Tag: Online Learning

Do Alpha Schools Deliver on Their AI Promise?

A recent article in the Chicago Tribune about a second Alpha School opening up in Chicagoland piqued my curiosity. I decided to do a deep dive into their programming and any research and evaluation I could find.

There are some features I love. I avidly support the small student/teacher ratio, the time devoted to life skills and real-world experiences, their project-based and problem-based learning, and the use of their mascot, Steve the Yet Yeti, to promote a “growth mindset” [the conviction that learners can grow and develop through hard work and learning from failures].

But we should be concerned about the level of self-promotion and lack of outside validation and the dependence on AI tutoring that marketing expert Edward Nevraumont says “is closer to ‘turbocharged spreadsheet checklist with a spaced‑repetition algorithm.’” (www.astralcodexten.com) Unbound Academy, for example, an Arizona charter school that claims to use the Alpha Schools curriculum, “projected 60% proficiency in math off a baseline of 34% and ended the year with 10% compared to an Arizona state average of 34%. They projected 65% proficiency in ELA off a baseline of 40% and ended with 28% compared to an Arizona state average of 42%.” (www.edweek.org)

Alpha Schools uses the NWEA MAP (Measures of Academic Progress) to measure progress. MAP uses a computerized adaptive that is adapts as each child progresses. It is not considered a standardized test, and “schools are allowed to modify their preferences when interpreting data

which can inflate scores and performance.” Their results are “based entirely on an internal analysis of NWEA MAP test data and haven’t been independently verified by third parties. Critics have also challenged the statistical methodology, alleging use of ‘inflated MAP growth ratios’ and ‘misused medians’ to produce impressive but potentially misleading results.” These concerns led the state of Pennsylvania to reject their proposal for a school there. (https://npec.colorado.edu) Van Schoales , a senior policy director at the nonpartisan Keystone Policy Center, warns that “The website is covered in figures suggesting that Alpha students are not merely doing better than students elsewhere but blowing the doors off them. No outside study supports any of it, and the MAP and SAT numbers are close to meaningless without knowing whether Alpha students are being compared with students of similar background. That comparison matters more here than usual: tuition runs as high as $75,000 a year, and every family in the building went looking for this school. (https://fordhaminstitute.org) Where is the evidence of their highly touted success?

Alpha Schools claim they can help students do twice [or now 2.6 times] the learning in only two hours each morning, though students often self-report needing more time than that. They say they accomplish this by depending on Artificial Intelligence [AI] tutoring with “guides” to help students. Is Alpha Schools dependence on AI tutoring for academics effective when most current research says it is valuable as a supplement rather than a replacement for instruction? If the AI programs are more like worksheets than Socratic dialogues, do they foster critical thinking effectively? What sort of training and preparation do the “guides” have? I could not find answers to these questions.

Educational neuroscientist Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath, author of The Digital Delusion: How Classroom Technology Harms OurKids’ Learning– And How to Help Them Thrive Again, argues that “If learning could truly be accelerated at the rates claimed by Alpha schools, then students would finish a complete K–12 education by the second year of elementary school – an obviously absurd implication. EdTech developers have long promised faster and easier learning. But speed and ease have never been the hallmarks of deep education. Real learning is slow, effortful, and deliberate.” He reminds us that covering content does not equate real learning. He defines learning at the effort to “‘think through knowledge’ and ‘transform ideas’. The time students spend revising ideas, debating them, and applying them across varied contexts is not wasted time.” (https://npec.colorado.edu)

Gerald LeTendre, an educational policy researcher at Pennsylvania State University, says that good tutoring is not equivalent to good teaching. “There’s no evidence in the literature that you can substitute a pure AI tutoring model and still achieve all of the multiple effects that one gets from studying in a classroom.” Indeed, a 2025 literature review of 28 studies that involved a total of nearly 5,000 K–12 students found that while AI-driven intelligent tutoring systems generally had positive effects, the advantage was negligible when compared with nonintelligent tutoring systems that also used active learning models without relying on AI. (www.scientificamerican.com)

Another article warns about the limitations of the teaching guides. “When a child hits a conceptual wall that requires a human to explain it differently—not replay a

video or serve up a parallel problem—the system breaks. Guides are facilitators, not subject-

matter teachers. Multiple parents describe guides who gave incorrect methods just to push

a student past a stuck point and keep their dashboard metrics looking clean.” (www.aifunlab.io)

The guides are “outsourced foreign contractors with no teaching background.” (https://terryu.stubstack.com)

We need to ask what the impact of a reliance on screens over human interaction is? Doctors and psychologists warn that overuse of technology can have damaging effects on young kids – and make teens more likely to suffer from social anxiety, low self-esteem and depression. “I believe it’s dangerous to wipe teachers from classrooms,” said Joe Vercellino, a Detroit Teacher of the Year and founder of The Lion Heart Experience, which brings mental health programming to schools. “What I worry about is what it will take away from our human development.” (https://nypost.com)

Stanford University Researchers at the Scale Initiative for Learning emphasize the importance of a strong student-tutor relationship “as an essential contributor to engagement and improved outcomes in high-impact tutoring. “o date, AI does not replicate human relationships. Most AI tutoring developers interviewed describe the goal as applying specific AI strengths rather than replacing human relationships.” (https://scale.stanford.edu)

I also question Alpha Schools’ use of extrinsic motivation and rewards. Students rack up Alpha Bucks by hitting daily academic minimums, mastering lessons, and turning in work on time. They buy rewards that actually matter to them: AirPods, Taylor Swift merch, snacks, or access to the lounge. They also offer the 100-for-100 to new students, paying students $100 for every 100% they make on the Texas STAAR test. (https://alpha.school/blog) Although extrinsic rewards may prompt desired behaviors, do they develop a lifelong love of and commitment to learning? Should learning be transactional? What will cause students to continue to learn when rewards are no longer part of the package?

The required Alpha Schools Bootcamp is notoriously stressful. Every freshman at an Alpha High School must complete a set of 18 challenges that the program considers essential life skills, like “selling an idea, speaking compellingly in public, teaching themselves something difficult, receiving critical feedback productively, working effectively with others, and doing demanding work without complaint.” Students must pass a test to show mastery, and they do have unlimited opportunities to succeed. (https://alpha-high-bootcamp.vercel.app/ But students in the bootcamp “are also required to pass an eyebrow-raising heart rate challenge, in which they’re hooked up to live monitors in front of their classmates and presented with a pre-recorded video of their parents berating them.” (https://futurism.com) Is that part of a humanitarian approach to education? What about the required social media posts that must achieve a minimum of 100 organic followers? (Ibid.)

If Alpha Schools students are indeed more successful academically than their peers in public schools, how much of that is due to the inherent self-selection? With a tuition range of $40,000 to 75,000 a year, aren’t their students likely to have stronger backgrounds and more drive to succeed? Doesn’t the high tuition self-select a student body that comes to school already advantaged, especially since under-performing students are invited to leave?

Despite all these red flags, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon promotes Alpha Schools. During a Fox Business interview, she said, “I certainly believe AI is definitely a tool used correctly, and I’ve seen it in action,” McMahon said in the interview. “I have visited the Alpha School in Austin, Texas, where they use AI for the first two hours every single morning… It is incredibly effective.” (https://truthout.org) She said she was very impressed by her visit to the Austin campus. (www.kxan.com) And in a CNN interview this summer, when Dana Bash asked her if Alpha Schools were a proper model, McMahon replied, “It’s working wonderfully.” (www.nytimes.com) Of course, this is the same cabinet member who once referred to artificial intelligence as A1, the steak sauce. She may be easily taken in, but I join the many educators who seek serious evaluation of Alpha Schools before we consider them the answer for the future of education.

Schools must change. They are not adequately addressing students’ needs, nor are they preparing them for the future. But let’s not jump to this model without more information…

we should be wary. There must be a better way.

Will A.I. Triumph?

I am mortified! The New York Times posted a quiz, “Who’s a Better Writer: A.I. or Humans?” They offered five pairs of writing samples in a variety of styles and genres. They asked A.I. to “to choose an existing piece of strong writing and then craft its own version using its own voice.” Readers then indicated their preference for each pair. (nytimes.com)

Certain that I could tell the difference, confident that A.I. could not have as strong a voice, I plowed through the quiz quickly. I was wrong. I choose more A.I. than human-written passages. Even my scientist spouse did better than that!

What happened? I can blame the small sample, the particular genres chosen that don’t happen to be my favorite, or even the stars not aligning… but I think the truth is that A.I. has made huge progress in writing effectively.

So, confession over, what are the implications for writers and the teaching of writing? I’m going to switch gears here: instead of offering evidence-based and cited information, I’m going to share my own musings.

Efforts worth considering:

  • Writers have been reading. Our kids have not been reading. We must do more to foster the habit of reading, especially the reading of good writing and of passages longer than sound bites.
    • Resurrect the pattern of Silent Sustained Reading using printed books for young students to build the habit of reading and to improve attention spans.
    • Revise book choices in school to include works with more appeal alongside some of the canon.
    • Consider using excerpts of longer works.
    • Develop book clubs in classrooms where students choose what to read more freely and then “sell” their choices to their classmates.
  • Let go of formulaic writing like the five-paragraph essay. That’s exactly the kind of writing that A.I. can do, perhaps even better than most of us. Instead, look for more meaningful writing tasks that depend on the author’s voice.
  • Teach the concept of author’s voice and of original work. Perhaps start with music and have students identify singers whose voice is instantly recognizable; then play with writing samples. Perhaps offer a quiz like the one the New York Times provided, but choose strong works likely to have an appeal over the A.I. version.
  • Provide more writing time in class without access to technology tools. If students are using tablets or laptops, turn off the internet access temporarily to limit access to technology tools like A.I.
  • Use a writing workshop approach and portfolio grading to show that the process of writing matters and helps writers produce better finished works.
  • Teach students to use A.I. to assist them instead of replacing their own efforts:
    • Brainstorming tool
    • Sounding board – let it play devil’s advocate to make the opposite case in a persuasive piece, for instance.
    • Help with character development and word building.
    • After developing one’s own outline for a piece, ask it for one and use additional ideas for scaffolding.
    • Feed a draft into A.I. and ask it to create an outline – that will show disorganized and disconnected parts.
    • Help with sentence variety by asking it to evaluate and improve variety in sentence length, type, and openings.
    • Help with transitions.
    • Identify a specific, desired tone like “conversational” and ask A.I. to revise the piece in that tone.
  • Show students A.I. written passages riddled with misinformation and passages that are badly written as exemplars of what’s wrong with using A.I. in place of their own writing.
  • Teach students to write effective and specific prompts for A.I. Not only will they get more out of their A.I. collaboration, but that in itself is a form of writing that will help them improve their clarity and focus.

We have been using technology to improve writing since the advent of personal computers and the internet. Spellchecks, grammar checks, and internet research are old hat. More sophisticated programs have offered tools to evaluate and improve readability, sentence variety, etc. Before the turn of the century, the high school where I taught for my last 24 years was the beta site for AT&T’s writing analysis program, Writer’s Workbench. I had my writers run their drafts through the analysis, then turn in their first draft along with the analysis and their revision. I saw huge growth for many of them. I know we can figure out how to use these tools for good.

And I know that we have to figure that out. We don’t have a choice. I graduated high school before most of the technology that students now take for granted. I didn’t have a calculator and needed to depend on a slide rule (which, I admit, I never fully mastered). I wrote lots of papers in high school and over 80 in college, all of which were drafted longhand on yellow legal pads with arrows and asterisks to my revisions, before most of them were typed on a manual typewriter. I got my first electric typewriter in college, my first computer in 1981. I have watched the inevitable progression of tech into every aspect of our lives. I helped promote that progression by having a paperless problem-solving classroom in the 1990s where students used Palm handhelds, a web target to share files, a classroom computer, and CDs to turn in their work. I commented on and graded their work directly on their CDs. I responded to their writing in the computer lab in real time, and I had my writers turn in their portfolios digitally. Instead of fearing the constant new opportunities, I worked to harness them

A.I. is here. It isn’t going away. Are we brave enough, determined enough, smart enough to figure out how to harness it? I certainly hope so!

AI Revisited

Image courtesy of Dall-E

The tsunami of information, fear-mongering, and arguing about the impact of Artificial Intelligence has swamped my mailbox and muddied my thinking. There’s just so much that I’m taking a different tack to cover more ground. Here’s a bulleted list for you.

  • Industry is racing ahead of academia: Until 2014, most significant machine learning models were released by academia. In 2022, there were 32 significant industry-produced machine learning models compared to just three produced by academia. “Building state-of-the-art AI systems increasingly requires large amounts of data, compute, and money, resources that industry actors inherently possess in greater amounts compared to nonprofits and academia” [stanford.edu].
  • According to the AIAAIC database, which tracks incidents related to the ethical misuse of AI, the number of AI incidents of misuse and controversies has increased 26 times since 2012 [Ibid.].
  • While the proportion of companies adopting AI has plateaued, the companies that have adopted AI continue to pull ahead, more than doubling since 2017 [Ibid.].
  • “Princeton University computer science professor Arvind Narayanan has called ChatGPT a ‘bulls— generator.’ While their responses often sound authoritative, the models lack reliable mechanisms for verifying the things they say. Users have posted numerous examples of the tools fumbling basic factual questions or even fabricating falsehoods, complete with realistic details and fake citations.” Just look at the supposed case against a law professor, citing a non-existent Washington Post article accusing him of sexual harassment that never occurred” [washingtonpost.com].
  • Will Oremus warns, “The bad news is that anxiety at the pace of change also might be warranted — not because AI will outsmart humans, but because humans are already using AI to outsmart, exploit, and shortchange each other in ways that existing institutions aren’t prepared for. And the more AI is regarded as powerful, the greater the risk people and corporations will entrust it with tasks that it’s ill-equipped to take on… OpenAI is now leading a headlong race, tech giants are axing their ethicists and, in any case, the horse may have already left the barn”  [washingtonpost.com2].
  • PCMag.com reportsthat half of Americans can’t distinguish between AI and human writing, warning that it will only get worse as AI tools continue to improve [pcmag.com].
  • Last fall the Biden White House unveiled an AI Bill of Rights to protect users, but it’s voluntary and has no teeth [whitehouse.gov].
  • Italy has blocked ChatGPT as of early April [nytimes.com].
  • “A group of prominent artificial intelligence researchers is calling on the European Union to expand its proposed rules for the technology to expressly target tools like ChatGPT, arguing in a new brief that such a move could ‘set the regulatory tone’ globally” [washingtonpost.com3].
  • Just this past week, Meta unveiled a Powerful new Meta AI tool that can identify individual items within images, allowing it to generate masks for any object in any image or any video, even including objects and image types that it had not encountered during training [techxplore.com].
  • Also just this past week, a start-up in New York is among a group of companies working on systems that can produce short videos based on a few words typed into a computer using generative AI [nytimes.com2].
  • This month Sen. Michael F. Bennet (D-Colorado) tweeted, “The use of AI is growing — without any required safeguards to protect our kids, prevent false information, or preserve privacy. The development of AI audits and assessments can’t come soon enough” [washingtonpost.com4].
  • On March 29, 2023, “more than a thousand tech leaders and researchers…signed an open letter calling for a six-month pause in developing the most powerful AI systems” [npr.org].

But can you stop a moving train going full speed ahead?

I don’t think so. Clearly we’re in the midst of a transformative upheaval that will change society and the roles within it profoundly. And we are unprepared.

What do we do? We need a major national/international initiative to bring together the best thinkers in varied fields that include technology and ethics; they must develop some standards and vision to help us ensure that AI becomes a force more for good than not. This call to action is urgent.

As educators, we need to stop wringing our hands and move on to the work of deciding how to work with AI. Prohibitions fail. What do we do to use this tool well? What do we do to minimize its potential for harm? Urgent work to be done, long overdue.

Befriending AI

Columns and comments about emerging AI continue to abound, and I find myself “going down the rabbit hole” as I try to determine which predictions are most likely and what changes will occur. Free artificial intelligence apps are widely available. What do we do about them for education?

I’m old, old enough that my youth predates not just computers, smart phones, TV streaming, and virtual reality. I remember the revelations of ATMs, email, fiber optics, robotic surgeries, solar energy, bar codes, and MRIs. I didn’t get my first calculator until college [not that I ever really mastered using a slide rule…], I typed my high school and college papers on a manual typewriter after drafting them on legal pads longhand, and long-distance phone calls were an absolute luxury. I have often pondered the way technological innovations have changed my own life, and the way they changed my teaching.  The one thing I’m sure of is that, for better or worse, tech innovations will continue. It’s up to us to figure out the “for better.”

Free AI, through sites like https://openai.com/ and https://openai.com/dall-e-2/ , will impact teaching. That’s a given. But artificial intelligence, at least so far, is only as good as the data it’s fed. Since it is generative rather than creative, it cobbles together writing from the data sets that have been inputted into “large language learning models” [LLMs], the same tools that allow auto-complete in apps like Microsoft Word and most email apps. These LLMs are, however, much more powerful: “It turns out that with enough training data and sufficiently deep neural nets, large language models can display remarkable skill if you ask them not just to fill in the missing word, but also to continue on writing whole paragraphs in the style of the initial prompt” [nytimes.com]. That means AI can generate the kinds of essays and technical writing we too often ask our students to produce.

Does that make AI the end of teaching content area writing in schools as we know it? I hope so. I’ve long thought our focus on the formulaic three-part, five-paragraph essay stifles meaningful thought. We have an exciting opportunity here: AI can transform the teaching of writing if we let it. If we discard our traditional approach of parroting back ideas in favor of asking deep prompts that require original and personalized thought, we can not only beat the system of having AI replace students’ own writing, but we can make teaching and learning more powerful at the same time. For example, my final exam question for some of my more advanced classes was to trace the evolution of one significant idea throughout the literature we’d read all year along with how the student’s own vision of that idea evolved from the readings. How can AI answer not only questions like what it means to be a good citizen or what our responsibility as humans is to each other but also provide the student’s personal response? I suspected that AI cannot give a profound reply, so I asked it the following prompt: “Based on the books we read, what does it mean to be a good citizen and what do I believe?” As I expected, the generated paragraph was superficial and grossly inadequate:

Being a good citizen typically means being responsible, law-abiding, and actively engaged in the community. This can include things like paying taxes, obeying laws, participating in the democratic process, volunteering, and treating others with respect. Ultimately, what it means to be a good citizen may vary depending on the individual and the context, and what you believe may depend on your personal values and beliefs. [written by openai.com]

My students, on the other hand, grappled with this question with specificity that showed their thinking and their learning.

Issues remain. AI is flawed: “Some skeptics argue that the software is capable only of blind mimicry — that it’s imitating the syntactic patterns of human language but is incapable of generating its own ideas or making complex decisions, a fundamental limitation that will keep the L.L.M. approach from ever maturing into anything resembling human intelligence… Other critics believe that software like GPT-3 will forever remain compromised by the biases and propaganda and misinformation in the data it has been trained on, meaning that using it for anything more than parlor tricks will always be irresponsible” [Ibid.]. Furthermore, our legal system lags behind technological developments, and we have work to do about intellectual property and plagiarism.

But AI isn’t going away, and we need to decide how best to harness it. Kevin Roose, author and technology columnist for the New York Times, argues that “schools should thoughtfully embrace ChatGPT as a teaching aid — one that could unlock student creativity, offer personalized tutoring, and better prepare students to work alongside A.I. systems as adults” [nytimes.com 2]. He argues that banning AI won’t work: even if schools block openai.com, learners will find ways to access it. He also assures readers that AI can be a valuable teaching tool, writing about its effectiveness in helping students work through their outlines, helping teachers work though their lesson plans, and serving as a debate sparring partner and an after-school tutor. Roose writes, “Even ChatGPT’s flaws — such as the fact that its answers to factual questions are often wrong — can become fodder for a critical thinking exercise. Several teachers told me that they had instructed students to try to trip up ChatGPT, or evaluate its responses the way a teacher would evaluate a student’s” [Ibid.]. He even sends us to Ditch that Textbook [ditchthattextbook.com], which offers 20 specific strategies to make AI an ally for learning.

Going back to my advanced age… I find myself remembering the controversy about other technological innovations: would calculator use render us unable to do math in our heads, would online translation obliterate the need to learn other languages, would internet research make plagiarism inevitable and hard to spot, etc. Over time, learning from each other, we have managed to harness the potential of other technologies while limiting its harm somewhat. We need to approach AI with that mindset. I expect the journey will be challenging, but if it leads to deeper questions and more hands-on learning, it will be worth it.

Note: The image was generated by Dall-E, but all the writing except the indented paragraph is indeed my own!

Strategies to Support Learning

I know I must sound like a broken record when I keep returning to social and emotional learning as a pandemic priority… but I found more support in an Education Week piece by Stephanie Jones, “4 Social-Emotional Practices to Help Students Flourish Now” [EdWeek]. The Gerald S. Lesser Professor in early-childhood development at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education, she affirms the imperative that teachers and parents work to “help children feel stable, safe, and ready to learn.” Jones offers four specific strategies:

  • “Ask questions and listen actively.”

Jones describes the disappointments and traumas of the last two years and the intense pressure that children [and parents] feel about catching up academically. She urges adults to check in with children and have conversations about how they’re feeling.

  • “Let your students know what’s going to happen and establish clear and predictable expectations.”

I have always seen value in this approach, but it becomes even more important in times that feel unstable. Jones urges teachers to establish concrete and predictable procedures, and to give students more time when they need it. She encourages families to develop predictable rituals and routines at home, and to invite conversations with prompts like “What was the hardest and easiest for you today?” or “What are you grateful for today?” Students need to be seen and heard, especially when they are under stress, and adults need to provide those opportunities.

  • “Provide extra social and emotional time, not less.”

Helping students thrive in the current climate requires more support for emotional development and stability. Jones urges “respectful, open, and accepting learning environments.” She offers several strategies, including journaling, daily greetings, and open discussion about how students are feeling. Neuroscientists tell us that students’ readiness to learn is highly correlated with their emotional well-being. “Emotion has a substantial influence on the cognitive processes in humans, including perception, attention, learning, memory, reasoning, and problem solving. Emotion has a particularly strong influence on attention, especially modulating the selectivity of attention as well as motivating action and behavior” [Frontiers in Psychology]. Investing time and energy in the emotional well-being of students ultimately pays off in their learning.

  • “Enlist families to step back, connect, and listen at home.”

Jones asserts that the responsibility to support students and their learning should not depend only on teachers. “Parents and other guardians can play a uniquely valuable role in providing children with feelings of stability and comfort” [Op.Cit.]. She suggests that parents share their own feelings and sense of vulnerability, then listen actively and affirm what their children say.

I loved Jones’ closing statements: “…it is only when students feel safe, listened to, and supported by adults in their life that they can fully engage in academic work and everything else they do” [Op.Cit.]. I couldn’t have said it better myself!

First Things First

I just read a New York Times article about the state of U. S. schools today, based on the question, “‘Are American children getting adequate schooling in the pandemic?‘” [NYTimes 1.22.21]. It warns that inconsistency and disruption have been the only constants, that lack of guidance from the federal government has left districts to fend for themselves, that “there has been no official accounting of how many American students are attending school in person or virtually” [Ibid.]. This guarantees that we cannot know how many students have had face-to-face learning or what the educational outcomes might be, but the author argues that “some of the early data is deeply troubling” [Ibid.]

Given the variety of situations, the study chose to provide snapshots of seven districts that, together, provide a cross-section of America. While the snapshots offer interesting contrast, they also suggest confirmation that disadvantaged students suffer disproportionately. “‘Lower-income kids, kids of color, kids with unique needs like those who have a disability or other challenges — the numbers look very, very bad,’ said Robin Lake, the director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, a research and policy organization based at the University of Washington Bothell” [Ibid.]. They also confirm that students are suffering not only academically but also in terms of their mental health.

An earlier article in The Washington Post supports these findings. In December “A flood of new data — on the national, state and district levels — finds students began this academic year behind. Most of the research concludes students of color and those in high-poverty communities fell further behind their peers, exacerbating long-standing gaps in American education” [Washington Post, 12.6.20]

As a teacher, I’ve always cared about my students’ academic progress. As an activist, I’m working to impact the educational inequities that plague our less advantaged children. Yet I think we’re missing the boat here. Certainly, we need to improve online learning and work for more equity in educational opportunities to limit further harm that the pandemic may inflict on our students. Even more urgent, however, must be our efforts to address the mental and emotional consequences of the pandemic and the strain our students are under. If we ignore the trauma many students – and many families – are enduring for the sake of academic progress, we will ensure that neither improves adequately. Too many of our students will not succeed without more emotional and psychological support.

Last December the Superintendents of the nation’s three largest school districts, New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, called for an immediate Marshall plan for education, a national commitment to address the national emergency in education [Washington Post 12.12.20]. I agree that such a plan is overdue, but it cannot focus on achievement without addressing mental and emotional health first. Our students are struggling. We’re all struggling. Those who feel helpless and overwhelmed will not achieve academically until they feel more hope. Let’s get our priorities straight here and serve our learners by meeting these needs.

Teaching Now: Time for Change

My blog has been MIA for far too long while I dealt with some medical challenges, but I am back. Throughout this absence I’ve been pondering the future of education, convinced that teaching during the pandemic has created an opportunity for meaningful change yet concerned that we aren’t seeing that change come to fruition.  

In my optimistic naivete, I had envisioned a more student-centered approach with more time for collaboration and independent work. Zoom fatigue is real for both learners and teachers –surely we would see a shift like this.

Sadly, I don’t think we have seen that shift. Teachers are overwhelmed with hybrid learning, with the challenge of keeping students engaged in virtual platforms that don’t foster relationships, with student absenteeism and distraction… and the list goes on. Students and their families also seem overwhelmed by the challenges of hybrid and virtual learning.

Sal Kahn, founder of Khan Academy, confirms this: “These traditional lessons are also too long and not interactive enough to hold a student’s attention over a video conference. The traditional paper-based homework that’s being assigned does not provide students with enough feedback or teachers with enough information to understand what students are learning” [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/13/opinion/coronavirus-school-digital.html?campaign_id=9&emc=edit_nn_20200819&instance_id=21408&nl=the-morning&regi_id=71948775&section_index=3&section_name=idea_of_the_day_how_to_improve_remote_learning&segment_id=36497&te=1&user_id=a2c5403f90bf9a526413b15a7b86a2e2].

Torrey Trust offers a clear vision for a better of way of doing things. A University of Massachusetts – Amherst professor of Educational Technology, she shares graphics that demonstrate alternative approaches to serve educators and their learners. The one I chose to include above offers concrete options to improve teaching and learning. Each link provides specific approaches and activities. For example, her “Connected Learning” link suggests multiple team-based activities, including team challenges, virtual board designs, and community quilts. Each strategy provides another way for students to actively learn together if the teacher provides a framework related to content. The National Writing Project supports this kind of connected Learning: “Young people learn best when actively engaged, creating, and solving problems they care about, and supported by peers who appreciate and recognize their accomplishments” [https://lead.nwp.org/knowledgebase/what-is-connected-learning/]. Her link to Universal Design for Learning strategies offers ways optimize individual choice and autonomy, customize the display of information, and vary methods for response [https://goalbookapp.com/toolkit/v/strategies].

Classrooms that use strategies like these employ active learning. The Harvard Gazette reminds us, “Study shows students in ‘active learning’ classrooms learn more than they think” [https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/09/study-shows-that-students-learn-more-when-taking-part-in-classrooms-that-employ-active-learning-strategies/]. The authors describe classes in which they “start each topic by asking students to gather in small groups to solve some problems. While they work, we walk around the room to observe them and answer questions. Then we come together and give a short lecture targeted specifically at the misconceptions and struggles we saw during the problem-solving activity. So far we’ve transformed over a dozen classes to use this kind of active-learning approach. It’s extremely efficient — we can cover just as much material as we would using lectures” [Ibid.] Compared with a control group that experienced only lectures, the active learners scored far higher on tests on the material.

During my own teacher training, one of my supervisors told me I was too focused on content, that I should consider teaching college because of that focus. By the time I was teaching my Problem-Based Learning class in the late 1990s, my focus had shifted to process so dramatically that even my traditional curriculum classes grew more student-centered. Over time, my students clearly showed more engagement and satisfaction.

My naïve hope that this kind of shift would be forced by our emphasis on online and hybrid learning may have been foolish, but it’s not too late to move toward this kind of teaching. We need a better way. Our teachers would be more fulfilled, and our students deserve it.

Returning to Remote Learning

Parents, teachers, and administrators all reeled from the frustrations and challenges of the sudden shift to remote learning last Spring, so it’s no surprise that everyone needed a break. But it appears that remote learning cannot go away, and we have squandered a summer in which all those stakeholders might have prepared for the new reality.

School districts are struggling to determine what’s best for learners even as they acknowledge that 25% of teachers are high-risk and that support staff [nurses, secretaries, bus drivers] are essential to re-opening. Some have pushed back their opening date even for hybrid learning that combines in-person with remote; others have opted to go all remote from the beginning. Given the current stats for the pandemic, I suspect that most hybrid programs will find themselves having to close at some point in the Fall. Clearly, learning will be remote for a vast number.

How do we make it work better? How do we use this opportunity to improve teaching and learning? Surely it’s not enough to make do when this is our new normal.  Just a few options:

  1. Reconsider educational roles. The Council of Chief State School Officers, which represents state superintendents, outlined some roles schools might consider to focus attention in key areas: academics, technology, emotional support, and family outreach. Specialist leaders can help their colleagues succeed. For example, schools might consider having the teachers who were most successful with remote learning last Spring become School Remote Learning Leads with release time to support their colleagues. Academic Content Leads can be teachers with deep knowledge of standards, principals, and assistant principals. The principal, assistant principal, counselor, or social worker might become the Care Team Lead. This approach supports all faculty and staff in adjusting to the challenges of remote. If teacher contracts prove an obstacle, perhaps teacher’s associations will grant a temporary waiver.
  2. Do the work to establish classroom norms and build community that you’d normally do in person before you move to academic work.
  3. Recognize the inherent inequities in remote learning: internet access, access to devices, parental support, speed of internet, etc. Record Zoom sessions for later access for students who were unable to participate; seek ways to provide paper tools where internet is not available.
  4. Don’t depend on Zoom alone. Jennifer Casa-Todd writes, “We should be asking, is it more effective to have my students watch a video I created to learn a concept and then meet in real time to go over any issues or is it more effective to teach an interactive lesson in real time?” (https://jcasatodd.com/synchronous-vs-asynchronous learning/?fbclid=IwAR0sYP0Pf6FjuqJ0)
  5. Embrace technology, since we’re stuck with it, and seek out more digital tools like Screencastify and Padlet. Let students offer you ways they might want to share their learning.
  6. Rethink the purpose of learning. Never has it made more sense to move to a constructivist approach, to address real-world problems. Consider using problem-based learning for small groups.  Real world topics promote engagement and make the relevance of the work obvious.
  7. “Pandemic pods,” groups of families organizing remote home schooling groups, perhaps even with hired support, offer a model for those who choose remote learning in publice schools – why not partner up with one or more families to provide additional support and share efforts?
  8. Make online learning as interactive as possible. Use breakout rooms in Zoom for small group work. Use Zoom surveys to create “quizzes.” Create an open forum or discussion board so that students can support and mentor each other.
  9. Provide ongoing feedback, not only in Zoom sessions. Consider emailing embedded comments on student writing sent to the teacher.
  10. Recognize that social/emotional learning and mental health have taken a hit with schools moving to online instruction. Work on ways to build in community-building. Reach out individually to students who seem to be disengaged or struggling.

These ideas provide a mere beginning. Remote learning remains essential. It’s up to us to make it worthwhile.

Obstacles into Opportunities

Articles about education, its current challenges, and its possible if uncertain future abound. In educational webinars I see committed if often exhausted educators problem-solving, keeping the focus on what’s best for their students in these unusual times. Too often our education system seems hopeless.  


We don’t even know if schools will reopen later this summer or this fall. But despite President Trump’s prediction that “I think you’ll see a lot of schools open up,” all but a few states have suspended in-person classes for the rest of the academic year, and some are preparing for the possibility of shutdowns or part-time schedules in the fall. Illinois officials have gone even further, warning that remote learning could continue indefinitely. “This may be the new normal even in the fall,” said Janice Jackson, the chief executive of Chicago Public Schools.[1] Yesterday “California State University, the nation’s largest four-year public university system, said on Tuesday that classes at its 23 campuses would be canceled for the fall semester, with instruction taking place almost exclusively online.”[2]

Glaring inequity in access has never been more apparent. “The digital divide is real. Only two-thirds of rural homes have broadband; low-income families typically lack access to Internet-enabled devices beyond smartphones.”[3]

Parents are burning out as they try to help their students with at-home learning, and there is “widespread concern that even with remote learning in place, many students will return to school behind where they would have been if they’d been in the classroom.”[4]

Concerns for special education students have become particularly acute. “It is not only because their students’ challenges often make it more difficult for them to learn remotely, but also because districts are required under the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act to provide specific services and meet particular goals within a certain time frame to any child deemed to be eligible for special education services. That can include not just academics, but related services such as occupational, physical and speech therapy.”[5]

Nor can we hope to resume a functioning economy until schools reopen. “Now, with schools and child care centers closed, it’s obvious how much child care is a societal, not just an individual, need. Essential workers can’t show up without child care, and remote working parents struggle to work anything close to full time.”[6]

Although these obstacles may seem insurmountable, we have the power to use them as steppingstones to reshape education. It is up to us to turn these obstacles into opportunities. Educational reform, long overdue, can no longer wait. We need to demand change:

  • Learners need universal internet access.
  • Effective schools must build stronger partnerships between parents and teachers.
  • More research into what online learning can do well, and where face-to-face instruction is superior is now essential.
  • Students need more ownership for their learning, and teachers need to coach and facilitate and create learning opportunities.
  • We must recognize that schools are an essential part of our functioning society, not only because they prepare students for the future, but because they empower parents to function now. All of us benefit when schools serve students well.

We cannot afford to feel hopeless. Our schools have not always met the needs of their students or of society. If our educational system has been further broken by Covid-19, we must seize the opportunity to change as we rebuild. As we seek to reopen, we must reinvent.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/28/us/coronavirus-schools-reopen.html?campaign_id=168&emc=edit_NN_p_20200429&instance_id=18058&nl=morning-briefing&regi_id=71948775&section=topNews&segment_id=26195&te=1&user_id=a2c5403f90bf9a526413b15a7b86a2e2.

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/12/us/cal-state-online-classes.html

[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/05/03/jeb-bush-its-time-embrace-distance-learning-not-just-because-coronavirus/?utm_campaign=wp_opinions&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_opinions

[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/27/nyregion/coronavirus-homeschooling-parents.html?campaign_id=168&emc=edit_NN_p_20200428&instance_id=17997&nl=morning-briefing&regi_id=71948775&section=topNews&segment_id=26118&te=1&user_id=a2c5403f90bf9a526413b15a7b86a2e2

[5] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/23/education/learning/coronavirus-teachers-special-needs-students.html?campaign_id=168&emc=edit_NN_p_20200428&instance_id=17997&nl=morning-briefing&regi_id=71948775&section=topNews&segment_id=26118&te=1&user_id=a2c5403f90bf9a526413b15a7b86a2e2

[6] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/27/upshot/coronavirus-exposes-workplace-truths.html?campaign_id=43&emc=edit_li_20200428&instance_id=18040&nl=wait-…&regi_id=71948775&segment_id=26146&te=1&user_id=a2c5403f90bf9a526413b15a7b86a2e2