Learning from life in a Zoom classroom
Some positives, but no one said they prefer this
This coming week, students in Mara Nowak’s sophomore class at Carmen High School South will be writing personal essays describing a time when they experienced adversity.
I don’t want to get involved in the choices each one makes, except to suggest one possible theme: What you’re going through right now. Adversity, thy name is Spring 2020. That’s true for almost every person on the planet. When it comes to students, teachers and schools, the period from mid-March through the end of this school year (and maybe longer) is not simple, not always pretty and frequently stressful.
Perhaps ironically, the more a school community aims to keep moving forward with education, the more challenging things are, simply because trying is harder than not trying and change is harder than throwing up your hands.
But progress is possible. There are praiseworthy examples of school communities in Milwaukee uniting to make the best of education now. The five Carmen charter schools are examples — and not the only ones — of places pushing hard to keep learning going.
I dropped in on Nowak’s session with eight of her students several days ago, meaning I joined their Zoom group. It was a pretty good class, with the teacher and students talking and seeing each other on screens.
The goal was to get students prepared to write their essays by learning from successful essays of past students and by discussing definitions and examples of some writing devices, such as analogies, metaphors and allusion.
“I’m really excited about this writing journey you’re about to begin,” Nowak told the students.
I asked the students what they thought of learning via computer. The general view was that it’s OK, but conventional classrooms are better. You get more done in a regular class and questions are answered more promptly by teachers, although messaging works.
You get to be with your friends in a “real” school. But there are good things about distance learning, including that you get more choice of when to do school work.
Nowak said that at the start, in March, she was trying to follow a schedule of daily classes similar to a conventional schedule. But she realized that in distance learning, focusing around what to do this week worked better than focusing on what to do each day.
“Let those daily goals take a break,” she said. “Less is more, in a way.” I heard similar thoughts from several teachers I spoke with.
Nowak also said small group sessions online were more successful than big group sessions.
“I would say that engagement and connection are such vital components of learning and we’ve continued to engage with students,“she said.
She has tried to get every student involved, but success isn’t easy. Some weeks, about 75% students are actively involved, some weeks less.
“There are other things that are just out of our control,” she said. Among the stresses: many students are helping care for siblings much of the time and learning circumstances in some homes are not ideal.
“Are we progressing at the same level we would in the classroom? I don’t think we could compare this to that,” Nowak said. “I would absolutely rather be in the classroom.”
Some students told me they find pluses, mostly involving picking when they do school work, but no one said that overall they preferred distance learning to being in school.
David Alanis, 11, a sixth grader at Carmen Middle School South, said he thought his learning, much of it using a Chromebook computer, was going well. “When I feel overwhelmed, I can take some breaks, also,” he said.
But overall, “I think I would learn more in school because I can tell my teachers to help me,” and there are now sometimes delays waiting for responses by email.
His mother, Llesavel Alanis, said she thought David was learning well. But a conventional classroom would be better.
“At home, there are things that I can do to help and things that I can’t,” she said.
Lexi Kathrens-Gallardo, David’s social studies teacher, said one thing she had found now was a better response
from students to feedback from her.
“That has really upped their writing game,” she said. “I think it shows so much determination on their part.”
Bailey Greene, a fourth grade teacher at Stellar Elementary, part of the Carmen network, said the distance has actually brought her closer to her students and their parents because there is daily communication between school and home.
She said, “I just feel so much closer to families and feel comfortable relating to them on a human level.” She hopes that will lead to higher levels of trust between school and home in the future.
“The unknown scares our kids,” said Nina Lantz, a special education teacher at Carmen Middle-High School Northwest. “That makes a lot of sense. It scares all of us. I really think our kids are anxious to get back to school and I’m a little bit anxious for all of them.”
Lantz said, “I do have to say there are some positives.”
Some students, even those with higher-level special education needs, are making good progress and seem to benefit from learning from homes where there is less distraction.
“We have really been able to get into a groove with some of our students,” Lantz said.
One can hope that the students in Mara Nowak’s class will find that dealing with adversity can lead to constructive results. For the ones who are fortunate to have a lot going on between them and their teachers, distance learning may keep them on a pretty good track.
But for the large number of students in many schools who aren’t engaged in schoolwork, many of them dealing with tough personal issues daily, there is no way this isn’t a time of educational setbacks
One lesson from this tumultuous spring is that adversity comes in different degrees. Having an effective school and teachers is one of the things that makes it less formidable.
Alan J. Borsuk is senior fellow in law and public policy at Marquette Law School. Reach him at alan.borsuk@ marquette.edu.