Lyons Township High School posted the following information on its website about reopening this fall:
LTHS REMOTE LEARNING APPROACH AND FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Before the conclusion of the 2019-20 school year, LTHS began efforts to revise and improve our plan in preparation for the 2020-21 school year. Over the summer, a team of teachers and administrators met to develop a remote learning plan that was grounded in research and focused on delivering courses with fidelity. The LTHS plan certainly won’t replace in-person instruction, but it will ensure students will be able to take full advantage of the opportunities in the courses they signed up for.
Philosophy
Remote instruction is not the same as traditional in-school instruction.
The eight period school day came out of the scientific management of factories¹ in the early 1900’s and divides the day into discrete segments with unrelated classes taught by subject-area experts are monitored by bells. Schools were also set up to have periodic measures of productivity, or tests, which determined whether a student had sufficiently learned the material placed before them. For years, school has been designed to be more about time sitting in a seat rather than ensuring mastery of outcomes.² As we have made changes to our curriculum over the past few years, we have focused more on meeting the needs of every student and ensuring all students meet the expectations of the course.
While many industries continue to use this model, the introduction of laptop computers and interactive educational tools have called the traditional school model into question. Companies such as Google³ have created spaces where workers can interact and collaborate. Not surprisingly, Google has also created digital tools to replicate the physical environment in the digital realm. Every Google application has a component of sharing and collaboration. Work has shifted from a top-down management hierarchy to a flat structure allowing for more ownership in the work.⁴ For schools, this means that students are less passive and more engaged in the work of the class with the teacher as the “guide on the side” rather than the “sage on the stage.” LT shifted to Google tools two years ago and ongoing professional development has provided teachers a better understanding of how to address remote learning needs.
In a remote learning environment, the flat model works more effectively than the traditional model, and our Remote Learning plan was designed to take advantage of the tools available to collaborate virtually rather than in real time.
Visible Learning and Remote Learning
We looked for methods and plans that fit a remote model rather than attempting to replicate an eight period day. We designed a schedule that built time for direct instruction, student interaction, independent work, and personalized feedback. We have used John Hattie’s meta-research on student achievement as the backbone for many of our curricular decisions for the past few years and his analysis of school closures from natural disasters shows that students do not experience learning loss when the essentials of a course are kept as the primary focus and teachers work toward student mastery of those essentials.⁵
For the past three years we have been mapping all of our courses to essentials knowing and doing outcomes and aligning them to standards. As we embark on this 2020-21 school year, curriculum maps will be shared with families pointing out what the essentials are for each course and showing the alignment to standards and assessments. To do this, teachers need to provide more than just 5 zoom classes a day and students need to spend less time sitting in front of a screen and more time taking what they have viewed to build their own knowledge.
Faculty Preparation for Remote Learning
We have all experienced the isolation of remote learning and remote living, so we are also training teachers how to connect with students in a remote environment while also addressing belonging and community in a digital space. The five days prior to students “arriving” at school will provide teachers the time to develop a different instructional mindset and clarify the essential outcomes of courses.
We have also changed the expectations of our technology coaches and instructional coaches to provide teachers training on technology tools and lesson plan structure to maximize the effectiveness of learning for our students.
Approach to Instruction and Cognitive Load
Cognitive load⁶ is the amount of information a student can process in working memory before they become frustrated, stressed, or unable to learn additional new things. Online Learning demands more cognitive load from students since they have to learn how to navigate the environment, the content, and the ways to send information back to the instructor while also remaining in a home-environment. Ideally, anything that is delivered as new learning should not exceed 10 minutes without an opportunity for students to process the information and move that information into long term memory. Our A/B schedule divides the day into two four-hour sessions that allow for introduction of new information, synchronous instruction for clarification and coordinated interaction. Time is also available for students to meet with teachers and get clarity on assignments.
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