Connection, not real-time teaching, is the priority
Remote teaching during this pandemic will not replicate the classroom experience. Last Friday, Stephen Lecce, Ontario’s minister of education, announced the government expects teachers to embrace virtual classes in real time, also known as synchronous learning, to restore the classroom experience and feeling for kids.
Educators have sounded alarms about the problems with at-home learning that will only be made worse with synchronous classes, including unequal access to technology, privacy concerns, and varying levels of parental support. Synchronous learning cannot recreate the classroom. Forcing learning to occur at the same time and in the same ways will compound inequities. If there is a hopeful sign it may be that Lecce recognizes the best education values relationships.
The ministry’s memo states the directive for synchronous learning responds to parents and students looking for ways to interact with their teachers. A recent Angus Reid poll of Canadian children ages 10 to 17 reports that students want greater connection. While children report keeping up with learning at home, they are unmotivated and dislike it. More than half of children said it’s their friends they miss the most.
Educators are attempting to leverage the face-to-face relationships established with students to make remote instruction work. Teachers have checked-in with families by video conference, phone or email since school closures. Many have posted videos of themselves reading or giving instructions, some even making headlines for bicycling through neighbourhoods to encourage kids to stay fit. Despite teachers’ efforts, feelings of disconnection and dissatisfaction with home learning persist.
The Learn at Home program has prioritized curriculum over connection. Lecce stated when schools closed that students’ academic achievement would continue with discipline and commitment. The ministry, while assuring students their grades will not go down, still requires teachers to provide a final report card.
Teachers have rapidly learned new software to transmit information to their classes in large measure through asynchronous learning, meaning that students learn the same material but at their own pace. For example, a teacher posts an assignment online to be returned by a certain date.
Asynchronous remote learning is far from ideal, but the best option during the pandemic. Parents are supporting the learning of children with different needs, while possibly coping with work schedules, health issues, economic uncertainty and more.
Perhaps Lecce’s drive for synchronous learning signals an awareness that the Learn at Home program is problematic. The unprecedented move to remote teaching necessitated a one-size-fits-all approach to the delivery of content. Long discredited, this model reduces teaching to depositing knowledge into the minds of passive students. Lecce is correct that such learning does not replicate what students are missing in the classroom.
Good classroom learning is an active and creative process among a community of learners. Ideally, teachers use flexible and responsive methods to reach the needs of diverse learners. Students discover, create and wrestle with ideas together. This kind of learning encourages students to be critical and engaged thinkers. Education is largely about connections — between teacher and student, among students, and to the world.
If this recent insistence on synchronous learning is a recognition of the value of connection to promote belonging and to motivate students, then the ministry needs to support educators in prioritizing positive relationships essential to learning. Teachers are keenly aware that the emotional and social supports they provide are what drives student success.
Teachers need to be empowered to use their judgment about what this form of learning requires in the same flexible and responsive ways they do in the classroom. To be sure, this will require significant efforts on the part of teachers, who may need to offer virtual lessons for individual, struggling students or checkins to ensure the well-being of students.
But the Ministry of Education needs to relax its expectations that students will complete the usual curriculum and perhaps focus more on the social services that are integral to education. Whatever the response, it will be good education if the priority is connection before curriculum.