Chris's Advice - April 2020

All of us are facing a similar problem: how to provide a meaningful learning experience for our students during a time of social upheaval. We all have limited time and complex personal circumstances to work within. Here are some tips that I hope might help us manage the challenges we face.

(1) Pace yourself. Take things a week at a time. None of us have handled a situation like this before and none of us have all the answers.

(2) Be observant. Don't try to do too much all at once. Do a bit and see how it goes; figure out what works and what doesn't. Watch for students falling through the cracks.

(3) Get students learning quickly. Start your students learning as soon as you can (April 6) and in the simplest way you can manage. Their learning experiences will be far from the quality they experience in your regular classes and this is understandable. There will be time to change this and improve. This is not likely to end soon.

(4) Do what you can. What each one of us does will look different depending on lots of things: our experience with online technology, the nature of our subjects, the electronic resources we already use in our classrooms, our circumstances at home, and more. That is OK. Pick small, incremental goals for the development of your students' remote learning experience. Try to improve these as time goes by.

(5) Focus on what's important. We have already lost two weeks of learning and you won't be able to cover content at the same rate as in a physical class; students will learn slower and less reliably. Choose the most important learning and set aside the smaller niche topics. Focus on the core ideas and skills.

(6) Don't worry (or cause worry) about what is out of our hands. We have no instructions yet about how to deal with assessment, tests, exams, credits, and universities. Don't worry about this yet and be careful what you say to students.

(7) Help with morale. Despite the many challenges our students will face, encourage a positive attitude towards learning and provide advice on helpful learning behaviours: establish a daily routine, collaborate with peers, what to do when you're stuck, avoiding distractions, the importance of self-regulation, the value of present learning for the future, etc.

(8) Share and collaborate. We need to help out one another! If you have a good set of resources what could be helpful for others, please share them with me. Let's try to avoid everyone reinventing the wheel. I will curate a collection on this website. I won't post everything that I receive: only materials are of reasonable quality and easy to use for other teachers. christopher.meyer@tdsb.on.ca