School systems across the state at every level have either created their own training for teachers or paid someone else to do it. They hope it makes this fall’s distance learning more effective than the spring’s.
For most California students in schools and colleges, the fall term will look like the middle of spring: online with little to no in-person instruction.
But if students and parents accepted the rapid switch to online in March and April as an emergency need while a pandemic spiraled out of control, their expectations for fall will be different.
“With a number of months to prepare, that same grace and gratitude probably won’t be there,” said Brad Rathgeber, the CEO of One Schoolhouse, a Washington D.C.-based consortium of 218 mostly “independent” private K-12 schools that offers online coursework to students and trains teachers readying for a virtual fall.
Schools at every level have tried different strategies to prepare teachers for distance learning in the fall, from paying companies like One Schoolhouse to developing their own training curriculum.
Here’s a look at how some of that is shaking out.
Spring training
When teachers rushed to move instruction online back in March, “they were basically taking what they did in their face-to-face classrooms and finding an online equivalent,” said Rathgeber.
But the rules of in-person instruction don’t fully apply to teaching virtually. Educators need to spend considerable time learning not just the new digital tools but totally different strategies for teaching students who’ll likely never set foot in a classroom this fall.
Experts say teaching is about building relationships. Without the ability to see students in-person, how can schools and colleges forge the human element that can easily go missing in a virtual environment? One strategy is for teachers and professors to organize group learning activities over video conferencing software. Another, which takes time to get right, is figuring out what content should instructors prioritize for live instruction and what can be assigned as homework for students to review, such as explanatory videos or articles to prepare for a live discussion.
One Schoolhouse charges schools $300 per teacher for approximately 15 hours of training for teaching virtually, or $450 if the school isn’t part of the One Schoolhouse consortium. Several California schools took on those services, Rathgeber said, including Marin Academy, a private school in San Rafael, CA, where all roughly 70 teachers and faculty took part in the training. One Schoolhouse also provides free training to any teacher outside its network through webinars.
Los Angeles Unified School District, California’s largest, in May created 30 hours of online training to ready teachers for distance learning. More than 11,000 teachers completed the training, just under half of the district’s teaching corps.
Public and private universities are running faculty training programs this summer to help them create virtual courses and teach them techniques for improving student learning online. Some are even offering faculty stipends to learn the virtual instruction ropes.
For California universities that made early decisions to move most, if not all, instruction online for fall term, the summer has been smoother. By focusing on online teaching, the fall learning plan “is coherent from beginning to end and doesn’t have a lot of this flipping back and forth” between scenarios that bring instruction back in person mid-term, said Deanna L. Fassett, assistant vice provost for faculty development at San Jose State University, where all instruction is expected to be remote in the fall.
An ideal plan for K-12 teachers
For K-12 schools, training faculty for an online fall is key, says Alix Gallagher, director of strategic partnerships at Policy Analysis for California Education, an education research center made up of faculty from several premier California universities that last week published a guide for schools to prepare for online learning. “What happened this past spring, I’ll say as a researcher and parent, in general, was pretty terrible and we need to get it better,” Gallagher said.
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Learning the bells and whistles of technology is important but the training can’t stop there. She’d like to see district headquarters, which have curriculum specialists on staff, develop model lesson plans for a variety of subjects that can be imported to a virtual fall.
The models should include guidance for teachers on what kind of learning can happen synchronously — the term used to mean live virtual instruction — and what can be assigned for students to learn on their own time, she said.
That’s where familiarity with the technology is important. Teachers should know how to organize virtual breakout rooms on Zoom, the popular video conferencing software that’s become ubiquitous in the era of COVID-19, to schedule group discussions among students to better reinforce the content they’re trying to teach.
To improve classroom security, teachers should also know how to create login credentials so that only students assigned to the class can enter the video meetings, Gallagher said.
That training should be ongoing, because “there will probably be a long learning trajectory for teachers,” Gallagher said. She recommends districts restructure part of their school calendar to focus more on teacher training. The training can also look like the lesson plans teachers will be developing — with some aspects done synchronously and others on-demand — and use the same tools teachers will work with while teaching students.
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