Learn from Home

It's spring break for many teachers and students in south Texas, and other places around the country.  My original plan for this week's post was to chat about books - what I have read / am reading / want to read in the realm of education.  But, I was really inspired over the weekend by Kasey Bell's @shakeuplearning podcast in support of all the teachers that are, or may be, thinking about what it would be like to move from brick and mortar/ face to face school to an online learning environment due to school closures surrounding Covid19.  There are currently a ton of blog posts, podcasts, tweets, etc. out there talking about making that move, but Kasey put the rubber to the road and had Jen Pearson @1hightech, a teacher from the International School in Shenzen, China on the podcast.  Jen's words, recommendations, and lessons learned are spot-on, if not counter to a lot of the posts coming thought on my social media feeds.
Jen and Kasey's conversation has big ideas that reach beyond the moment we are in right now - the catalyst may be Covid19, but the lessons are ones that we can use to plan for the future.  There are big implications for equity in access when we talk about online learning outside of the school, but we need to have those conversations - out kids deserve progress.

I want to share my big thoughts after listening to their podcast:

• The term "home learning" focuses on the task at hand. We don't say "online work", we usually say work from home.  #learnfromhome
• If we, schools/ schools districts/ instructional leaders, are not already thinking about how home learning fits into the future of our instructional practice, we are behind the curve.
• Less is more.  Online learning isn't really about being online, and we shouldn't move to tools or platforms that students have not seen or used in a face to face experiences. Do we want our students to focus on learning the tool or learning the content?!.
• Digital piece delivery can help facilitate the directions and information, but we need to give kids the opportunity to seek out "real world" connections (think a scavenger hunts, of geometric shapes they are learning about, writing a argumentative paper a current event or issue happening in their neighborhood) .
• Classroom is about relationships, this is true if we are learning from home or learning at school. The successful online classroom is going to have routines and procedures driving the success of learning the same way it does in the face to face classroom.
• Thinking about the work that we are asking students in our classroom to complete:  What is the purpose? Is it meaningful? If my students were in a learn from home situation would this assignment matter?
• When you think about home learning, bring in those soft skills from AVID - post a photo of your own work-space, ask students what they notice / how it compares or how they plan to set up their own work-space.