My school year ended today. Like many of you, I’m relieved!
The transition to remote learning was exhausting because I was constantly experimenting with strategies to keep my kids engaged and learning our essential content from home. I got a lot of things right — but I also got a lot of things wrong.
One of the things that I got wrong was failing to ensure that students with difficult home circumstances had a shot to master our essential learning, too.
Take Penelope* for example.
Remote learning for her looked a lot different than it did for most of my students. She went to work with her mother — who is a professional house cleaner — every single day.
Some days, she was “free,” simply waiting in each house while her mother worked. Other days, she pitched in and lent a hand, helping her mom to finish the homes that she had been hired to clean.
In both circumstances, however, Penelope didn’t have the kind of focused learning time that many of the other students on my eighth grade team had. That made it nearly impossible for her to complete the traditional assignments that I was posting for my students week in and week out.
The result: She checked out of learning early in our final quarter, rarely completing assignments. I’m sure that there are lots of gaps in her knowledge as a result.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Penelope today — and if I had it to do all over again, I would have given her a personal task card to work with every two weeks.
Notice that I built this task card around a simple experiment that Penelope could do while helping her mother: Removing tarnish from silverware.
My hope would be that Penelope could grab the materials for removing tarnish from silverware and actually do that in a few of the homes where she and her mother were working. Doing so would give Penelope a chance to lend a hand while learning about chemical reactions — an essential outcome in my eighth grade science curriculum — all at the same time.
The remainder of the tasks on the task card build off of that original experiment. More importantly, all of those tasks are connected to specific essential outcomes in the eighth grade curriculum.
Can you see what’s happening here?
The nonnegotiable for teachers is that EVERY student — regardless of circumstance — should master any outcomes that we have identified as essential.
That means MY responsibility in a remote learning environment where some students have different experiences than others is to plan intentionally for students like Penelope. I need to understand her situation and then figure out the best ways that she can interact with my essential outcomes, too.
Now, I know what some of you are thinking: There’s NO WAY that this is doable! We simply CAN’T make individual learning cards for every student that we teach.
And the good news is that I’m not asking you to make individual learning cards for every student. The fact of the matter is that the majority of my students WEREN’T going to work with their mothers every single day — so they didn’t need a customized learning card based on their unique situations.
What’s even better is that ALL of the tasks on Penelope’s learning card can be used with ALL of my students who aren’t wrestling with the same challenges that she is. That means the work that I plan for kids with unique circumstances like Penelope wouldn’t be an extra item on my to-do list because I could use that same work with everyone.
Does that make sense to you?
By ignoring her unique circumstance in my planning process for this year, I failed Penelope. She didn’t have the chance to interact with my essential outcomes because she couldn’t complete the more traditional tasks that I had developed.
If I had prioritize her learning needs FIRST in my planning process, however, I would have ended up with tasks that gave EVERY student — including Penelope — a chance to master the essentials in my required curriculum.
THAT’s a change I’m making when we come back to school next fall.
(*Penelope is not her real name!)
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