"Return to Learn": Voices and Perspectives on School Reopening

Speaker 1 Hello, and welcome to episode 76 of our podcast at Human Restoration Project. My name is Chris McNutt, and I'm a high school digital media instructor from Ohio. Before we get started, I want to let you know that this podcast is brought to you by our Patreon supporters, three of whom are Alicia Husalak, Dan Kearney, and Deborah Covington. Thank you for your ongoing support. You can learn more about the Human Restoration Project on our website, humanrestorationproject.org, or find us on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook. Today, I am joined by Nick and we're gonna be talking about schools reopening, what we know, how we feel, and how others are feeling via some recordings we've gathered. How's it going, Nick? It's going alright, Chris. How are you? I'm doing okay. So right now, our school is probably shifting towards going virtual, although that isn't a 100% certain.

Speaker 2 Right now, we're hybrid. What's your school doing? We are doing a hybrid model. 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 1 So the real question gets into it. 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, and we can dive into that more here in a second. But how do you feel about the hybrid model and the blended model, whatever you wanna call it at your school?

Speaker 2 I mean, I've been part of my district's return to learn committee, so I've been part of these conversations, since we started them. And it was something that I kind of was excited about before just because it kinda 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. But 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 kinda seemed like it was gonna mitigate class sizes and the number of students and buildings. Great. But at the same time, you were still gonna have all the transportation issues, lunch schedules, an eight class period day, five minute passing periods, and and 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. Really, have three cohorts. Alright? The first cohort is about 10 to 20% of students who are going to be learning remotely. The second cohort is gonna be the in person group for a given day. Right? So I'll have an in person group of students times six class periods. Alright? 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. So we haven't really talked about the logistics of it, but it sounds like I'm gonna be teaching three different cohorts of students. And I I I'm not quite sure how I'm gonna be able to do that yet and juggle the rotation while teaching a a permanent cohort of students who's going to be learning online on a full time basis. So I I don't know. My mind my mind kinda blocks off at that point because I just don't really know how I'm gonna get past it, but, I guess I guess we'll have to. Yeah. I mean, until you have a COVID case in the first week and then it blows everything out of proportion and you just go straight virtual. Exactly. So so that's what it seems like. Yeah. 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 gonna approach it is gonna be, I'm just gonna have to make that virtual space my home base anyway. Like, knowing that some kids might have to cycle in and out of quarantine. Right? Or I might have to be quarantined for a couple weeks and and can't deliver in person instruction. So, that that virtual home base needs to be the place that everyone has access to, and that's what I need to make quality, accessible, you know, collaborative, community based, you know, learning experiences rather than just digital worksheets for students to complete. But then treating the in person stuff is kind of gravy on top of everything else, knowing that we might not get the opportunity for very long. What kind of things does in person schooling do well enough to highlight when I do have students in the classroom? 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 and go full virtual anyway. I mean, I see it as two separate

Speaker 1 huge problems, and that's how we've been framing it to our district and demanding change. The first is obviously safety. Both you and I teach in pretty rural areas. 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. 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 three hundred cases since March. And they're already seeing it at schools because recent research is showing that children spread the virus rapidly. And if you send them all in one place, with social distancing, even with PPE, you're gonna see spread, especially since I mean, they're kids, and they're they're gonna feel like they don't really need to worry about those things as much as maybe adults do. And many adults don't care as well. The second point being pedagogical, which I you're alluding to with the three separate plans. Some areas are looking at their hybrid model as one group is going to watch online and the other group is just gonna be doing it in person, which makes me question, well, why have two separate groups at all? Because you may as well have them all online if you're gonna do that. But, also, when they're at school, I mean, I've been trying to plan for that as well, and I have no idea how you do that. Like, Like, it's gonna feel isolated in prison like because kids can't do anything.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And and even just in in your thought process of trying to, like, unpack what that's gonna look like, like, I kinda just sank deeper down into into, like, the 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 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. It's like, no, knowing that safety needs to come first, 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 from six feet away and have a cacophony of voices. But, yeah, I don't I don't know how to build an in an in class community that is socially distanced and, right, brings in those the the required online element that students are interacting with at any given moment. Right. And for me,

Speaker 1 that planning process has looked like just plan it all being virtual, because ironically, the virtual connections will still be stronger even if they're doing it in person.

Speaker 2 Maybe we could use those digital tools in in person to blend those two things. So that's the primary way that, like, you're collaborating and bridging those two groups of students. It it kind of counter countermands and counteracts all of the supposed benefits of in person instruction and, like, that urgency, right, of a set schools are so essential because we need to get these kids in here and and learning in in these safe spaces if we immediately say, no. You're all sitting six feet apart, surrounded in plexiglass facing the front of the room. There there's gonna be, like, a cognitive dissonance in there that I don't know we can resolve.

Speaker 1 Oftentimes, I think we're tiptoeing around the greater issue that we've spoken about before, which is teachers are being put into a situation that's not only not safe, but it's not professional. And often, their voices are not being pulled, or even listened to at all. No one's even, like, calling to check-in on them and see how they're doing. And so many of us are in compromised situations. And even if we're not, the virus even if you don't die from it, there's range now of research that's forty to seventy percent of people are affected in some way for for life by the virus. So there's 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. It's 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, in my opinion, in the first two weeks. 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 gonna go, shoot. Like, this is this is dumb. Maybe we should explore online options. And now when you know it, most teachers are not prepared to go online because you didn't have any PD. There was no training for that. You were worried about going hybrid. And they are different pedagogies, and they are different places. If you wanna do it effectively. So let's go to the phones. So I got I got four recordings. I did not pre listen to these. So we'll just listen to them and see what they have to say and then, yeah.

Speaker 3 My name is Jessica Zeller, and I'm an associate professor of dance at Texas Christian University, TCU. I teach undergraduate dance majors in studio based ballet and repertory courses, and I teach academic courses in dance history, theory, and pedagogy. As schools consider various reopening plans, I am concerned about human agency. I'm frustrated by administrative decisions that haven't actively sought out and considered the voices of students, faculty, and staff. I'm concerned that our autonomy is being revoked if we were ever privileged enough to have such autonomy in the first place. I'm concerned that too many reopening plans don't consider how collective and individual experiences of trauma might affect us and the students as we return to a learning environment. I'm concerned that these plans instead prioritize business as usual. I am 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. 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. I'm concerned that schools are missing an opportunity to become more equitable and more humanistic. 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. 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. I'm thinking about how to prioritize autonomy and relevance inside of my work with students this fall. I'm asking students what they want from their education in the context of fall twenty twenty. I'm trying to communicate to students that I see them and hear them and that they have my support. 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 2 Very well said and and very thoughtful too. I I think Jessica nails it when she says, right, we kind of missed our chance to talk about what education could be. Right? And and and use this as a time to reshape systems in in those inhumanizing ways, right, rather than dehumanizing ones. And and somebody on Twitter, I forget who it was, said schools should be trying to think, how to think outside the box 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. So many of the pieces that Jessica mentioned there about human agency, about community, like, are lost in that conversation because the the next question has to be, how's that gonna look different in these in these circumstances? Right? How are are we going to build community? How are we going to honor human agency and autonomy rather than business as usual? So many of my own conversations in my district have been have been kind of frustrating because it is is around this concept of accelerated learning. And that's that should be in scare quotes because, right, you think accelerated learning, you think, oh, how can we use this to do more? And that kind of seems counter counterintuitive too. But really the idea is how can we focus on, you know, those content standards and how can we pair things down to make it, you know, more palatable or deliverable in this in this crazy environment. But so many of the things that we need to focus on are not curricular in August and September 2020 that that compared to previous years. That accelerated learning process should be what we were doing for all the other times. Now is the time that we gotta focus on. Right? How do we create better communities and human beings and survive this thing together? I don't know. What do you think about it? Well,

Speaker 1 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. We're so stuck on this idea that first off, schools are the only source of knowledge for kids. Like, I keep hearing the news report and pretty famous figures that I would consider to be pretty intelligent. Say, like, you know, our kids are not gonna be able to read or write or do anything, and they're gonna be so far behind grade level without recognizing that, yes, we certainly have to be concerned about the equity piece here. But kids can still learn at home without being in a school building. 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. Kids' mental health and their ability to succeed are solved by going into a school building, wherein 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. 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. And that is going to have to fall on teacher's shoulders, not administrator's 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 these

Speaker 2 underlying structural issues for the most part. There there's been, like, a backlash to trying to think about school in different ways. To 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. But now that we've said, we've people who have never supported, you know, public education before are doubling down, and now they're saying, you know, oh, schools are so essential and and teachers should be obligated to go back in there, right, and and suck it up and and do what's best for everybody. As a profession, our collective I don't know. It's it's like a mix between confusion and disgust to say to say like, where where were you all the other times we said those things? And now you're trying to push us back into the burning building and and make us do things in a particular way, that 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 that human centered learning part that Jessica mentioned. Something else that I wanna kinda reiterate too is that from an equity standpoint,

Speaker 1 the ways that in person schooling affects primarily students of color, for example, like, discipline policies, I wonder when schools go fully remote, how that will shift. I mean, I'm sure people will find a way to still police students. We're already seeing that with, like, camera technology and tracking software, etcetera. But I couldn't imagine that being as extreme as what we're seeing right now with tardy policies and dress codes and things of that nature. 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. And two, when it comes to that reimagine learning, component, initially in March and April when schools were shutting down, I didn't really like that verbiage because I feel like struggle, teachers are just, like, struggling to stay afloat. 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 and try some things. 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. So let's dive into phone call number two of four. Here is Rachel Lawrence.

Speaker 4 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 from ground up, rather than designing a remote or hybrid or whatever learning system, in many cases, the first time. 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 versus how are we designing these systems in a way that's alienating and excluding and uttering certain families? And I'm thinking about that in a lot of components. One thing that has me thinking about are the schedules that I'm starting to see come out where we have, like, a dedicated part of the day of an hour per meeting, an hour per pass, and and then then lunch is probably on there, and a couple breaks might be busy on there. And it's sort of a time of being remote learning was as much like possible when face to face learning. That's what it seems to be. Now on the one hand, I really understand that information. Right? Like, we love our face to face classroom because we do it. It's comforting. And so in some ways, makes us feel better to get our remote classroom to look more like our face to face classroom. But I don't think it's a harmless practice because even if we look at these schedules and and say, oh, well, know, families don't have to follow-up or we'll make out occasions if we need to. What we when we put the burden on families to ask for adaptations, we're making them feel basically like a a less full part of our school community. Right? Like, there's something wrong with them that they have to be accommodated. And especially in this context where it's kind of laughable to think that any of our families are gonna be able to follow schedules like this on a day to day basis. I'm a little bit like, are we replacing our own comfort and need for control in this out of control time above what we know is the best design practices for for not only for educating kids, but also for building our community. And this is one of the clearest examples, I think, of all ways that even really good schools are letting personal and pedagogy slip into their practice because of time and remote learning. And I think it's something we really have to be on our bar and vigilant about because these things are not hard one. 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. And we have to be willing to give up some of this control so that families can be more fully empowered, you know, agents in their child's education.

Speaker 1 Alright. There you go. I I was thinking as she was talking about 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 gonna see students basically just, like, not quote, unquote come to school, like, how that might affect absenteeism. I don't know. It's just really interesting to think about. Yeah. It is. And and,

Speaker 2 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. And and to your point, like, that transition into the home environment is that opportunity as well. You know, that's that's what you're talking about. What what kids are going to be alienated and excluded, from that remote learning, be it, right, for technological, sociological barriers, scheduling barriers. You know, when you're when you're coming into a kid's home, right, it it might be difficult to schedule that 08:00 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 the school environment where maybe they'd be able to show up later in the day. 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. In your opinion, what would,

Speaker 1 like, a strong schedule look like if you could reimagine it? I I understand

Speaker 2 the the impetus to have, like, synchronous hours. And I know when you had talked about, a a model that a a district near you was was considering was, like, live streaming class into kids' homes and keeping them on those same schedules. I mean, I I think a model that might be more effective is gonna 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. And so 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 for, you know, econ document and they can get the work done and respond and participate. Right? That doesn't involve them putting on a webcam. That doesn't involve them having to, you know, do sit and get on their couch. If 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. But as an information source, as a learning source, video lectures is is essentially what it amounts to.

Speaker 1 Right. And, I mean, what I found worked in the spring pretty well was ignoring the period schedule. And if you are gonna do, like, let's say, synchronous once a week, which is what we did, I thought it was pretty decent. Just have students sign up for a variety of different times. I mean, I'm I'm stuck at home anyway. So to me, doing a live session at, like, 5PM 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. Because I saw way more engagement when students were not logging into a Zoom session at 07:45 in the morning. God, I'm not even engaged at 07:45 in the morning. I think that allowing students to choose from a variety of different times and really limiting synchronous is gonna work well. And I I think to that point too, going back to that carceral pedagogies and equity discussion, the 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. In addition to, obviously, the pandemic, there's the economic side of this and got what? A third of US households didn't make a mortgage or rent payment last month and unemployment benefits just dissolved. And right now, there's on hold, and no one's getting that extra money. I would imagine that the vast majority of us are going to have a sizable number of students who potentially could be homeless. They could be having economic, you know, difficulties at home, which leads to so much stress and anxiety. I don't know. I I just have a feeling there's gonna be a lot of one on one conversations and a ton of grace and, hopefully, a decentering of one's class. 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, but the content isn't the end all, be all. It's about, at this point, I mean, survival, which sounds kinda gross to say, but it's true. So let's move in to call number three. This one's anonymous.

Speaker 5 So for me, thinking about the fall semester of twenty twenty, we returned to school in just over five weeks, and just I'm a walking ball of contradicting emotions. I miss my students. I miss my colleagues. 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. And I don't wanna get my students or families sick or even worse, you know, potentially lead to somebody dying. Right now, our district's plan is to be back in person. I assume that being back in person won't last long because somebody's gonna 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. So I think, you know, if somebody gets sick, it's gonna shut down a lot of the school. 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. At the same time, my program at my school works way better in person, and I know that starting the year off virtual is gonna be 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. But I think there is has been a lot of work done figuring this stuff out that I've, you know, been reading about and participating in webinars on and that sort of thing over the summer already. And I think we could do some really cool stuff if we're allowed to. 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 what's gonna how it's gonna impact our district. But, I just, I would like some certainty, I guess, here.

Speaker 2 Man, I mean, you can hear those contradicting emotions just in in the way he kind of goes back and forth between, hey, yeah, our our program works really good in person and that's how I know how to build relationships with kids and that's how I know how to do this stuff. But we could do some cool things online too. Teaching as a profession, you're constantly balancing, you know, whatever personal cynicism you might have with like the the the optimism, and and that I have in great doses. But that optimism, like, that's required for the profession as well. Otherwise, you couldn't do it every day. You know? You have to you have to go in, you know, knowing that you're gonna do something, not great, but, like, something decent for for somebody in the course of the day. Otherwise, if if you didn't, you'd stop you'd stop going, you know. This situation though, it like risks stretching that those contradictory emotions to their extremes. Right? The the need that that teachers have to want to provide for kids, right, and to want to do what's best. But understanding as we do the 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 a which is a frankly a stressor for those things, or just CDC guidelines and safety. Right? So so there might be some people who get sick because we want to do what's best for kids. I mean, that's that's like the inherent contradiction with all of this. And I mean, that that might as well be a recording of my inner monologue every day, 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 make remote learning look different than it did this fall and amplify those parts of education that we know, again,

Speaker 1 a common theme of this podcast probably that are necessary, right, which is the human aspect of it. Yeah. There's there's two things you just said that I wanna expand upon. The first one being that idea of toxic positivity makes me really upset when I see people in education 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. Whereas, in my opinion, those teachers should be pissed off. I mean, there's a there's a time where you don't have 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 gonna end up well in the end because it might not. The other side of things is to I have a frustration with those that keep thinking that virtual is inherently, as a practice, not as beneficial as being in person. 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. We don't have the necessary training to do it well. But the concept of a virtual classroom isn't inherently any worse. I mean, there's been people teaching online for decades that have really great connected classrooms where students engage with each other. 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. But we're having that conversation all the time now that we're going to online classrooms. Like, well, these kids aren't gonna learn anything because they're not at school. We're gonna have to take a step back again and and look and see what's going on here,

Speaker 2 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. Yeah. And and assuming that something that's different is going to be less than, like to your point. But what we've been talking about for for the last couple of years, right, has been look at engagement statistics. Right? 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. And, like, if those four or five data points don't make it clear that youth and and kids have been in crisis for longer than the last five months. And pushing them back into stressful, school environments in which they they risk bringing a potentially fatal disease home or spreading it to, you know, their their teachers or vice versa. Right? I have to, you you and I have to have that stress. The people calling in here today have to have that stress of potentially bringing that to their colleagues and their coworkers,

Speaker 1 or or in their students rather. And and we have those conversations too. It's not like 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 gonna have to strike or they're gonna have to quit. Neither of which is gonna be comfortable for, I would say, most people. It's leadership. 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. Individual teachers are left with this, as you said earlier, cognitive dissonance where we wanna think of things doing different. But at the same time, like, I have to go into a building with 15 people, and I could get COVID. But if I don't do that, I'm going to lose my paycheck. That 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 a whole it could be a whole podcast just on that. Let's jump to this one, and then we'll we'll go from there. This is Shane McLeod.

Speaker 6 Good day. My name is Shane McLeod. I'm a physics teacher at Dartmouth High School in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, Canada. I've been a physics teacher for approximately twenty years, the last fifteen of which have been at Dartmouth High School. Here in Nova Scotia, we're in the fairly fortunate situation to have a population of approximately 1,000,000 people, and we currently only have one known active case of COVID nineteen. With this, we're looking at reopening schools at full capacity for all students and staff in September. The plan has recently been released, and some of the concerns that we have are that the two meter social distancing is going to be relaxed in schools and also masks are going to be worn in high schools in common areas as students move between classes, but not in classes themselves. And so there's concerns that what's going to happen is that if there is a case of COVID nineteen in the schools, it's going to spread very quickly through the school. One of the big concerns that I have is that my classroom is going to look very different with students sitting in rows, desks separated by approximately a meter is what it's looking like. My teaching practice, my pedagogy is going to look incredibly different. In twenty years, I don't think I've ever had my classroom set up where students are just sitting in rows. They're always sitting together. They're discussing. Almost all of the things that I do in the classroom focuses on having students interacting with each other and trying to solve problems. 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. 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 nineteen spike in the province, I'm really concerned that there's a too much focus on trying to recreate the classroom online. 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. 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. Unfortunately, much of the restart plan in terms of hybrid and online models provides a huge emphasis on synchronous teaching and seems to put asynchronous learning on a much lower level and something that is going to be not encouraged as much. In fact, much synchronous much more synchronous activities would be required than asynchronous. 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. 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 classroom, we're going to end up doing a disservice to students should be should that be the way that we proceed.

Speaker 1 That's a really interesting one. It's just amazing how more proactive other nations are than The United States.

Speaker 2 Dude has one case per million in Nova Scotia, and he's talking about a plan a, b, and c as though we're talking some cases some counties in Iowa have a twenty percent plus positivity rate. That's like Florida, you know. And we're like, we're talking about an in person return with social distancing in in a lot of districts. It's it's unfathomable.

Speaker 1 Or or we're suspending kids who take pictures of how people don't have masks on in their crowded hallways. Yeah. That's where we're at. So what

Speaker 2 Scotia, I mean, it just sounds like Atlantis. You know, it's like a mythical place, you know, where you go and and and people people care about kids and care about human beings and and oh my gosh. That's that's a whole other rabbit hole, I guess. Yeah. So what

Speaker 1 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 gonna realize that 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 gonna have to go up some control because you can't police students as well. So what you see schools doing and some teachers doing is, like, investing in plagiarism software or the camera trackers. There's a rubric going around right now on Twitter where it's like a 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's people don't have reliable Internet access, but also, like let me pull it up. It says 98% of the time, your eyes are on the screen. Like, I like, how first off, I wanna know how you would even enforce that. And you know there's gonna be bias there. You're gonna be looking at certain kids and not other there's no way you can enforce it. Oh, yeah. Who's who's keeping track of 98% of the time? Am I teaching or am I policing behaviors? Like, don't know. I don't feel like I could do both of those roles very well. Whenever I talk, I don't know about you, but I don't even look at the camera. I find it awkward to, like, stare at my screen as I speak. Yeah. So I I don't know. You see people doing stuff like this. You see them doubling down on traditional in an effort to control the classroom because what they're used to, and they like that power, and they like that control. And in the exact same vein as just forcing synchronous learning, not only is that not gonna work, I mean, it's just not rational, but it's gonna hurt students because that's not healthy learning. It's not healthy behavior in the exact same way that going to school eight hours a day and listening to lectures all day is not healthy behavior. 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 or at least at home more often when students are learning. They see what's going on and they complain. Like, they fight back a little bit. So, like, get back to that synchronous versus asynchronous point. I just I cannot wrap my mind around people,

Speaker 2 not people. That's unfair. Around the the system the systemic thought that synchronous learning is is de facto, you know, superior to asynchronous. To me, like, based on everything you just talked about, based on conversations we've had, it it's an accountability tool. Right? It's it's a it's a behavior tool. 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. So if I'm not, right, tracking my synchronous minutes in a forty five minute class period, well, what am I doing? Right? I must not be teaching if I'm not delivering a lecture to a group of kids online. Right? So it's it's asinine to think about because the the only difference between, you know, synchronous learning and asynchronous learning, let's let's think about it. Okay? You go to a play. Okay? That's that's a synchronous learning experience, right, where you're in the room altogether, sharing in the the narrative and the story unfolding before you're on the stage. The actors are responding to you. Right? There's a whole sociological environment happening there, but you could watch a movie at home. A movie is a asynchronous version of like a a a play, a screenplay. Right? But we wouldn't say, oh, watching the movie watching the movie is is is a net less than than watching the play. I mean, they're just different things. You can't pause the play to go take care of an emergency and come back. Right? Or you can't pause it and take notes. You can't turn on subtitles. You can't, you know, do all those things. 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, advances. Right? And and and enhances educational experiences for everybody. You can learn asynchronously in a classroom. That doesn't even necessitate, synchronous, learning. So we just need to explode our whole bias against it and and just do away with it and and pick up the pieces from there.

Speaker 1 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. It's like three hours, four hours. Well, 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. I was thinking about this when I was in, like, three back to back Zoom conferences, and it was, like, hour three. When was the last time I felt like this where I was, like, watching the clock and couldn't really do anything? I was bored out of my mind and zoning out. And it was school. It reminded me back of being in high school where I couldn't get up and move around, and people were just droning about things I didn't really care about, and I couldn't really participate, and I couldn't eat or drink easily because I had to, like, go walk and get it. I mean, there's some places that have policies, like, where you're not allowed to eat or drink from your house while you're on the conference call. Like, like, there's things like that. It's like, what are you, like, what are you talking about? Like, that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. I I think that there's also a place to be said that teachers are they're starting to realize what their practices might feel like when they're the ones in the in the passenger seat. And they see how how these policies play out because we often forget,

Speaker 2 since we were kids. Yeah. That's a great point. And, I mean, let's let's think about the future of workspaces. Right? 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. And they live in environment or they work in environments that have much smaller populations, are able to social distance better, right, are able to do all those things. But most of those people are working from home. Right? My wife, on the other hand, she's an essential worker. She's been working since day one of the crisis. She works in mental health. Most of her work is done in an office where she can close her door, take off her mask, right, and can kind of do that work. But then when she needs to engage, right, with people, when she needs to, you know, meet with the the the clients that she works with, masks, shields, social distancing, but there's a there that retreat. As we think about the work that teachers have to do in this environment, which I I don't have a place to go to. I don't know about you. I don't have an office. I have a desk that I have to eat at, and I have to set my coffee mug down somewhere. And I'm gonna have x number of kids in my room at any, given moment and throughout the day. But also just think about the future of work for kids. Like, how can we effectively use a hybrid model to shift kids into, right, hybrid college, and hybrid higher ed, and then into a hybrid online workplace, right, that might utilize a tool like Slack or a tool like Notion or, right, 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, right, watching you and tracking 98 of your moment your your motions or your eye contact. So it's 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? And the answer is it really doesn't. Right? Unless you're in a an essential medical field, right, 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 are working in conditions where social distancing and masking and things are possible. We can't turn the world into a hospital and expect,

Speaker 1 that, that learning is gonna keep happening too. I think that probably puts it best. And I I I really like that idea of taking it as an opportunity to prepare students to be digital citizens. The world is a changing place, and to turn this into a futurist podcast here for the last two minutes, I I think that is the future. You already see reports of what's going to happen as we expand our population. You're gonna have more pandemics where people need to learn how to be further away from each other. To that point, you're also having concerns about, like, the environment and having to drive to work. You see more and more businesses giving up the office because it's just not needed. And if we really wanna prepare our students for the, quote, unquote, future of work, it's not by drilling content information. It's about those, quote, unquote, soft skills. And the soft skill that we're really missing out on is, well, how do I navigate a digital landscape, and how do I have a personality online, and how do I, like, know what these different tools are so I can collaborate because that's gonna be really difficult. It's already difficult for many teachers and students to adapt to that. And now it's it's kinda like moving to, a foreign country or something. Like, you're you have to learn how to do it or else you, like, you're not gonna know what's going on, so you're you're learning by living it, which could be really effective.

Speaker 2 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 gonna fall behind. And 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 gonna fall behind anyway. Right? Not it it might not matter if, you know, they to draw from my own content, right, can can factor supply or demand or elasticity of demand or something like that. But God, if you if you can't use Discord, effectively to communicate with your coworkers, or if you can't schedule a home work environment and organize yourself at home, to be able to to contribute, to to a workspace, a digital workspace, you're not gonna be an effective digital citizen either. 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 1 I hope this this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to push the progressive envelope of education. 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.