Brave New World: How Your Kids Learn During COVID-19

My wife is a 5th-grade school teacher and our 12-year-old is in middle school.  The outbreak of the Corona Virus and the subsequent economic lockdown has presented new challenges across the nation that impact nearly every facet of our daily lives.  From deciding how best to explain the pandemic to our children to weaving new work-from-home practices into our routines, the impact on education may prove to be the most frightening…and fascinating.  I recently attended a Facebook live conference call hosted by the superintendent of our school district and walked away realizing the incredible opportunity that these trying times offer us. This is the brave new world for education.  This is how your kids will learn during the age of COVID-19.

Out with the Old, In with the Zoom

To say that social distancing (the practice of keeping at least 6-feet apart from one another) is just not possible in a classroom is to state the obvious.  Up until this point in time, learning has been an in-person activity involving nearly 30 children, desks a few feet apart, with countless surfaces and papers touched by many hands.  When it comes to preventing the spread of a highly contagious virus, a traditional classroom may as well be a packed subway car.  

Across the country, schools made use of the coming spring break to close down for weeks while teachers, administrators, and government officials assessed the situation and scrambled to find a path forward for students.  

In scholastic terms, the 3rd quarter of the year was just about to end when schools were shut down.  Since then, educators have reached out to large tech companies for assistance in how to help children finish up the year.  The response has been overwhelming. The largest internet provider in my area offered free internet to children in disconnected homes for the duration of the pandemic.  Google has expanded on it’s excellent Google Classroom platform for educators, and a new company that focuses on face to face digital meetings, Zoom.us, made its excellent services free for teachers and students (and partially free for the rest of us as well!).

Watching the companies of our nation come to our aid during this crisis has been inspiring.  From a strictly education-focussed standpoint, this time will be one of great innovation and experimentation.  Teachers will connect with their students in new ways while students and their families will have to adapt to continuing the all-important task of educating our kids while they are at home.   

The Learning Curve

In his address to teachers and parents on Facebook Live, our superintendent laid out the district’s plan moving forward.  He also answered questions that were being asked by those in attendance. Will high school seniors still be able to graduate on time?  What about kindergarteners who don’t use technology? How will we assist parents who do not speak English? Will federal and state testing still commence?  The district had answers.

High school students would still be able to graduate.  Local television stations had donated time for kindergarten teachers to teach and reach out to young kids who lacked a computer or the ability to get online.  Translators would be made available to families who struggle with the English language. State and federal testing would be suspended for this year.  

The district had plans to pass out Chromebooks (web-connected laptops) to any student who didn’t already have a device.  Meals were still being served for children and families who relied on the school lunch program to meet nutritional needs.  

The superintendent let everyone know that while this sudden departure from traditional learning would most certainly involve some struggles early, the end result could help the district innovate to improve outcomes for when the crisis had passed and kids were able to go back to school and this point, more than anything, really drove home the opportunity that the crisis presents. 

The Great Technology Experiment

What school boards across the country will learn from this historical moment may define how our students are taught moving forward.  This is the first time that every school in the nation will be able to experiment with at-home learning. It’s unprecedented. While implementation will not be simple, the aftershocks of what we learn from this experiment will shake us well into next year and beyond.  It raises several questions:

• Can we rely on students of all ages to take assignments and teachers seriously when they are not in the classroom?  
• What will the newfound appreciation that parents have for teachers since their kids came home from school do to improve in-home motivation when the schools reopen?   
• How can we spread the reach of technology to improve the lives of disconnected homes and students?
• Would a federal investment in educational technologies such as internet everywhere, online access for low and middle-income communities allow for greater educational outreach?
• What are the pros and cons of missing the social time enjoyed by students in the same building?

Some of the answers to these questions will be obvious over the remaining course of the school year.  Others still will take time to process as data from this remarkable experiment rolls into next year. What will not be dismissed, however, is the fact that this departure from traditional education will have a profound impact on how we use all of the modern tools available to us to share knowledge with our most precious treasure: our kids.

Keep Calm and Carry On

Keeping children busy during this time is no simple task.  Even as distance learning programs begin in earnest there will undoubtedly be more ‘down’ time than normally occurs in school.  Fortunately, there are excellent resources for those with internet access to continue learning even after the teacher turns off the microphone.  Khan Academy offers classes at many grade levels, helping children overcome obstacles in Math, Science, and Reading while also nurturing their curiosity with electives in Computer Science, Business, Art History, and more.  It is a truly incredible and completely free resource that I highly recommend. 

Code Academy is excellent for students who wish to develop new skills in Computer Science that stress programming languages, logic, and math.  It is also completely free. 

Of course, YouTube (which most of us are struggling to get our kids off of!) is actually an invaluable and free resource for all kinds of educational opportunities.  Lean in more to channels such as National Geographic and other “hands-on” experiences. It may not be as satisfying to your child as endless Minecraft videos, but it will definitely keep their interest while teaching them something they didn’t know.

Fortunately, this too shall pass.  While the last several weeks have felt like an eternity, there will come a time in the not-so-distant future when all of this is behind us.  Until that happy day, we urge you to be safe and to explore the abundant educational opportunities that exist for your child. There is a silver lining around the cloud of this crisis and if we explore it, the sun will shine through brighter than ever before.