators. You can find her free webinars on “Communicating Effectively During Distance Learning,” “Creating Online Classes that Motivate”, and “Integrations for Every Subject” at https:// www.artplaylearn.com/free-webinars.

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