Three of the five stages require us to provide blended, or hybrid, learning models. These models call for students to attend our buildings for some of the time, and have their learning supported at home for the rest of the time. Knowing this, we have built many features into our plan to allow for movement between on-site and off-site learning opportunities.
We began by identifying our priorities as a learning community to guide our decision making.
- student, staff, and parent health and welfare
- forge and foster relationships that are strong enough to withstand stage shifts/changes in learning models
- all students are supported to move from their point A to their point B
- work to create opportunities to reduce necessary screen time
- developing Core Competencies
- developing literacy – reading, writing, communication, critical thinking
- developing numeracy – figures, procedures, patterns, problem solving
- developing health – physical, mental, emotional
- learning to learn
- collaboration
- parent-teacher-student
- teacher-student
- student-student
- teacher-teacher
As student, staff, and parent health and safety are our top priority, our Health and Safety Committee will direct how our school operates and functions based on their work with district and provincial authorities and experts. Any schedules in the blended/hybrid model are dependent upon what the Health and Safety Committee establishes as safe operation and a schedule will be prepared based on those requirements in August.
As for the next part of our planning, to reflect our priorities, we set a plan for implementation that did not matter where on the face-to-face continuum we are in September. These are things that transcend physical structure.
Students will not be ready for learning until they feel physiologically and psychologically safe. We will prepare a plan with homeroom teachers to support students working through their experiences. We also believe that our teachers need to process the past year, so we have hired a highly regarded therapist (Kim Bartel and her team) to work with our teachers directly on one of our professional development days before school begins. She will also work with us to facilitate the creation of our plan for supporting our students.
In all three models, September will be focused on quick and powerful relationship and community building. For example, we are committing to early and meaningful contact with each child’s primary caregivers. We plan to schedule a day and evening in the second week of September for this, though recognize much of the contact will not be restricted to these times. We also identified that some executive skills – especially organization skills, planning/prioritizing, time management, and goal-directed persistence – were difference makers for student success. These will be targeted for development right away as will the developing of technology skills in the platform we have chosen to use. Our teachers will be spending a second professional development day in September developing their skills in Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365, making sure to set up clear and consistent structures for supporting student learning with this platform. We will also assess math, reading and writing levels for all students before the end of September in order to better target supports and learning.
Our most vulnerable learners will be identified and supported quickly, often, and we will channel supports, including outside agencies, for these families. Through the spring we worked to identify those students who struggled significantly with remote learning and then with blended learning. This will give us an advantage in the fall to make sure supports are in place for these students right away. One structure we will use is to create a technology inventory for students in each homeroom. From this we will identify sources of needed technology immediately and either distribute that technology right away if we are in a blended or remote learning environment or have it ready to go for when we shift to those. Vulnerabilities in learners will also be identified and supported quickly, often, and we will channel targeted supports. One of the advantages of our school structure is that our homeroom teachers keep their students for two years, so those in grades seven and nine are already well known to their teachers.
One of the most significant factors in student success via remote or blended learning is the ability of parents to support students with their organization skills and work environments. We heard clearly that our communication needs to improve. So, right at the beginning of September we will provide parents with information, in a clear and supportive way, about how to best support their children in their learning journey. This will include key information about accessing and utilizing our electronic tools.
Core Competencies, literacy, numeracy, health, and learning to learn will drive program design and delivery. In planning our learning, we will be working to provide as many co-created learning opportunities as possible and will be developing our use of assessment with learning, focusing on the learning process and executive skill development.
Each of the following three structures offer their advantages and their challenges, and we feel ready to embrace the advantages and mitigate many of the challenges.
Full Face-to-Face Learning
We know this structure well; we know how to do it and have been using this model for millennia. We have created a timetable that fits with our learning community’s goals and values and this has been communicated to all staff. We recognize that Teams can amplify the learning for many of our students, and we recognize that at some point in the school year we will likely be working in a blended model or in a remote model; therefore, we will be using Microsoft Teams as our student learning platform throughout. As we do this, we will be working to establish clear protocols, ways to use this technology to support executive skills, and ways to use the technology to improve learning.
Blended Learning
Based on the parameters set by our Health and Safety Committee, homeroom teachers will determine which students will attend school at which times. Our Health and Safety Committee will also decide how we can utilize our rooms and space. Our most vulnerable students will get the majority of time available in our building for support. Homeroom teachers, with their partners, will direct the learning for their students. We have two models that might be used, depending on the teacher team. The first would have, at various times, one teacher taking the lead for the remote learning with the other supporting students on-site. It will be necessary for the two teachers to work together to ensure that both have ample face-to-face access to their students to support positive relationship development. The other model has the homeroom teacher guiding the learning for all and managing a schedule that supports both remote and face-to-face elements. This has been a challenge for teachers this year, but several models have emerged to support this structure. In this model, and in the remote model, teachers will be working to find learning opportunities that are not dependent on technology to minimize the amount of screen time students need to have. It will be important in this structure, to make sure that each student gets some face-to-face time; however, the lion’s share of that time will be filled with our most vulnerable learners.
One of the many things we learned this past year is that it takes a lot of time and effort to establish patterns and routines with online learning, consistency matters, so we will work to minimize changes and transitions between teachers, days, and groups. Each homeroom teacher will maintain a continuous journal for each student in one place. This journal will document salient information about their learning program and experiences. Support staff will have access to these journals to maximize our consistency of service and support for each child.
We are fortunate to have several teachers who do not have homerooms. Our plan is to have these teachers help our students in a few ways. We would like to provide access for students to work in our shop, our digital media lab, our art room, our music room, and our food preparation lab. These are the domains for many of our non-enrolling teachers and they will support student access and use of these facilities. Similarly, we will maximize learning opportunities in our gymnasium and outdoor spaces. We also see our non-enrolling teachers working with teacher teams to develop cross-curricular, hands-on learning with their students. Finally, these teachers will be available to provide academic student support as needed.
Remote Learning
This structure has similar features to the blended learning structure. Homeroom teachers will direct the learning for their students working together with their teaching partner. Our vulnerable learners will be supported quickly, often, and we will channel the requisite supports, including our outside agency partners, for these families. We will not let more than 3 days go by without establishing contact with each of these learners and their families. We will have an education assistant working with each teacher team to increase the amount of support we can give each student. We will also have our teachers without homerooms supporting students by working with teacher teams to integrate learning opportunities and provide extra support to specific learners. We will make a concerted effort to co-create as many learning opportunities with our students as possible that do not require technology. As with the blended model, each homeroom teacher will maintain a continuous journal for each student in one place. This journal will document salient information about their learning program and experiences. Support staff will have access to these journals to maximize our consistency of service and support for each child. Instructions for learning plans will be simple, clear, and short to increase student understanding and success.
As one can see from reading these plans, we are well prepared for each extreme and to move fluidly between different levels of the blended learning continuum between the extremes. We have learned a lot together from the past four months. Our priorities guide our planning and will guide our actions in the new school year. We are supporting our plans with three intense days of professional development for our teachers at the end of summer to be as prepared as possible for our new adventures in a new school year. Regardless the structure, staying focused on our goal of improving each child’s life has and will continue to guide our actions guaranteeing that we do our best for each of our students.
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About the author: Gerald Fussell has a Bachelor of Arts, a Bachelor of Education, and a Masters in Curriculum Leadership from the University of Victoria. He is currently working on his Doctorate at the University of Kansas. He serves as the principal of a middle school for students in grades 6 through 9 in the Comox Valley, British Columbia. Gerald has been active in projects related to assessment, educational change, and inquiry driven learning. More information about Gerald Fussell can be found at his web-site, on his blog (http://whynot-gfussell.blogspot.com/), or on Twitter (@GFussell).