Remote learning has been a disaster for many students. But some kids have thrived.
“He just gets distracted,” said his mother, Alex, who spoke on the condition that her last name be withheld to protect her son’s privacy. “That’s his biggest issue.”
And then, suddenly, John was no longer in class. Like millions of other American schoolchildren, he was pushed into remote learning from home when the coronavirus pandemic hit this spring.
But something surprising happened. John did better learning remotely than he had in person, the opposite of the experience of most students. He even received a certificate from his school, in a suburb of Boston, for excellence in remote learning, something given to only a handful of students.
“He misses friends, obviously, but at the same time, I can tell that there was a huge change in his stress levels, and he was able to concentrate on his schoolwork,” said Alex. “He enjoyed learning again. Before, school was kind of tedious for him.”
Remote learning has been a struggle for teachers and is expected to set back the learning gains of a generation of students. It has been particularly hard on children of color, kids from families who are financially insecure, and those without access to computers and technology at home.
But a small number of students have done unexpectedly well. In some cases, those students struggled with distractions in the classroom during in-person learning. In others, they had social challenges at school: They were anxious, easily drawn into conflicts with other students, or embarrassed to engage in front of their peers.
“The challenge of in-classroom [learning] can be the social interaction. And for some kids, that’s actually really hard,” said Lynette Guastaferro, chief executive officer of Teaching Matters, a nonprofit that focuses on increasing teacher effectiveness.
Some educators are wondering how the experiences of kids who have done better during remote learning can be applied to improve in-person learning in the future. Takeaways might include having more social and emotional check-ins with students, increased inclusion of students with disabilities in general education class activities, wider use of technology, and accommodating unconventional techniques that individual students have found helpful.
“I know it’s a pandemic. I know it’s hellacious out there, I know it’s hard. I’m not saying it’s not all those things,” said Lauren Katzman, executive director of the Urban Collaborative, a national network of more than 100 school districts focused on improving outcomes for students with disabilities. “I am saying there are opportunities that we’re not thinking about clearly, and I want us to.”
For John, the freedom to work at his own pace and manage his own time, along with a few incentives, played key roles in his success. When Alex allowed him to play video games on weekdays (not allowed before the pandemic), he started to get more involved in planning his schoolwork for the week, and frontloaded assignments so that he could take off Fridays, and sometimes even part of the day on Thursdays.
“He just kind of did that on his own, and saw the value of not procrastinating, like he normally would,” said Alex.
Listening to music while he did his schoolwork was also important.
“He often said, ‘I wish I could do this in school; I bet I could do so much better, and I could concentrate better,’ ” said Alex.
Allowing students such as John to listen to music in a classroom is a simple accommodation a school could make in order for a student to learn better, according to Katzman. “It doesn’t cost anybody any money,” she said. “You don’t need any expertise in how to manage that. It’s a simple thing.” CONTINUE READING: Some children thrive in remote learning. - The Washington Post