Transcript
Speaker: Hello and welcome to episode 76 of our podcast at Human Restoration Project.
Speaker: My name is Chris McNutt and I'm a high school digital media instructor from Ohio.
Speaker: Before we get started, I wanted to let you know that this podcast is brought to you by our Patreon supporters, three of whom are Alicia Housalak, Dan Kearney, and Deborah Covington.
Speaker: Thank you for your ongoing support.
Speaker: You can learn more about the Human Restoration Project on our website, humanrestorationproject.org, or find us on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook.
Speaker: Today, I am joined by Nick and we're going to be talking about schools reopening, what we know, how we feel, and how others are feeling via some recordings we've gathered.
Speaker: How's it going, Nick?
Speaker: It's going all right, Chris.
Speaker: How are you?
Speaker: I'm doing okay.
Speaker: So right now, our school is probably shifting towards going virtual, although that isn't 100% certain.
Speaker: Right now, we're hybrid.
Speaker: What's your school doing?
Speaker: We are doing a hybrid model.
Speaker: So kids will be in session, I think about 50% of the time in person and then 50% of the time at home on kind of a rotating cohort basis.
Speaker: So the real question gets into it.
Speaker: I'm sure others, if they've listened to our previous podcast, know how I feel about the concept of going back into the building.
Speaker: And we can dive into that more here in a second.
Speaker: But how do you feel about the hybrid model and the blended model, whatever you want to call it at your school?
Speaker: I mean, I've been part of my district's return to learn committee.
Speaker: So I've been part of these conversations since we started them.
Speaker: And it was something that I kind of was excited about before, just because it kind of gave us a different way to approach scheduling and maybe even open the doors just to being flexible with student schedules, with teacher workloads, and really kind of like explore the possibilities of, you know, what we could do with school in the fall.
Speaker: But yeah,
Speaker: Then as the weeks went on and cases continued to go up rather than down, kind of looking at that hybrid model really like not as a as a as a compromise, but but as compromised, because it kind of seemed like it was going to mitigate class sizes and the number of students and buildings.
Speaker: Great.
Speaker: But at the same time, you were still going to have all the transportation issues, lunch schedules, an eight class period day, five minute passing periods, and really not touch the structure of the school day aside from taking half the kids out of the building at any given time and putting them remotely.
Speaker: Really, we have three cohorts, all right?
Speaker: The first cohort is about 10 to 20% of students who are going to be learning remotely.
Speaker: The second cohort is gonna be the in-person group for a given day, right?
Speaker: So I'll have an in-person group of students times six class periods, all right?
Speaker: And then the third cohort is going to be the students that are learning remotely on those alternating days that they're not in person.
Speaker: So we haven't really talked about the logistics of it, but it sounds like I'm going to be teaching three different cohorts of students.
Speaker: And I'm not quite sure how I'm going to be able to do that yet and juggle the rotation while I'm
Speaker: teaching a permanent cohort of students who's going to be learning online on a full-time basis.
Speaker: So I don't know.
Speaker: My mind kind of blocks off at that point because I just don't really know how I'm going to get past it.
Speaker: But I guess we'll have to.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, until you have a COVID case in the first week and then...
Speaker: It blows everything out of proportion and you just go straight virtual.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: So that's what it seems like.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, I would love to put all of our eggs in that virtual basket and kind of in my thinking about how I'm going to approach it is going to be, I'm just going to have to make that virtual space my home base anyway.
Speaker: Like knowing that some kids might have to cycle in and out of quarantine, right?
Speaker: Or I might have to be quarantined for a couple of weeks and can't deliver in-person instruction.
Speaker: So yeah.
Speaker: That virtual home base needs to be the place that everyone has access to, and that's what I need to make quality, accessible, collaborative, community-based learning experiences rather than just digital worksheets for students to complete.
Speaker: But then treating the in-person stuff as kind of gravy on top of everything else, knowing that we might not get the opportunity for very long.
Speaker: What kind of things does in-person schooling do well enough to highlight when I do have students in the classroom?
Speaker: Again, I haven't figured it out, but that's kind of what I'm thinking about as we go through it, knowing that, you know, a week or two or a month into the process, we might have to just shut things down and go full virtual anyway.
Speaker: I mean, I see it as two separate huge problems, and that's how we've been framing it to our district and demanding change.
Speaker: The first is obviously safety.
Speaker: Both you and I teach in pretty rural areas.
Speaker: So the argument has been, well, there's really not that many cases relative to like the downtown metro areas or New York or something.
Speaker: The problem that we're running into is that just in the last week in Indiana, there have been cases in areas where there's been 300 cases since March.
Speaker: And they're already seeing it at schools because recent research is showing that children spread the virus rapidly.
Speaker: And if you send them all into one place, even with social distancing, even with PPE, you're going to see spread, especially since, I mean, they're kids and they're going to feel like they don't really need to worry about those things as much as maybe adults do.
Speaker: And many adults don't care as well.
Speaker: The second point being pedagogical, which you're alluding to with the three separate plans,
Speaker: Some areas are looking at their hybrid model as one group is going to watch online and the other group is just going to be doing it in person, which makes me question, well, why have two separate groups at all?
Speaker: Because you may as well have them all online if you're going to do that.
Speaker: But also when they're at school, I mean, I've been trying to plan for that as well.
Speaker: And I have no idea how you do that.
Speaker: Like it's going to feel isolated in prison, like because kids can't do anything.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And even just in your thought process of trying to like unpack what that's going to look like, like I kind of just sank deeper down into into like the depression space that I that I try to like, that's my block, because I can only think of ways that it's, it will be
Speaker: It's negatively different, like not an opportunity to like, hey, we have smaller class sizes now, so let's let's maximize what we can do with in-person school.
Speaker: It's like, no, knowing that safety needs to come first.
Speaker: Like then we're sacrificing, you know, human centered pedagogy to say, right, everyone look up at the front of the room or I don't know, turn and talk to your neighbor.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: from six feet away and have a cacophony of voices.
Speaker: But yeah, I don't know how to build an in-class community that is socially distanced and brings in the required online element that students are interacting with at any given moment.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And for me, that planning process has looked like just plan on it all being virtual, because ironically, the virtual connections will still be stronger, even if they're doing it in person.
Speaker: Maybe we can use those digital tools in in-person to blend those two things.
Speaker: So that's the primary way that like you're collaborating and bridging those two groups of students.
Speaker: It kind of counter, counter mans and counteracts all of the supposed benefits of in-person instruction and like that urgency, right?
Speaker: Of a sense, schools are so essential because we need to get these kids in here and learning in these safe spaces if we...
Speaker: immediately say, no, you're all sitting six feet apart, surrounded in plexiglass facing the front of the room.
Speaker: There's going to be like a cognitive dissonance in there that I don't know we can resolve.
Speaker: Oftentimes, I think we're tiptoeing around the greater issue that we've spoken about before, which is
Speaker: teachers are being put into a situation that's not only not safe, but it's not professional.
Speaker: And often their voices are not being pulled or even listened to at all.
Speaker: No one's even like calling to check in on them and see how they're doing.
Speaker: And so many of us are in compromised situations.
Speaker: And even if we're not, the virus, even if you don't die from it, there's range now of research that's 40 to 70% of people are affected in some way for life by the virus.
Speaker: So there's
Speaker: a call there for almost like collective action to basically have teachers demand that these things don't happen because the inevitable is going to anyway.
Speaker: It's a really a mind boggling situation where we're spending so much time and so many resources and putting ourselves underneath a ton of stress and pressure to answer hundreds of unknown questions only for it all to fall apart.
Speaker: in my opinion, in the first two weeks.
Speaker: I think that even if it's not at your school, at the schools around you, if there's COVID cases popping up, most schools are going to go, shoot, this is dumb.
Speaker: Maybe we should explore online options.
Speaker: And now, when you know it, most teachers are not prepared to go online because you didn't have any PD.
Speaker: There was no training for that.
Speaker: You were worried about going hybrid.
Speaker: And they are different pedagogies and they are different places.
Speaker: If you want to do it effectively.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So let's go to the phones.
Speaker: So I got four recordings.
Speaker: I did not pre-listen to these.
Speaker: So we'll just listen to them and see what they have to say.
Speaker: And then, yeah.
Speaker: My name is Jessica Zeller and I'm an associate professor of dance at Texas Christian University, TCU.
Speaker: I teach undergraduate dance majors in studio-based ballet and repertory courses, and I teach academic courses in dance history, theory, and pedagogy.
Speaker: As schools consider various reopening plans, I am concerned about human agency.
Speaker: I'm frustrated by administrative decisions that haven't actively sought out and considered the voices of students, faculty, and staff.
Speaker: I'm concerned that our autonomy is being revoked, if we were ever privileged enough to have such autonomy in the first place.
Speaker: I'm concerned that too many reopening plans don't consider how the collective and individual experiences of trauma might affect us and the students as we return to a learning environment.
Speaker: I'm concerned that these plans instead prioritize business as usual.
Speaker: I'm concerned that most educational institutions haven't considered the wealth of knowledge and creativity of their students, faculty, or staff that might help them make choices that support well-being and equity.
Speaker: Schools writ large are overlooking what seems to me the central conversation we should be having about what education could be or perhaps should be in this moment.
Speaker: I'm concerned that schools are missing an opportunity to become more equitable and more humanistic.
Speaker: In light of my concerns, I am thinking about how to foster relationships and build community in my classes at a distance and through our shared hardship.
Speaker: I am concerned that the dialogue around reopening has put students in the margins, and I am particularly concerned about Black, Brown, and Indigenous students, as well as students in LGBTQIA plus communities who were already marginalized.
Speaker: I am thinking about how to prioritize autonomy and relevance inside of my work with students this fall.
Speaker: I am asking students what they want from their education in the context of fall 2020.
Speaker: I am trying to communicate to students that I see them and hear them and that they have my support.
Speaker: Once the anticipation around reopening starts to fade and the actual reopening begins, whether in person or online, I am hopeful that teachers and students will come together in community and I am hopeful that we will prioritize our collective humanity.
Speaker: Very well said and very thoughtful too.
Speaker: I think Jessica nails it when she says, right, we kind of missed our chance to talk about what education could be, right, and use this as a time to reshape systems in those inhumanizing ways, right, rather than dehumanizing ones.
Speaker: And somebody on Twitter, I forget who it was, said,
Speaker: Schools should be trying to think how to think outside the box.
Speaker: And I guess political leaders are trying to force us back in the box, right, to force us into this narrow conception of what like physical in-person school looks like and and holding that up as an ideal, as if this version of education doesn't happen for my kid, they will be put at a disadvantage.
Speaker: So many of the pieces that Jessica mentioned there about human agency, about
Speaker: community, like are lost in that conversation, because the next question has to be, how's that going to look different in these in these circumstances, right?
Speaker: How are we going to build community?
Speaker: How are we going to honor human agency and autonomy rather than business as usual?
Speaker: So many of my own conversations in my district have been kind of frustrating because it's around this concept of accelerated learning.
Speaker: And that should be in scare quotes because, right, you think accelerated learning, you think, oh, how can we use this to do more?
Speaker: And that kind of seems counterintuitive too.
Speaker: But really the idea is how can we focus on, you know, those content standards and how can we pare things down to make it
Speaker: you know, more palatable or deliverable in this crazy environment.
Speaker: But so many of the things that we need to focus on are not curricular in August and September of 2020 that compared to previous years.
Speaker: That accelerated learning process should be what we were doing for all the other times.
Speaker: Now is the time that we got to focus on, right?
Speaker: How do we create better communities and human beings and survive this thing together?
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: What do you think about it?
Speaker: Well, to me, I feel like we've taken such a huge step backwards of recognizing, I guess, what the purpose of school is to begin with.
Speaker: We're so stuck on this idea that first off, schools are the only source of knowledge for kids.
Speaker: Like I keep hearing the news report and pretty famous figures that I would consider to be pretty intelligent.
Speaker: Say like, you know, our kids are not going to be able to read or write or do anything and they're going to be so far behind grade level without recognizing that, yes, we certainly have to be concerned about the equity piece here.
Speaker: But kids can still learn at home without being in a school building.
Speaker: The second part, though, is people have a really dreamlike feeling about what schools are like in the United States and think that they are equitable spaces.
Speaker: kids mental health and their ability to succeed are solved by going into a school building where in reality for many students it's the complete opposite there might be better mental health and maybe even more equitable scenarios if they're not in the building assuming that they can gain access to support systems
Speaker: So to me, the questions we need to be asking is how can we use this time period to radicalize or to reimagine what the structures of school are because the structures of school are going to have to shift in order for this to work.
Speaker: And that is going to have to fall on teachers' shoulders, not administrators' shoulders, because obviously it doesn't work when it falls on administrators or on the government, because their job is just to keep the building open, not necessarily to be thinking about
Speaker: these underlying structural issues for the most part.
Speaker: There's been like a backlash to trying to think about school in different ways.
Speaker: Exactly to your point, like the conversations about can students learn better at home or outside of school should have been happening in the first place and providing flexible options for kids to learn in different environments.
Speaker: But now that we've said we've done...
Speaker: People who have never supported public education before are doubling down.
Speaker: And now they're saying, you know, oh, schools are so essential and teachers should be obligated to go back in there, right, and suck it up and do what's best for everybody.
Speaker: As a profession, our collective, I don't know, it's like a mix between confusion and disgust to say, like, where were you all the other times we said those things?
Speaker: And now you're trying to push us back into the burning building and make us do things in a particular way.
Speaker: that doesn't honor foundations of education, which are not necessarily, you know, the academic outcomes, but more of like that community context and that human-centered learning part that Jessica mentioned.
Speaker: Something else that I want to kind of reiterate, too, is that from an equity standpoint, the ways that in-person schooling affects primarily students of color, for example, like discipline policies,
Speaker: I wonder when schools go fully remote, how that will shift.
Speaker: I mean, I'm sure people will find a way to still police students.
Speaker: We're already seeing that with like camera technology and tracking software, et cetera.
Speaker: But I couldn't imagine that being as extreme as what we're seeing right now with tardy policies and dress codes and
Speaker: things of that nature.
Speaker: So I'm curious to see how equity is affected as a result of students not going to the institution of schooling, at least physically.
Speaker: And two, when it comes to that re-imagined learning component,
Speaker: Initially in March and April when schools were shutting down, I didn't really like that verbiage because I feel like teachers were just struggling to stay afloat.
Speaker: Whereas now we've had some months where we've thought about this and I feel like we could launch the school year with some pretty cool ideas and really experiment and try some things.
Speaker: I'm really open to that idea now of using technology and facilitating connections and looking at those structures, for example, like the schedule and how those things could be adapted to a virtual learning environment.
Speaker: So let's dive into phone call number two of four.
Speaker: Here is Rachel Lawrence.
Speaker: As I'm thinking about returning to school in the fall, and I'm watching so many schools and districts and school leaders design basically a new education system that can round up.
Speaker: We're designing these remote or hybrid or whatever learning systems, in many cases for the first time.
Speaker: I'm thinking a lot about how are we designing these systems in a way that's as accessible and inclusive and empowering for as many families as possible
Speaker: versus how are we designing these systems in a way that's alienating and exceeding and othering certain feelings.
Speaker: And I'm thinking about that in a lot of components.
Speaker: One thing that has to be thinking about are these schedules that I'm starting to see come out where we have like a dedicated part of the day, like an hour for meeting and an hour for math, and lunch is probably on there, and a couple breaks might need to be on there.
Speaker: And it's sort of a time in Maine where remote learning looks as much like possible like face-to-face learning.
Speaker: That's what it needs to be.
Speaker: Now, on the one hand, I really understand that explanation, right?
Speaker: Like, we love our face-to-face classroom for how we do it.
Speaker: It's comforting.
Speaker: And so in some ways, it makes us feel better to get our remote classrooms to look more like our face-to-face classroom.
Speaker: But I don't think it's a harmless practice because even if we look at these schedules and say, oh, well, you know, families don't have to follow up or we'll make adaptations if we need to.
Speaker: When we put the burden on families to ask for adaptations, we're making them feel basically like a less full part of our school community, right?
Speaker: Like there's something wrong with them that they have to be accommodated.
Speaker: And especially in this context where it's kind of laughable to think that any of our families are going to be able to follow schedules like this on a day-to-day basis.
Speaker: I'm a little bit like are we placing our own comfort and need for control in this out-of-control time of what we know is the best design practices for not only for educating kids but also for building our community.
Speaker: One of the clearest examples, I think, of all ways that even really good schools are letting carceral pedagogy slip into their practice in this time of remote learning.
Speaker: And I think it's something we really have to be on our bar and vigilant about because these things are not hard ones.
Speaker: And as we are interacting more directly with students in their home, we have to remember that we are interacting with students in their home.
Speaker: And we have to be willing
Speaker: to give off some of this control so that families can be more fully empowered, you know, agents in their child's education.
Speaker: All right, there you go.
Speaker: I was thinking as she was talking about
Speaker: from a student engagement standpoint, when we bring learning to their device inside of their home and we double down on these policies that don't really make much sense outside of how it's always been done, if you're going to see students basically just like not quote unquote come to school, like how that might affect absenteeism.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: It's just really interesting to think about.
Speaker: Yeah, it is.
Speaker: And like Rachel's big point there right at the beginning, like we have this choice of whether to be flexible, inclusive and empowering versus alienating and exclusionary.
Speaker: And and to your point, like that transition into the home environment is that opportunity as well.
Speaker: You know, that's that's what you're talking about.
Speaker: What what kids are going to be alienated and excluded from.
Speaker: from that remote learning, be it for technological, sociological barriers, scheduling barriers.
Speaker: When you're coming into a kid's home, it might be difficult to schedule that eight o'clock class because maybe that kid's home schedule is not what traditionally works for them in school, but now you're being even less flexible than you were in a school environment where maybe they'd be able to show up later in the day
Speaker: You know, you're bringing the school to them and imposing the same kinds of policies that you say, you know, doesn't make sense in a home context.
Speaker: In your opinion, what would like a strong schedule look like if you could reimagine it?
Speaker: I understand the impetus to have like synchronous hours.
Speaker: And I know when you had talked about a model that a district near you was considering was like live streaming class into kids' homes and keeping them on those same schedules.
Speaker: I mean,
Speaker: I think a model that might be more effective is going to be that asynchronous model, but having those synchronous opportunities for engagement, whether it's on a collaborative Google Doc, right, where even kids at home, maybe they're assigned, quote unquote, to, you know, a fourth hour class.
Speaker: And so
Speaker: throughout the day as they're working on their other asynchronous work or whatever that looks like for your grade level, they can access that period four econ document and they can get the work done and respond and participate, right?
Speaker: That doesn't involve them putting on a webcam.
Speaker: That doesn't involve them having to, you know, do sit and get on their couch.
Speaker: If Zoom has taught us anything in the last five months, it's that that's not that's an effective, maybe an effective means for small groups to collaborate.
Speaker: But as an information source, as a learning source, video lectures is essentially what it amounts to.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And.
Speaker: I mean, what I found worked in the spring pretty well was ignoring the period schedule.
Speaker: And if you are going to do, let's say, synchronous once a week, which is what we did, I thought it was pretty decent.
Speaker: just have students sign up for a variety of different times.
Speaker: I mean, I'm stuck at home anyway, so to me, doing a live session at like 5 p.m.
Speaker: for a half an hour doesn't really matter as long as the workplace is comfortable with me saying like, hey, I'm not gonna start for a half hour in the morning.
Speaker: Because I saw way more engagement when students were not logging into a Zoom session at 7.45 in the morning.
Speaker: God, I'm not even engaged at 7.45 in the morning.
Speaker: I think that allowing students to choose from a variety of different times and really limiting synchronous is going to work well.
Speaker: And I think to that point, too, going back to that carceral pedagogies and equity discussion,
Speaker: There just has to be a ton of grace, more so than I think most teachers are familiar with or have practiced in their physical classrooms.
Speaker: In addition to, obviously, the pandemic, there's the economic side of this.
Speaker: And what, a third of U.S. households didn't make a mortgage or rent payment last month?
Speaker: And unemployment benefits just dissolved.
Speaker: And right now there's no hold and no one's getting that extra money.
Speaker: I would imagine that the vast majority of us are going to have a sizable number of students who potentially could be homeless.
Speaker: They could be having economic difficulties at home, which leads to so much stress and anxiety.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: I just have a feeling there's going to be a lot of one-on-one conversations and a ton of grace and...
Speaker: hopefully a decentering of one's class.
Speaker: Because ultimately, we're there to help kids, like coach them through life, help them with stuff, try to get our content in there a little bit.
Speaker: But the content isn't the end all be all it's about at this point, I mean, survival, which sounds kind of gross to say, but it's true.
Speaker: So let's move into call number three.
Speaker: This one's anonymous.
Speaker: So for me, thinking about the fall semester of 2020, we returned to school in just over five weeks.
Speaker: And I'm just a walking ball of contradicting emotions.
Speaker: I miss my students, I miss my colleagues,
Speaker: I know that virtual learning wasn't ideal for anyone, but I also live in a place that has a much higher viral activity with COVID than the place where I teach, although there it's also growing.
Speaker: And I don't want to get my students or family sick, or even worse, potentially lead to somebody dying.
Speaker: Right now, our district's plan is to be back in person.
Speaker: I assume that being back in person won't last long because somebody's going to get sick and our building houses 700 and something students from pre-K through 12 without windows or other, you know, we don't really have like outdoor classrooms or those sorts of things.
Speaker: So I think, you know, somebody gets sick, it's going to shut down a lot of the school.
Speaker: So I really think we should be spending our summer preparing for really great remote learning experience rather than trying to pretend that in-person learning is going to work.
Speaker: At the same time, my program at my school works way better in person and I know that starting the year off virtual is going to be
Speaker: would be extremely difficult in terms of building relationships with kids, in terms of having them work together on tasks, in terms of just pretty much every aspect of our school would be a challenge doing it virtually.
Speaker: But I think there has been a lot of work done figuring this stuff out that I've been reading about and participating in webinars on and that sort of thing over the summer already.
Speaker: And I think we can do some really cool stuff if we're allowed to.
Speaker: Meanwhile, a lot of the districts, the bigger districts in our state, have been announcing virtual starts for the school year, so I don't know how it's going to impact our district, but I would like some certainty, I guess.
Speaker: Man, I mean, you can hear those contradicting emotions just in the way he kind of goes back and forth between, yeah, our program works really good in person.
Speaker: And that's how I know how to build relationships with kids.
Speaker: And that's how I know how to do this stuff.
Speaker: But we could do some cool things online, too.
Speaker: teaching as a profession, you're constantly balancing, you know, whatever personal cynicism you might have with like the, the, the optimism and that I have in great doses, but that optimism, like that's required for the profession as well.
Speaker: Otherwise you couldn't do it every day.
Speaker: You know, you have to, you have to go in, you know, knowing that you're going to do something not great, but like something decent for, for somebody in the course of a day.
Speaker: Otherwise, if, if you didn't, you'd stop, you'd stop going, you know,
Speaker: This situation, though, it like risks stretching that those contradictory emotions to their extremes, right?
Speaker: The need that teachers have to want to provide for kids, right?
Speaker: And to want to do what's best.
Speaker: But understanding as we do the guidelines and the restrictions that are put in place in our ability to do that, whether it's through hybrid models or remote learning, right, which is frankly a stressor for those things, or just CDC guidelines and safety, right?
Speaker: So there might be some people who get sick because we want to do what's best for kids.
Speaker: I mean, that's like the inherent contradiction with all of this.
Speaker: And I mean, that might as well be a recording of my inner monologue every day.
Speaker: Just understanding the way that that schools and classrooms do tend to work right in person, face to face, founded upon community building and relationships and understanding that we've squandered an opportunity to work.
Speaker: make remote learning look different than it did this fall and amplify those parts of education that we know, again, a common theme of this podcast probably that are necessary, right?
Speaker: Which is the human aspect of it.
Speaker: Yeah, there's two things you just said that I want to expand upon.
Speaker: The first one being that idea of toxic positivity makes me really upset when I see people in education, right?
Speaker: kind of like going all in for going back to school because they want to, quote unquote, like save children by taking the risk to be around them.
Speaker: Whereas in my opinion, those teachers should be pissed off.
Speaker: I mean, there's a there's a time where you don't have to be upset with the kids, but you should be upset that the government slash your district is putting you in an unsafe situation, not just like embracing and go like, well, it's all going to end up well in the end because it might not.
Speaker: The other side of things is too, I have a frustration with those that keep thinking that virtual is inherently as a practice, not as beneficial as being in person.
Speaker: I think that many of us are not going to do virtual as well as we do in person because we're just not used to it.
Speaker: We don't have the necessary training to do it well.
Speaker: But the concept of a virtual classroom isn't inherently any worse.
Speaker: I mean, there's been people teaching online for decades that have really great connected classrooms where students engage with each other.
Speaker: And we weren't having a lot of conversations when we were at school about, you know, what kids in here aren't succeeding and would do a lot better in online classrooms.
Speaker: But we're having that conversation all the time now that we're going to online classrooms like, well, these kids aren't going to learn anything because they're not at school.
Speaker: We're going to have to take a step back again and look and see what's going on here because we're making a lot of assumptions about what's going on because we assume that the innate practice of going to school works for everyone.
Speaker: Yeah, and assuming that something that's different is going to be less than, like to your point.
Speaker: But what we've been talking about for the last couple of years, right, has been look at engagement statistics, right?
Speaker: Look at dropout rates, look at, right, look at all of these metrics, look at depression, look at suicide rates, right, at the extremes of the crisis.
Speaker: And like, if those four or five data points don't make it clear that youth and kids have been in crisis for longer than the last five months,
Speaker: and pushing them back into stressful school environments in which they risk bringing a potentially fatal disease home or spreading it to their teachers or vice versa.
Speaker: You and I have to have that stress.
Speaker: The people calling in here today have to have that stress of potentially bringing that to their colleagues and their co-workers and their students, rather.
Speaker: And we have those conversations, too.
Speaker: It's not like
Speaker: I'm blaming teachers for having those thoughts because teachers have to think that way because if they don't go along with what their district says, they're either going to strike or they're going to quit.
Speaker: neither of which is going to be comfortable for, I would say, most people.
Speaker: It's leadership.
Speaker: It's people that are in a situation where they can make those decisions that should be alluding to the fact that other things are possible.
Speaker: Individual teachers are left with this, as you said earlier, cognitive dissonance, where we want to think of things doing different, but it seems at a time like,
Speaker: I have to go into a building with 15 people and I could get COVID.
Speaker: But if I don't do that, I'm going to lose my paycheck.
Speaker: That is probably the most extreme cognitive dissonance you could have in the profession, like death or earning money, which, I mean, sadly, there's a ton of people facing that right now, not just teachers, which is a whole, it could be a whole podcast just on that.
Speaker: Let's jump to this one.
Speaker: And then we'll go from there.
Speaker: This is Shane McLeod.
Speaker: Good day, my name is Shane McCloud.
Speaker: I'm a physics teacher at Dartmouth High School in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, Canada.
Speaker: I've been a physics teacher for approximately 20 years, the last 15 of which have been at Dartmouth High School.
Speaker: Here in Nova Scotia, we're in the fairly fortunate situation to have a population of approximately 1 million people, and we currently only have one known active case of COVID-19.
Speaker: With this, we're looking at reopening schools at full capacity for all students and staff in September.
Speaker: The plan has recently been released.
Speaker: Some of the concerns that we have are that the two meter social distancing is going to be relaxed in schools
Speaker: And also, masks are going to be worn in high schools in common areas as students move between classes, but not in classes themselves.
Speaker: And so there's concerns that what's going to happen is that if there is a case of COVID-19 in the schools, it's going to spread very quickly through the school.
Speaker: One of the big concerns that I have is that my classroom is going to look very different.
Speaker: With students sitting in rows, desks separated by approximately a meter is what it's looking like.
Speaker: my teaching practice, my pedagogy is going to look incredibly different.
Speaker: In 20 years, I don't think I've ever had my classroom set up where students are just sitting in rows.
Speaker: They're always sitting together, they're discussing.
Speaker: Almost all of the things that I do in the classroom focuses on having students interacting with each other and trying to solve problems.
Speaker: So in terms of our reopening, this is one of the concerns that I have is what is my teaching practice going to look like and how are things going to have to shift?
Speaker: In terms of a hybrid opening or a completely online model, both of which we have in our Plan B and Plan C for reopening should COVID-19 spike in the province, I'm really concerned that there's too much focus on trying to recreate the classroom online.
Speaker: My attempt when we did emergency distance learning was not to recreate what I was doing in the classroom online, but rather to provide meaningful learning experiences to students.
Speaker: This meant that I did a large focus on asynchronous activities where students could consume the activities, they could interact with me, and in some cases their peers, as they worked through it, similar to the classroom, but with a focus on the fact that online learning was going to be very different than in-class learning.
Speaker: Unfortunately, much of the restart plan in terms of hybrid and online models provides a huge emphasis on synchronous teaching.
Speaker: and seems to put asynchronous learning on a much lower level and something that is going to be not encouraged as much.
Speaker: In fact, much more synchronous activities would be required than asynchronous.
Speaker: Overall, based on what I did during our emergency distance learning between March and June, was done asynchronously, and I believe it was quite effective.
Speaker: Based on reports that I've had from students, from parents, and from other teachers, it seems to have worked rather well, and I believe that in focusing more on synchronous learning and the actual delivery of something similar to the classroom, we're going to end up doing a disservice to students should that be the way that we proceed.
Speaker: That's a really interesting one.
Speaker: It's just amazing how more proactive other nations are than the United States.
Speaker: Dude has one case per million in Nova Scotia.
Speaker: And he's talking about a plan A, B, and C as though we're talking some cases, some counties in Iowa have a 20% plus positivity rate.
Speaker: That's like Florida, you know, and we're like, we're talking about an in-person return with social distancing in a lot of districts.
Speaker: It's unfathomable.
Speaker: Or we're suspending kids who take pictures of how people don't have masks on in their crowded hallways.
Speaker: Yeah, that's where we're at.
Speaker: So what Nova Scotia, I mean, it just sounds like Atlantis, you know, it's like a mythical place, you know, where you go and people people care about kids and care about human beings.
Speaker: And, and oh, my gosh, that's that's a whole other rabbit hole, I guess.
Speaker: Yeah, so what Shane's point makes me think about when he says, you know, we're doing a disservice to kids by forcing synchronous learning all day, every day, or most days, is I hope coming out of all of this, that because many parents are at home, or at least will see more of what their students are doing at home, that they start to demand maybe more from what's going on in the building, because they're going to realize that
Speaker: Some people are doubling down on traditional because they want to maintain that control because in order for remote learning to work at all, you're going to have to give up some control because you can't police students as well.
Speaker: So what you see schools doing and some teachers doing is like investing in plagiarism software or the camera trackers.
Speaker: There's a rubric going around right now on Twitter where it's like,
Speaker: a teacher is somehow monitoring students to the point where you get points for not only being on time and like in class, in session, keeping your camera on, both of which this morning is people that don't have reliable internet access, but also like, let me pull it up.
Speaker: It says 98% of the time your eyes are on the screen.
Speaker: Like, I...
Speaker: First off, I want to know how you would even enforce that.
Speaker: And you know there's going to be bias there.
Speaker: You're going to be looking at certain kids and not others.
Speaker: There's no way you can enforce it.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: Who's keeping track of 98% of the time?
Speaker: Am I teaching or am I policing behaviors?
Speaker: Like, I don't know.
Speaker: I don't feel like I could do both of those roles very well.
Speaker: Whenever I talk, I don't know about you, but I don't even look at the camera.
Speaker: I find it awkward to, like, stare at my screen as I speak.
Speaker: Yeah, so I don't know.
Speaker: You see people doing stuff like this.
Speaker: You see them doubling down on traditional in an effort to control the classroom because it's what they're used to, and they like that power, and they like that control.
Speaker: And in the exact same vein as just forcing synchronous learning, not only is that not going to work, I mean, it's just not rational, but it's going to hurt students because that's not healthy learning.
Speaker: It's not healthy behavior in the exact same way that going to school
Speaker: Eight hours a day and listening to lectures all day is not healthy behavior.
Speaker: So I'm hoping as a result that families that are fortunate to either be at home with their students as they learn or with their children as they learn, or at least at home more often when students are learning, they see what's going on and they complain.
Speaker: Like they fight back a little bit.
Speaker: To like get back to that synchronous versus asynchronous point, I just, I cannot wrap my mind around people, not people, that's unfair, around the system, the systemic thought that synchronous learning is de facto, you know, superior to asynchronous.
Speaker: To me, like based on everything you just talked about, based on conversations we've had, it's an accountability tool.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: It's it's a it's a behavior tool.
Speaker: And that's that's that's for us, because people in communities and administrators and people think, right, oh, a teacher's job is to be teaching.
Speaker: So if I'm not right, tracking my synchronous minutes in a 45 minute class period, well, what am I doing?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: I must not be teaching if I'm not delivering a lecture to a group of kids online.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So it's it's asinine to think about because the only difference between, you know, synchronous learning and asynchronous learning.
Speaker: Let's let's think about it.
Speaker: OK, you go to a play.
Speaker: OK, that's that's a synchronous learning experience, right, where you're in the room altogether sharing in the narrative and the story unfolding before you on the stage.
Speaker: The actors are responding to you.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: There's a whole sociological environment happening there.
Speaker: But.
Speaker: You could watch a movie at home.
Speaker: A movie is an asynchronous version of like a play, a screenplay, right?
Speaker: But we wouldn't say, oh, watching the movie, watching the movie is a net less than than watching the play.
Speaker: I mean, they're just different things.
Speaker: You can't pause the play to...
Speaker: go take care of an emergency and come back, right?
Speaker: Or you can't pause it and take notes.
Speaker: You can't turn on subtitles.
Speaker: You can't, you know, do all those things.
Speaker: So God, it's just, we just need to shift our thinking to not thinking of it as less than, but thinking of it and how it actually works.
Speaker: advances, right, and enhances educational experiences for everybody.
Speaker: You can learn asynchronously in a classroom.
Speaker: That doesn't even necessitate synchronous learning.
Speaker: So we just need to explode our whole bias against it and just do away with it and pick up the pieces from there.
Speaker: Right, and I think teachers should know this firsthand right now, and so should administrators, because we keep complaining about being in Zoom sessions, where we're basically stuck looking at a screen, and usually we're complaining when it's like, oh, I had three conferences today.
Speaker: That's like three hours, four hours.
Speaker: Well, a school day is seven and a half or eight hours, and that's every single day where you're expected to be at a computer, which is some schools' return to learning plan, which is absolutely absurd.
Speaker: I was thinking about this when I was in like three back-to-back Zoom conferences and it was like hour three.
Speaker: When was the last time I felt like this where I was like watching the clock and couldn't really do anything and I was bored out of my mind and zoning out?
Speaker: And it was school.
Speaker: It reminded me back of being in high school where I couldn't get up and move around.
Speaker: People were just droning about things I didn't really care about and I couldn't really participate and I couldn't.
Speaker: eat or drink easily because I had to go walk and get it.
Speaker: I mean, there's some places that have policies where you're not allowed to eat or drink from your house while you're on the conference call.
Speaker: There's things like that.
Speaker: It's like, what are you talking about?
Speaker: That makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
Speaker: I think that there's also a place to be said that teachers are starting to realize what their practices might feel like when they're the ones in the...
Speaker: in the passenger seat and they see how these policies play out because we often forget since we were kids.
Speaker: Yeah, that's a great point.
Speaker: And I mean, let's think about the future of workspaces, right?
Speaker: I mean, my friends who work in professional jobs and for big companies, I mean, those people have like indefinitely delayed a normal return to work.
Speaker: And they live in environment or they work in environments that have much smaller populations, are able to social distance better, are able to do all those things.
Speaker: But
Speaker: most of those people are working from home, right?
Speaker: My wife, on the other hand, she's an essential worker.
Speaker: She's been working since day one of the crisis.
Speaker: She works in mental health.
Speaker: Most of her work is done in an office where she can close her door, take off her mask, right?
Speaker: And can kind of do that work.
Speaker: But then when she needs to engage, right?
Speaker: With people, when she needs to, you know, meet with the clients that she works with, masks, shield, social distancing, but there's that retreat, right?
Speaker: As we think about the work that teachers have to do in this environment, which I don't have a place to go to.
Speaker: I don't know about you.
Speaker: I don't have an office.
Speaker: I have a desk that I have to eat at and I have to set my coffee mug down somewhere.
Speaker: And I'm going to have X number of kids in my room at any given moment and throughout the day.
Speaker: But also just think about the future of work for kids like.
Speaker: How can we effectively use a hybrid model to shift kids into hybrid college and hybrid higher ed and then into a hybrid online workplace that might utilize a tool like Slack or a tool like Notion or might collaborate with all of these different tools so that way people in different time zones can communicate and can effectively do work and not have to have their webcam on watching you and tracking 98% of your moment, your motions or your eye contact.
Speaker: So it's, I mean, how much of what we're doing to kids and teachers now really looks like workplaces in much of the rest of society?
Speaker: And the answer is it really doesn't, right?
Speaker: Unless you're in an essential medical field, right?
Speaker: Or if you work in an office job, or if you, you know, are doing any kind of professional work, you're either remote or you work.
Speaker: are working in conditions where social distancing and masking and things are possible.
Speaker: We can't turn the world into a hospital and expect that that learning is going to keep happening, too.
Speaker: I think that probably puts it best.
Speaker: And I.
Speaker: I really like that idea of taking it as an opportunity to prepare students to be digital citizens.
Speaker: The world is a changing place.
Speaker: And to turn this into a futurist podcast here for the last two minutes, I think that is the future.
Speaker: You already see reports of what's going to happen as we expand our population.
Speaker: You're going to have more pandemics where people need to learn.
Speaker: Aaron Ross Powell, Ph.D.: How to be further away from each other to that point.
Speaker: You're also having concerns about like the environment and having to drive to work.
Speaker: You see more and more businesses giving up the office is just not needed.
Speaker: Aaron Ross Powell, Ph.D.: And if we really want to prepare our students for the quote unquote future of work.
Speaker: It's not by drilling content information.
Speaker: It's about those quote unquote soft skills.
Speaker: And the soft skill that we're really missing out on is, well, how do I navigate a digital landscape?
Speaker: And how do I have a personality online?
Speaker: And how do I know what these different tools are so I can collaborate?
Speaker: Because that's going to be really difficult.
Speaker: It's already difficult for many teachers and students to adapt to that.
Speaker: And now it's kind of like moving to a foreign country or something.
Speaker: You have to learn how to do it or else you're not going to know what's going on.
Speaker: So you're learning by living it, which could be really effective.
Speaker: That idea that's been in our heads and policymakers' minds has been, well, if we don't get kids back into schools, they're going to fall behind.
Speaker: And what you just said said that, well, if we don't teach kids how to be digital citizens and how to collaborate effectively over great distances asynchronously, well, they're going to fall behind anyway.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It might not matter if they, to draw from my own content, can factor supplier demand or elasticity of demand or something like that.
Speaker: But God, if you can't use Discord effectively to communicate with your coworkers, or if you can't schedule a homework environment and organize yourself at home to be able to contribute to a workspace, a digital workspace,
Speaker: but you're not going to be an effective digital citizen either.
Speaker: So we really need to make some difficult, they're not difficult choices, but we need to make some choices that are going to be difficult for the system to make.
Speaker: I hope this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to push the progressive envelope of education.
Speaker: You can learn more about progressive education, support our cause, and stay tuned to this podcast and other updates on our website at humanrestorationproject.org.
