8 minute read
Will Distance Learning Become the ‘New Normal’?
For some children, we are now in week 10 of distance learning and there is talk that distance learning may continue for some time into the near future. Various different models have been touted, whereby children may go back to school in the new academic term with 70% in a real class, and 30% in a virtual one, but regardless of percentage splits, could distance learning become the new normal for our students, teachers and parents?
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At Al Ain English Speaking school, our own research is telling us that teachers are working longer hours; children are working longer hours; and when we are dealing with younger children, parents are working longer hours to support them too.
“How can this be?”, I hear many people asking me. Surely, apart from parents supporting their children; trying to run a household, and complete their own work, how are children and teachers working longer hours, and more importantly for myself as a Principal, what effects are these having on the school community?
To answer this, we must understand how a classroom runs, and I mean a real day to day classroom, not one from utopia, but a real time everyday class, where there is a lot of non-learning time, all governed by routines and bells.
The ‘top runners’ for non-learning time, include the start and end of a lesson, where children may line up, walk in and then search the depths of their bags for a pencil, protractor, calculator, or whatever implement they need to start the lesson. It’s amazing how big and cavernous those bags can be at times when it comes to the searching of a pen! Naturally there is, at times a need to borrow one from the teacher, or a need to sharpen a pencil, which all takes precious minutes from a lesson. Once settled, the lesson may start, but again, at times, the teacher may need to manage a pupil or two who has become distracted with another. The lesson then begins. Students are normally given some instruction on the board, a few questions may be asked, and then the students will be given time to answer questions or complete a task. Children in the Primary school will be set differentiated work through the ‘Chilli Challenge,’ where a student who completes the ‘Mild’ work, will then go on to challenge themselves with the ‘Spicy’ one. Students in secondary will also be given differentiated tasks to complete also in a similar manner.
You can almost guarantee that during that lesson, a student or two will require the toilet pass, and we have a few more minutes wasted of learning.
Students will now be working at their own pace. The gifted and talented students will eat the work up and require another challenge, whilst the majority of the other children will make an attempt to complete the work that has been set. There are, of course, those students who struggle, and will need the support of the teacher, and there are students that will also become easily distracted and go off topic, wasting vital seconds that they will never get back.
As the lesson comes to an end, the packing away of materials, books, pencils etc occurs, where you can probably take at least another minute off the learning which is increased with age and then we have the transition to the next lesson, where the Primary students look to reset the books and materials on the desk for the next topic, and the secondary students walk to their next class. Time is ticking into the next lesson already, but this is reality and has been so for decades.
With the virtual classroom, and using platforms such as Google Classrooms, there is no clock! Yes, there is to make a ‘live’ online lesson, but once the work is set, all of it is due to be turned in. So, whereas a student may have been set 20 questions of Maths
(for example), but in the class, only completes 15, they now have time to complete all the work set and take the extended work as well. For the conscientious student, if an essay has been set, they will go way beyond the time set to complete it, trying to ensure the best grade ever. Likewise, students now have the Internet easily accessible at their fingertips to do additional research into topics and areas that they may need help with, to ensure they get the answer right, and to turn in the best work possible, so we do see children working longer per class as a result. There have been no interruptions; a comfort break can be taken or even a glass of water fetched, but the lesson remains live until all the work is completed. “Perfect!” I hear some of you say, knowing that your child is working harder perhaps, but is it, when I see the long timestamps of when your children have logged in and the very late times when they have turned work in? Children have changed from active learners in the classroom to passive learners in their bedrooms!
For the teacher who would have managed this class, they would have been walking behind every child, checking on their work, supporting their learning, and as they go, marking it too with what is known as ‘Live Marking’. The tick or cross is put next to the answer, and maybe the odd correction to support the student’s spelling, Maths or understanding, dependent on the topic, but more importantly, they would be giving essential verbal feedback and instruction on how to improve or gain a better grade. Likewise, children that were showing quick progress in an area, may be told to leave the rest of that ‘Mild’ challenge and go straight to the ‘Hot’ one. With distance learning, the student may now have worked through all the questions, but may have gone off on a tangent too, requiring the teacher to give much more feedback after the lesson, or now set up a live conference call to support the child further. This now eating into their time to prepare the next one!
More importantly, students can ask teachers questions in a lesson, if they don’t understand. The question is instantly resolved and may even become a point of interest in the lesson too. Additionally, the question may be the same that several children have, but an electronic communication, or e-mail is not required for the teacher to field hours or days later after the lesson has been set. Teachers are now being required to mark work from children as soon as possible and at different times of the day and week. Deadlines are made flexible to support the children with busy home lives; working parents; or where there is more than one child in the home that requires support from the parent. Teachers need to reply quickly to e-mails from students with important questions about their learning, undertake programmes of new training that doesn’t just teach them new tech skills, but learn how to keep your children safe online and look out for their welfare. Oh, I haven’t mentioned the increase in e-mails that they also need to field from parents too and the need to arrange live conference calls at times convenient to them also. This is all additional demanding work whilst trying to prepare the next lesson. I don’t have to tell you what this means if they have children whom they are trying to home-school and feeling guilty for putting the education of your children above their own.
So, will this become the new normal? Naturally it is all an unknown right now, but what I do think is that what was normal schooling, can clearly not be done or maintained via a computer chip and screen, and likewise, normal schooling may not be able to function with COVID-19. We must not neglect the holistic education that we provide as educators and as establishments, where we encourage, develop and nurture social skills and friendships; communication and conversation; handwriting and spelling. And what is becoming of student’s health and wellbeing, their general levels of fitness as most adopt a sedentary position behind a screen staring at the same walls each day? No person is an island, and this goes just as much for the teachers and parents too.
Even though months have passed, this is still very new to us all, and it will be interesting to see what the very first evaluations and inspections of distance learning that are being conducted right now in the UAE will tell us.
If this is the new normal, we will need to adapt further, not just teachers, but students and parents alike. After what may be a period of reluctance by us all, acceptance may allow us to tolerate a different mode and pedagogy that may not ever replace the ‘traditional’ teaching, but one that will become the best fit in a continuous and unprecedented set of circumstances.
As the clock continues to tick for all of us, I can assure you all that schools like us are looking to evolve and reimagine the learning, as we understand that replication via the internet is simply not sustainable.
Andrew Thomas B.Ed (Hons) M.Phil NPHQ Principal Al Ain English Speaking School Andrew gained his Master of Philosophy degree through the study of technology in education and has delivered many conference speeches on technology in education, including BETT Middle East, and at the British Educational Research Association.
