By Lindsay Lamb
If you are like me and have school age children, you probably spent the summer worrying about everything related to your child, your child’s learning, your child’s social and emotional wellbeing, your child’s teachers, and education in general.
Perhaps as a way of coping with this, and also as part of a larger project we were working on with one of our clients, we have been developing a Best Practices document for online learning (keep your eye out for it, we’ll let you know when it is available!). Our goal was to find answers to the following questions:
- What are some effective strategies teachers use to engage students in online learning?
- What strategies from the in-person environment can pivot to an online format?
- How do teachers build relationships with their students?
- How can we best support students and families during these challenging times?
To explore these questions, we spent the summer interviewing teachers, participating in webinars, reading timely research articles, and speaking with experts in the field. Based on all of these data, we identified six broad categories we believe will help educators navigate teaching and learning this fall:
- Supporting students’ social and emotional needs
- Building relationships
- Creating engaging content
- Providing consistent routines and procedures
- Expertly using technology
- Knowing when to pivot
Supporting students’ social and emotional needs.
While all of these practices are important, the theme that holds them all together and ran through our interviews, research, and learnings was providing social and emotional support for students, families, and teachers. While evaluating Austin Independent School District’s (AISD) social and emotional learning (SEL) program, I often heard program staff say SEL is not one other thing to add to teachers’ plates, it IS the plate. Now, I feel like SEL is the soil from which all learnings will grow. Without the ability to talk about emotions, build relationships, foster a safe learning community, and share experiences, teachers will be unable to teach, and students will be unable to learn. As one of my daughter’s teachers said in a meeting, we all need to give each other some grace. We all need to be okay with things not being perfect or exactly how we envisioned learning to be this school year. We are in the midst of a pandemic, and what matters most is keeping each other safe, happy, and healthy.
Recently, one of my friends and former colleagues wrote about her experiences teaching music in an online learning environment. The core of her teaching? Social and emotional learning. Was teaching music online perfect? No. Did she and her students experience technology problems? Yes. Did students benefit? Absolutely. Students need the arts, especially now, and social and emotional learning is such a perfect fit for arts instruction. Students need something to help them connect with each other, express their feelings, focus on something outside of the stresses they are experiencing because of the pandemic and political unrest. They need to feel part of something bigger than themselves, and just get the chance to be a kid. Is teaching the arts – or any subject – online an ideal way to experience learning? No, but there are great teachers out there making the best of this situation, and best practices we can learn from them.
I just want to close by reminding everyone that so many educators are going above and beyond to be there for our children while also caring for their own families. I cannot thank them enough. On a personal note, my daughter got through the summer by continuing to participate in her dance class over Zoom. She relished in being able to just be a kid, to wear a costume, to dance with her brother, and be silly. Her teachers always made time to listen to her stories, do a quick check in with everyone and see how they were feeling, and build a community. Rather than bemoaning online learning, let’s embrace it for what it is since we cannot do anything to change the situation. Let’s look for the joy and find ways to connect, reflect, and just help your kid to be a kid.