Designing Distance Learning at The Langley School

FEATURE STORY:

Designing Distance Learning

By Sarah Beck, Director of Curriculum & Instruction

Navigating Uncharted Territory The experiences of this past spring thrust us all into uncharted territory. In a matter of days, we were reinventing the way we learn and connect at Langley. Despite the challenges, images like those included in this article remind us that Langley students continued to engage in rigorous, joyful learning in the midst of a global pandemic. Reflecting back on our transition into distance learning, it is clear that our ongoing commitment to Langley’s mission and philosophy was a “North Star” as we charted our path forward.

Values matter, especially during a crisis. They allow individuals and institutions to orient themselves and set priorities quickly. They permit us to navigate confusion, turmoil, and emotion. They compel us to reflect on our relationships with, and obligations to, others. Most importantly, they inform our decisions and actions.

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It was challenging, at times, to resist reactionary and shortterm thinking. It would be tempting to implement everything on day one, for example, but we were committed to quality and to being responsive to feedback along the way.

We relied on experts and networks, including schools that had been in distance learning for longer than we had and organizations that specialize in online learning partnership.

Our goal was to be purposeful and avoid whiplash or false starts. Our philosophy, mission, and core values served as our strong, grounding foundation as we re-envisioned the way we live Langley at home.

Commitment to Our Mission Langley’s mission states our belief that “each child’s potential is boundless and every child can act with integrity, generosity, and consideration for others. We reach across multiple disciplines to discover, amplify, and embrace the talents of every child, every day. By nurturing, supporting,

and academically challenging our students, our inclusive community builds quietly confident, independent thinkers who flourish as learners and individuals.”

Our Philosophy: Inquiry-Based, Balanced, Student-Centered

At Langley, we think of our work as educators through the lens of Alison Gopnik’s research on child development. In her book, The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship

Langley’s instructional philosophy reflects our mission. We chose a balanced, inquiry-based, student-centered approach to instruction because it fosters independence, joy, and confidence in learning.

Inquiry-Based Instruction “Play, imagination, exploration, choice, autonomy, challenge, unstructured time, quiet, purposeful work, meaningful relationships, honest conversations – these are the things that a child needs to grow well. In looking to the future of learning, the call to action is…to figure out how to structure our lives and our schools in ways that honor the natural growth and development of young people.”

-Lauren Quinn, In Praise of Authentic Learning

Between Parents and Children (2012), she describes one way to approach parenting and schooling is like carpentry, in which the adults act as carpenters who must work diligently to shape and build something according to set rules and specific outcomes. By contrast, Langley believes that students grow best when we embrace the role of a gardener, creating optimal conditions for children to develop, and then stand by to support them as they grow. At Langley, we know that students thrive when they are given the support, guidance, and opportunities they need to be successful as learners. We have intentionally developed an instructional program that is inquiry-based, balanced, and student-centered because we know it allows our students to thrive.

Our mission guided our approach to instruction in the classroom and in distance learning. We believe students blossom in a safe, structured, and academically rigorous community that enables intellectual risk-taking while promoting positive social and personal development. To do this, we provide learning tasks that develop independent and critical thinkers who are poised and knowledgeable about themselves and possess a strong sense of responsibility to the larger community. Perhaps now more than ever, we know our students need to be preparing for a life of intellectual engagement and responsible citizenship.

Inquiry-based instruction focuses on creation over consumption, is driven by curiosity, and leads to deeper engagement and retention of learning. Inquiry has been the core of Langley’s instructional philosophy since our founding, and our faculty has spent the past year developing clarity and common language around our approach to inquiry. At Langley, inquiry instruction means community building, investigation, modeling, practice, and feedback to drive learning. We call these five our “Inquiry Essential Practices” and our faculty finds ways to incorporate them into the learning students do on a daily basis.

COMMUNITY BUILDING

create or enhance connections between people

INVESTIGATION

provide opportunities to discover, examine, and explore

INQUIRY ESSENTIAL PRACTICES MODELING

FEEDBACK

share information as a basis for improvement

give an example of process or product

PRACTICE

offer opportunities to improve or maintain proficiency through repetition

Perhaps most importantly, we know that inquiry develops critical-thinking skills. A global pandemic is a sobering reminder that simply recreating or remembering information is no longer sufficient to navigate a rapidly changing world.

As we planned distance learning, we recognized that our Langley students have been taught this way since they started with us. As unfamiliar as inquiry-based instruction may be to many adults, Langley students know how to learn in this model, and we saw the ways they continued to create, explore, and apply concepts in distance learning.

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For example, third-grade students used a reading unit on “The Power of Stories” to explore how memories and experiences shape who we are, and how authors tell stories through different lenses to develop empathy in their readers. Students brainstormed memories on an interactive chat board and asked questions to help each other add detail. After reading more examples of authors using memory to tell stories, students wrote their own. Many of their stories captured their experiences with the transition to distance learning and their feelings about the coronavirus.

Junior kindergarten students practiced their inquiry skills in a lesson about light, shadows, observation, and prediction.

Teachers recorded a video that showed several different shadows and asked students to share their observations with an adult and predict what object made the shadow.

They made their own simple shadow boxes and practiced making different shapes and patterns with light and objects. They became keen observers and practiced sharing their thinking along the way.

Balanced Instruction Balanced instruction means students are exposed to a range of skills and content across a comprehensive curriculum. It also means we are committed to an age-appropriate blend of learning through large-group, small-group, one-onone conferencing, and independent work in the classroom.

This blended approach applied to our transition to live and self-paced learning in distance learning.Specifically, we knew from Global Online Academy (2020) that different types of learning experiences worked best in synchronous (live) formats, while others worked best in asynchronous (self-paced) formats. We committed to leveraging each format for the type of learning it best facilitates.

For example, synchronous instruction works best for discussion, conferencing, feedback, exhibitions of learning,

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and connection. Students in Ms. Yates’ Spanish classes used breakout synchronous sessions to collaboratively build creative stories using vocabulary. Asynchronous instruction works best for absorbing content, deep work, reflection, and practice. Students in Ms. Meyer’s sixthgrade social studies course designed artwork to reflect a metaphor for the Renaissance based on themes they had learned about in their reading.

Blended instruction, when done purposefully, maximizes student learning in each format. Similarly, it supports student-centered inquiry by giving students the time they need to explore and apply concepts, while also providing the support they need to construct understanding and address misconceptions. By using both live and self-paced instruction in distance learning, students were able to

pursue the clearly articulated outcomes for each lesson in a way that met their needs while staying connected to a community of learners.

Fourth-grade students engaged in a blend of live and selfpaced learning to explore the concept of diagram patterns in Ms. Cook’s math class this spring. Before class, Ms. Cook shared the learning target for the lesson and gave students a lesson to read and practice in the textbook. During the live class, students met in small groups to work collaboratively on a more challenging problem than they had previously practiced. When they came back together, representatives from each group summarized their learning and other students were able to ask questions while Ms. Cook supported their understanding and addressed misconceptions. In this blended approach, students had the opportunity to think deeply about the concept, then collaborate with classmates and check their understanding with their teacher before moving on to the next lesson.

“Teaching students by example to be self-starters and to continuously evaluate how they might improve their education helps them learn how to effectively learn. When we stop simply telling students how to learn and, rather, act as a ‘guide on the side,’ we can support them in a way that encourages them to find their own solutions.” -George Couros, The Innovator's Mindset: Empower Learning, Unleash Talent, and Lead a Culture of Creativity (2015)

Student-Centered Instruction Finally, student-centered instruction means that we intentionally develop student efficacy, ownership, and independence, even for our youngest learners. We use modeling, practice, and reflection to support students’ ability to drive their learning in a supported partnership with peers and teachers. Student-centered instruction means that school is not a place where students show up to watch teachers work. Instead, teachers are purposefully designing supported learning experiences that allow students to drive their own learning throughout the lesson. Using reflection questions, rubrics, and models, teachers carefully develop students’ meta-cognition, their ability to think about their own thinking, so they are able to transfer their skills to novel situations.

Students need ample opportunity to apply, reflect, and synthesize in our lessons so they can do that in the real world. In our conversations with Langley families during distance learning, one of the “silver linings” mentioned most often was that distance learning was providing students an authentic opportunity to apply the skills we cultivate in the classroom – regulation, motivation, problem-solving, and self-advocacy – still in a structured and supported way.

Our Progress We had much to celebrate as we concluded the end of the 2019-2020 school year. Each family had the opportunity to conference with their child’s teachers. We shared the learning outcomes for each grade level, how students progressed, and what support will be most important in the fall.

From the beginning of our program, we committed to being adaptive, responsive, and dedicated to quality. These principles guided decisions like surveying parents from the very first day of our program and making adjustments based on what we heard. Our parent satisfaction survey reflected these strengths, with 90 percent of parents reporting overall satisfaction with Langley’s distance learning program.

We are also able to reflect on areas that need improvement and support as we transition into another unusual academic year, such as finding additional ways to foster student connections and deepening our school-wide focus on social-emotional learning.

Staying Grounded

Students in kindergarten, for example, used images from the Math in Focus curriculum to practice “counting on and counting back” to make 10. Using SeeSaw, students were able to “draw” their answers directly on their iPads and submit to their teachers. Teachers recorded voice messages back to students, giving feedback on their work.

By intentionally designing a way for students to engage directly, teachers helped some of our youngest learners practice a level of independence and reflection in their distance learning.

Langley’s mission and philosophy should and will continue to orient us during these unprecedented times. They allow us to cut through competing priorities and make difficult decisions. They remind us that we are all connected by the reasons we chose Langley as our learning community, either as a family or as an educator. We are dedicated to our mission of ensuring all students become engaged, joyful, confident learners, and our inquiry-based, balanced, student-centered instruction is what brings this mission to life each and every day.

Students in Ms. Musgrove’s math classes worked in groups to solve algebra problem sets and recorded videos for each other, explaining how they solved the problem and making their thinking visible to their classmates. By working through their problems with an authentic audience of their peers, students were able to practice applying not only their understanding, but also their ability to explain it to others as well.

As we carefully plan, innovate, and refine our approach to reopening in the fall, we will continue to find confidence in these commitments. Undoubtedly there are many more moments to come filled with the creative, thoughtful, and inspiring learning that we have come to expect from our Langley students, whether they are learning from home or a classroom.

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