The Distance Learning Playbook, Grades K-12

Pdf Book Name: The Distance Learning Playbook, Grades K-12: Teaching for Engagement and Impact in Any Setting 1st Edition
Author: Fisher, Douglas, Frey, Nancy, Hattie, John [Fisher, Douglas, Frey, Nancy, Hattie, John]
Publisher: Corwin; 1st edition (July 13, 2020)
ISBN-10, 13: 978-1071828922,1071828924
Year: 2020
Pages: 208 pages
Language: English
File size: 61 MB
File format: PDF,EPUB

The Distance Learning Playbook, Grades K-12: Teaching for Engagement and Impact in Any Setting 1st Edition Pdf Book Description:

The grammar of schooling has changed. And it changed quickly. There is an expectation that students will learn from a distance. That learning may be fully at a distance or a blend of online and brick-and-mortar schools. Who knows what school will be like in the short term? And we hope that we return better than before, taking ideas that we implemented during pandemic teaching and applying them in new situations. The constant, however, remains the same: to ensure that students are learning. We suspect that the future will include increased amounts of distance learning. Teachers have embraced their responsibility to impact learning, irrespective of the format of school. Let’s seize on what we have learned to improve schooling in any format, whether face-to-face or from a distance. Teachers are amazing and the public is realizing this in substantial ways. Unlike parents with a couple of kids in their homes, teachers have twenty to forty students at once. These educators can motivate students (mostly) to engage in activities that make the struggle of learning joyful. Teachers provide feedback at the right time and in the right way to each student and teachers do not “do” the work for the students. Teachers know where to go next and how to balance the breadth and depth of the ever-varied school curriculum.

They utilize their know-how to invest in the after schoolwork of grading, preparing lessons, developing resources, and going to professional learning and meetings. We lost count of the number of parents who posted on social media that they had no idea how their child’s teacher was able to accomplish all that they did. As one parent said, “I had a hard time motivating and supervising my own child. His teacher makes it look so easy, and she has twenty-five others in the class at the same time.” But the world changed in early 2020. And we’d like to take a moment to acknowledge the heroic efforts of educators worldwide who, during a pandemic, used what they knew to create meaningful learning opportunities for students. They didn’t miss a beat. Like the health-care workers who rose to the challenge, teachers stepped up and made sure that students continued to learn. We didn’t say that it was easy. And we didn’t say that we wanted to learn this way. But learn we did. And now that we did learn, it’s time to plan for distance learning using what we know now. To be clear, the pandemic teaching of 2020 was really not distance learning. It was also not homeschooling, which is a choice parents make for very specific reasons (e.g., religious, safety, not happy with their public school). It was crisis teaching. Now, we have time to be more purposeful and intentional with distance learning. What should not be lost is that as a field we learned more about what works by at times experiencing what didn’t work in a virtual setting