It's Not Remote Learning

As Vermont begins to contemplate phased steps to "return to normal," this week, St. Johnsbury returns from April vacation. I'm confident it is the oddest April vacation any of our students and families have ever experienced. I'm also reasonably sure these next two months will be the most unique two months of their educational career.

With our Continuity of Learning plan accepted by the Agency of Education, we are moving forward with the remainder of our academic year. In creating our plan, I asked our Leadership Team to consider three things: it needed to be reasonable, pragmatic, and authentic. Relationships come first in our plan. Our plan prioritizes conversations over grades. It prioritizes being kind, over being right.
We will continue to meet students and their families wherever they are.

In a conversation recently with a colleague, she mentioned a phrase that has stuck with me: "This is not remote learning, it's emergency distance teaching." The reason this resonated with me then, and still is resonating with me now is simple: it's the truth. It's so true that I don't even know what authentic remote learning looks like.

So I reached out to Jeff Renard, Director of the Vermont Virtual Learning Cooperative, for a sense of what it takes to reach students when you are not physically in front of them. To be a teacher for VTVLC, one must go through a ten graduate credit certificate program, which includes a final practicum class of 60 hours of student teaching with an experienced online instructor. Most cohorts take eight months to complete, and even still, from Renard's point of view, it takes three years to get comfortable with a new curriculum, a new initiative, or a new methodology.

Eight months of coursework, 60 hours of student teaching, and three years to get comfortable. That is how online learning is supposed to work. Our professionals had less than two weeks.

Now, please don't get me wrong. I'm incredibly proud of our Continuity of Learning Plan. It has all the elements I expected, and it has all the requirements for the Agency of Education. I continue to be awed by the greatness I see happening every day in our community. For example, without batting an eyelash, our Food Service personnel worked through their April vacation. Also, they've been asked to feed some of our homeless population staying in hotels and motels in our area.

Still, I know families are overwhelmed because my family is overwhelmed. I know teachers are working harder than ever, because they want to find creative ways to reach their students when their students are in twenty different places, instead of right in front of them. I know that students are confused because this is not how school is supposed to look. They want to see their friends, they want to play together, and they want to be with the teacher they'd seen every weekday since August.

We are all working together in good faith. We are all trying our best in light of a global health crisis. We are putting our students and their families first.

Every day we are getting better at this. We are listening to our students, we are listening to their families. We make adjustments and course correct. We are trying to encourage as much student agency as we can, given the circumstances. We want this to meet the needs of our students and their families - even from afar.

But please, make no mistake about it. This is not remote learning. It's emergency distance teaching.

There's a big difference.

Photo courtesy of www.myrye.com