We had received notice by email that New York City Public Schools would be closed due the worsening Covid-19 pandemic. The Chancellor instructed us to report to our school sites for three days of planning before departing for the foreseeable future.

On March 19, having exhausted my ability to focus over the course of the three planning days, I packed as many educational supplies as I could carry into boxes and hired a driver to take me home from my school in the Bronx. On the ride home, I felt a mix of dread and optimism: the dread that I would not likely be able to soon return and optimism that our transition to distance learning would be an astounding technological success.

A Brave Utopia Unravels

During our three days of intensive planning, we laboured fanatically to transform a month’s worth of curriculum into online learning modules, working as if we were archivists preserving the totality of human knowledge on Google Classroom. We naively believed that learning would go on at its usual pace, perhaps accelerated by a sudden, unbridled passion for learning by those students stuck at home. Unfortunately, our imagined utopia of distance learning quickly exposed itself for the hardship it was: the same struggling students we had always serviced, now learning with the additional barriers of distance, isolation, and a lack of technological literacy.

During our first few days of distance instruction, we stood by our well-laid plans and incorporated ways of communicating with students during instructional time. We made use of Google’s Meet and old-fashioned phone calls to congeal students to participate with unsatisfying success. Among those students with individualized education plans, work-completion was gauged at 30% with the general population fairing only slightly better. Students complained that the work was confusing, even if they did have regular access to an Internet-ready device. Parents complained that teachers didn’t call enough, or they called too often. As we pondered the Goldilocks rate of parental communication in frustrated-measure, we responded by further scaffolding assignments with vocabulary lists, modelled exemplars, and step by step instructions which, rather than clarifying tasks for students, overwhelmed them.

“Mad Work”

Students complained that assignments were “mad work” and seemed to exert little effort to complete them. I tried to interrogate students to determine the source of the problem. “Did you read the assignment?,” I asked. “Did you watch the YouTube video in which I explained everything?”

Apparently, becoming YouTube-famous for explaining the organic industrial food-chain is more difficult than might be supposed because of course, they didn’t watch the YouTube video. Nor did they read the assignment. Were my students just lazy?

Well, yes, to be frank. Students were not making a significant effort to read and understand the assignments. Still, they were the same students who were behind grade-level and read texts with difficulty, who were easily discouraged, who were dealing with isolation, who had limited experience with technology aside from web games and social media, and who were dealing with the stress created by the pandemic. In context, it was a lot to expect.

One Step at a Time

Successful teaching means being able to meet students where they are and having high expectations for them to grow and improve. Teachers often flounder on at least one of those requirements and I had been floundering at the first. How do you meet students where they are if you’re not in the same room with them?

After a healthy period of commiseration, the other teachers and I made some changes. We slowed down the pacing and reduced the complexity of learning tasks, breaking up the tasks into a few small steps each day. We invited students to participate in daily, whole-class video chats and kept the meetings fun and informal, encouraging them to share their thoughts and feelings about anything that was bothering them. We reached out to students who were not completing work and talked them through the assignments until they submitted them. In short, we supported students by validating their emotions and doing a lot of figurative hand-holding.

I can’t say that a majority of my eighth-grade students are currently well-prepared for high school. However, I can say that they are more engaged in learning now than they were when they were first thrust into distance learning. The pandemic has doubtlessly impacted student learning, but it is important that teachers mitigate that impact as much as possible, a challenge that begins with meeting students where they are. From there, we at least have the potential to move student achievement.

Distance learning isn’t easy nor ideal for most student populations, but it’s what we as teachers are called upon to succeed in, one step at a time until we are able to return to our school buildings.