A teacher predicts what his classroom will look like in fall - The Washington Post

A teacher predicts what his classroom will look like in fall - The Washington Post

A teacher predicts what his classroom (and others) will look like in the fall

I last posted something from Larry Ferlazzo, a veteran high school teacher in Sacramento, in April, when he was tweeting about his experiences teaching online during the coronavirus pandemic and saying unequivocally: However hard you think it might be, it’s harder. Now he is back with a prediction of how his class — and many others — will look in the fall, assuming school buildings actually open at all.

School districts are starting to make plans for how to reopen for the new school year in the fall, coming up with contingency options for continued remote learning, in-school learning or a blending of the two. Emerging plans call for schedules, seating arrangements, lesson planning and other things to be vastly different from what was customary before the coronavirus pandemic forced most schools around the country (and the world) to close.

Under pressure to reopen this fall, school leaders plot unprecedented changes

Ferlazzo teaches English and social studies at Luther Burbank High School in Sacramento. He has written or edited 12 books on education, writes a teacher advice blog for Education Week Teacher and has a popular resource-sharing blog. He has written pieces for this blog over the years, including one on how teachers can help students motivate themselves and this one, one of my favorites, titled: “NEWS BREAK (not breaking news): Teacher asks students to grade him. One wrote: ‘I give Mr. Ferlazzo an A at being annoying.’ ”

Every year, he sums up the best and worst in education news of the year, and then he predicts what will happen in the coming year. He did not predict that a pandemic would shut down schools in 2020 and send tens of millions of students home to do their schoolwork. (But really, who did?)

On his resource-sharing blog, he has been posting pieces about what the next school year might look like, and now, he has his own prediction in a piece titled, “It’s Going To Be A New Classroom World In The Fall – Here Is What I Think It Might Look Like.” He gave me permission to publish this.

By Larry Ferlazzo

Here is what I think it’s going to look like in many high school classrooms, including mine (and very possibly in elementary and middle schools, too):

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• There will be some kind of staggered attendance — either by days or morning/afternoon shifts (more likely the former), and done in a way that there will be a maximum of 10 students in a CONTINUE READING: A teacher predicts what his classroom will look like in fall - The Washington Post