The school district in which I teach, like most across the nation, has been doing distance learning since mid-March and will do so until the end of the school year. Distance learning is what we call the current situation where students and teachers stay at home due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and teachers provide lessons online for the students to do on a flexible schedule. My district uses Google Classroom as the online platform where teachers can deliver lessons and assignments, and students can post their work and get graded. At some point, probably in the fall, we will return to school. But what will that look like? Almost everyone in education agrees that we won’t just return to “normal” where the school and its classrooms, hallways, cafeteria, and gym are filled to capacity. With no available cure or vaccine for the COVID-19 virus, there will remain some need for social distancing and other hygiene protocols for some time into the future, and certainly into this coming fall. Even after the virus is under control and there is no more need for any extraordinary measures to combat it, do we want to return to the old way of school? Are there lessons from distance learning that we can apply?

I think the number one lesson that can be taken from the current distance learning experience is that many students can succeed in learning a subject without having the teacher of that subject physically present in front of them. I do not believe that this means we should transition to online learning where students do their lessons by logging into a website and proceeding through a computerized curriculum. While about half the students in various districts are succeeding in distance learning, the other half are struggling at different levels with the situation. These struggling students are having difficulty coping without a teacher present and without the infrastructure they are used to getting in a school classroom. Therefore, we need to have students in school, and we need teachers there to help them – but we don’t necessarily need a different teacher for every subject to see the students every day.

Distance learning has shown us that we can schedule students much more flexibly, and we can use this flexibility in the short-term to provide social distancing and in the long-term to address problems inherent in the old way of doing school. One problem that educators have understood for a long time is that students struggle with a typical middle or high school schedule where they have several different classes throughout the day, and there is little or no relation among the classes. Students are expected to walk from one classroom to another, stop thinking about the previous subject, and start thinking about the next subject – and to remember what they were doing in that subject the last time they had that class. Schools have tried to address this problem with block scheduling where students have half their classes on some days, then the other half of their classes on the other days. However, this means the class periods are twice as long, typically about 90 minutes, so students are expected to sit in a classroom and learn for a time period that is much longer than the average teenager’s attention span.

Now reimagine this situation with what we have learned with distance learning. A student could go to a small number of classrooms each day – maybe even just one or two classrooms per day. In each classroom, the teacher would deliver a short lesson, then post a long term assignment on the online learning platform. The students would work at their own pace on the assignment. The teacher would move through the room helping students with the assignment and answering any questions. Students could work in groups to collaborate on the assignment, as appropriate. If a student was finished in that class, the teacher could allow the student to go to another classroom to get help from another teacher. Teachers would spend less time managing a classroom and more time lesson planning – see my last post for lesson planning ideas from distance learning. Additionally, teachers could collaborate more and create integrated lessons and projects to help students draw connections among various subjects. Teachers of STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) subjects could create integrated STEM projects. Teachers of humanities subjects (English, social studies, world languages) could create integrated humanities projects. Teacher teams for each grade level could create integrated grade level projects. There are many possibilities.

This is only one problem that could be addressed using what we have learned from distance learning. As educators we should be working right now to think through these problems and how to solve them. When we return to school, we can use what we have learned from distance learning to improve education. Hoping to return to the old way of doing school is not only a waste of time, but it is a waste of an opportunity. We know the old way of school was far from perfect. We have seen what works with distance learning, so let’s use it to made education better.