This piece from @plthomasEdD is a great reflection of an approach to teaching that is "resilient," which made the transition to emergency distance learning much easier. The values can be shifted intact even as the medium may change. radicalscholarship.wordpress.com/2020/04/09/my-…
Resiliency has been at the front of my mind over the last couple of weeks because we have to be moving ourselves and our institutions towards footing that is responsive to a post (or ongoing) pandemic world. This is especially important for education.
It's interesting to see which schools have had the easiest time with transitioning to distance learning. For example, Success Academy, a no-excuses charter, is apparently up and running with very few hitches. Can we understand why?
IMO, it's because the SA values port to an online interface with minimal difficulty. Authoritarian surveillance and student compliance is the hallmark of their F2F teaching, so doing that over the web isn't a heavy lift.
So when charter schools brag about the percentage of students who have transitioned and are still "learning" it's because of the conditioning to be compliant and the implicit or explicit threat of "failure" if they do not comply. They value compliance above all.
Now, I do not find no-excuses pedagogy to be long term resilient. In fact, I think it's likely to have deleterious effects on students when they find themselves in settings where they must exercise greater agency. But...it's not an accident that they're up and running.
Schools that are having a harder time, IMO, are doing so because the hallmarks of their approach have not been built from a resilient core. If the most important part of the pedagogy is "seat time" then finding a distance learning analogue is a real struggle.
We need to use this period to better understand how we make our work with students resilient. This is at the institutional and class level. It starts with the values. I think a lot of school are finding out that they haven't thought enough about those things.
That said, daily I see communications from teachers, principles, professors, deans, that show them grappling with the need for resiliency, adjusting policies on the fly, etc... This is all to the good and necessary. But we can't adjust on the fly forever.
We need a sustainable approach, and the way we're going to find that sustainable approach is by understanding what is happening right now for instructors and students during this crisis. We can figure out what matters and needs preserving and what doesn't and can be jettisoned.
We need to talk to students. We need to talk to instructors. We need research. I hope we figure out how to get this done. insidehighered.com/blogs/just-vis…
