This resource is intended to help school and district leaders understand, reflect upon, and prioritize actions to improve student learning in remote settings. The guide:

• Is aligned to and organized around five key levers of the Texas Effective Schools Framework (ESF), which describes the statewide vision for the best practices effective schools and districts engage in daily across in-person and remote learning settings. It is not intended to substitute or replace the formal ESF diagnostic but rather seeks to offer support for launching, improving, and removing barriers for effective instruction in virtual settings.

• Highlights specific school-based “Power Moves,” examples and resources, and supportive system conditions that are particularly critical to ensuring high-quality teaching and learning in distance and online environments for all students.

• Can be used in concert with the accompanying deeper Remote Learning Reflection Tool to help leaders assess current readiness and practice, then work with their teams and technical assistance partners to choose areas for highest-impact action.

More About This Guide and Terms Used

The rapid shift to remote learning in the spring of 2020 has required schools to quickly build the capacity to serve students effectively online. This tool was developed to support Texas schools as they shift to and improve remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. It has been developed for the Texas Education Agency (TEA) by education nonprofit The Learning Accelerator (TLA), with support and input from technical assistance partners and districts.

Improving Remote Learning: A long-standing body of research suggests that remote learning can be as effective as in-person instruction; however, while “good learning”— that is, rigorous, active experiences that equitably enable all learners to acquire and transfer new knowledge and skills to longer-term memory and application — is generally the same online as offline, the specific practices teachers enact must differ to take advantage of relative benefits and challenges of modalities (digital and analog, synchronous and asynchronous, and in-person versus online).

Through review of the remote learning research, as well as through diligence with practitioners working on the ground, TLA has identified three factors critical to remote learning success:

• high-quality online instruction;

• effective independent learning in partnership with families; and,

• comprehensive support for whole child development.