This week on TeachLab, Justin Reich joins Blake Middle School of Medfield, MA for their Monday morning check-in to discuss the many challenges of distance learning, and the specific challenges of middle schools, who have uniquely diverse age-groups to address. Principal Nat Vaughn guides the discussion and provides questions for Justin to shed light on with his experience and research.
This week on TeachLab, Justin Reich joins Blake Middle School of Medfield, MA for their Monday morning check-in to discuss the many challenges of distance learning, and the specific challenges of middle schools, who have uniquely diverse age-groups to address. Principal Nat Vaughn guides the discussion and provides questions for Justin to shed light on with his experience and research.
“when I was a brand new teacher, my department head used to say.... every time you assign an essay, you're assigning 75 different essays. The experience that your students have writing this is just going to be so different for each student. And that was in normal non-crisis pandemic times, I feel like that advice is magnified a thousand times now.”
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Justin Reich: From the home studio of the MIT Teaching Systems Lab, welcome to TeachLab. I'm your host Justin Reich. This episode is part of our special COVID-19 series to support teachers and learners through the challenges of distance learning. Blake Middle School in Medfield, Massachusetts is an exceptional place. I've been working with educators there in a consulting capacity for over 10 years, and here in the teaching systems lab, we featured their terrific maker-space and engineering education program in our design thinking for leading and learning online course. Middle schools are in a unique situation where their students are transitioning out of elementary education and childhood and into adolescence and more independent learning, and each student is at a different place in that transition. I joined principal Nat Vaughn and many of the Blake Middle School faculty on a virtual Monday morning faculty check-in so I could hear about how they're doing, discuss distance learning in their middle school context, and address some of the faculty's questions about remote learning.
Nat Vaughn: So Justin has had a relationship with Medfield through edtech teacher for a long, long time now. It's been wonderful and he's an educational researcher, and I'll let Justin kind of ... if you don't mind introducing yourself a little bit as to where you're at, and as all of you know, I've been listening to his podcast a great deal and leaning on a lot of the resources coming out from their work for us as a district, and I reached out to him last week and he said he'd be happy to join one of our check-ins. So the questions on the doc Justin has access to. I don't think we'll have time to go through all of them, but Justin, you had shared that maybe it would be great if you could just kind of intro where you're at and what your work's about and kind of where you're at and then we can just kind of dive in.
Justin Reich: That sounds great. Yeah, so I've worked with Medfield I think for 12 years or something like that in one form or another, and I used to be a high school history teacher and then I spent some time studying how people use technology in schools and did a bunch of professional development around that, and now I'm at MIT and I run a lab called the teaching systems lab where we study how teachers learn and particularly how teachers learn through online means, and I happened to be on teaching leave this semester, in part because I was wrapping up a book, and sort of I sent in the copy edits for the book on March 21st or something like that, right before schools started closing. So I've pretty much just spent the last month trying to help educators think through what they're wrestling with and take sort of ... I have the good fortune to spend a lot of time thinking about and reading and learning about how online learning works in this country and in lots of other places, trying to share what we know there.
Justin Reich: One of the big research projects that we did was right around the time that Massachusetts on March 25th released its initial guidance, we realized, "Oh, I bet a lot of other States are going to release guidance in different forms." So most of the people in my lab dropped what were doing for about a week and read the remote learning guidance from all 50 states and put together a report called remote learning guidance for state education agencies during COVID-19 pandemic, a first look. We tried to get a sense of like, "Okay, so what is everyone across the country recommending and what can we learn from that?" And then we spent a lot of other time talking to educators and things like that, with all the kinds of questions that you all posted in the document here, which is how do we balance supporting kids and pushing them without pushing them too hard?
Justin Reich: How do we help them keep learning without making them feel bad if circumstances are such that they really can't keep learning at the pace that they were before? What are the right things to do here? I mean I think Medfield for a bunch of reasons is probably particularly well equipped to handle this challenge, and certainly at Blake Middle School, in part because you've thought a lot about technology mediated learning in one form or another for a long time, and fortunately my I get the sense that a lot of folks in Medfield live ... not everyone, but a lot of folks live in places where they have access to broadband internet and computing devices at home and those kinds of things, which isn't the case to our colleagues who are out in Western Massachusetts living in places where if a billion dollars fell from the sky, you still couldn't get broadband internet because someone has to carry the wires out, the fiber optic lines and things like that, and then our urban neighborhoods as well with a bunch of other challenges.
Justin Reich: So that's what I've been thinking about, but it'd be great to just dive into what some of these ... maybe the other thing to say is that I think this is really important for everyone to recognize that we all experience this very, very differently. Every kid does, every family does, every teacher does. I'm sure you're all waking up every day and doing the very best you can to make this work for kids and family. That is the sort of universal experience I have. If you happen to have a subscription to the LA Times, there was an incredibly beautiful profile of a teacher leader in Inglewood. She wakes up at seven o'clock in the morning so that she can get to school to pack lunches for her kids and distribute them, and part of why she's volunteering to distribute food is because that's one of the ways that she can kind of check in with her students from six feet away while they're coming and picking up their breakfast and lunch and maybe dinner for the day.
Justin Reich: And then she goes home and she teaches online from 12 to 6:00 PM and then she's the building union rep, and so she's taking questions from teachers all afternoon, and it's a beautiful story of an incredibly committed educator. Of course, lots of us can't have a story like that. Part of the condition of that story, she must not have young kids in the house or other kinds of things like that. My daughter's first grade teacher has a two year old at home and we don't see her that much, and that's totally fine because she has to take care of a two year old and there's nothing that she can do.
Justin Reich: She just started scheduling some synchronous check-ins and they're from 2-2:30 when she's pretty sure her kid's going to be asleep for her nap. There are some kids for whom ... if you didn't like school and school wasn't working for you, if you were ... I don't think this is the case in Medfield, but if you were an underrepresented minority kid and school is a place that you experienced a lot of racism and bigotry, not having to go to school every day is so great for you. There are all kinds of kids who are like, "Is this what college is going to be like? This is awesome. I pick my own schedule and I sort it all out," and then there's some people who really need that sort of [inaudible 00:06:27] presence and physical connection with peers and teachers and it's just devastating. So one of the challenges of figuring out policy and curriculum and all these other kinds of things for this is everyone is having their own individual pandemic.
Justin Reich: When I was a brand new teacher, my department head used to say, "Every time you assign an essay, you're assigning 75 different essays." The experience that your students have writing this is just going to be so different for each student, and that was in normal non-crisis pandemic times. I feel like that advice is magnified a thousand times now. Everyone is experiencing their own pandemic, and it can be really, really different from school to school, from house to house, from teacher to teacher, from family to family. So one of the pieces of state guidance that I really liked was the state of canvas, which is emphasize the concept of grace. We need to be forgiving of ourselves, forgiving them other people. We're all doing the best we can, and hopefully our students and families will recognize that. So what questions seem most crucial or salient, Nat?
Nat Vaughn: Well I guess even coming off ... and I know things changed a little bit, Justin, with ... and maybe not changed so much, with the essential standards that Jeff Riley put out on Friday night, but just curious about one piece about asynchronous versus synchronous, and maybe talk a little bit about that, and that piece in the Globe was interesting about comparing Rhode Island versus Massachusetts approach. One thing that I would say we're hearing from parents is that comparative piece of other districts and what the recommendations are of ... I guess if ... I've heard it, but also hearing from you, the thoughts of virtual high schools, how they design that. What are the recommendations regarding remote learning, knowing that this is emergency remote learning, which is a whole other category, I think we need to keep saying.
Justin Reich: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think that's a great point. So on the asynchronous and synchronous piece, one of the things that we know about virtual schools when they operate normally, so Connections Academy, the Greenfield virtual school, lots of other virtual schools across the country, is that they overwhelmingly use this kind of coached homeschool model. So at the beginning of the year or at various times in the year, they send home a computer, they send home links to online materials, they send printed materials and books and workbooks and things like that, and they expect students with the full time supervision of parents and caregivers to move asynchronously through that material. In one survey of virtual school faculty, they spend on average six hours a week doing synchronous instruction, and then the other 34 hours a week they're either providing this curriculum to students or really the main thing that ends up taking up the bulk of their time I think particularly for very good virtual school instructors is checking in with students and families, particularly the ones who won't reach out.
Justin Reich: I mean we know that the students who need the most help from us are not the ones who are raising their hands. It's the ones that we can't find, and so following up with people using high tech means. I mean you can do this in Google Classroom and Google Meet and all that kind of stuff, but you can also just do it by picking up the phone or texting, figuring out safe ways to do all these things, but texting with parents or texting with kids and parents in a three way line if they're comfortable with that and things like that. Trying to provide frequent feedback. Every time a student has something to be able to share and offer, just to put that little comment back that's like, "I saw this. What's the next question?" Oh, it seems you're excited about this. How do I follow up?
Justin Reich: I think a challenge that middle schools have in particular is that there's this developmental trajectory that students are on towards independence. So younger kids, elementary school students, they can't do remote instruction without a parent right there. This notion that a teacher would broadcast the lesson and a six year old would hold their iPad and watch that lesson and do whatever they're supposed to do for 30 minutes or whatever is nonsense. I mean I'm sure 1% of six year olds can do that, but the vast majority can't. Really up through six grade, we would expect kids to just need a parent sitting there to be able to supervise them. That I think is one of the biggest things that sort of the public ... I even think to some extent sort of teachers in schools haven't wrapped their head around.
Justin Reich: For younger students, we're no longer provisioning direct instruction from teachers to students as we do in school. We are coaching parents at a distance around homeschooling. Now I would hope that a lot of our 11th and 12th graders would be able to operate more independently, particularly in schools which have been nurturing and cultivating these kinds of skills and digital learning skills and independence and things like that. It's more feasible that you could have people continue to host seminars and lectures and things like that. There are issues with connections and so forth, and I think where you all are in sixth through eighth grade, you've probably got kids just all across that spectrum. You probably have more sixth graders who are a little bit more like the elementary school students, who just ... we can't reasonably expect them to be able to pick up their iPad and participate in remote learning in an undistracted way for 30 or 45 minutes.
Justin Reich: It's just not in their skillset right now. Maybe they'll get better at it during this period, and you probably have more eighth graders who you could expect somewhat more of, and then across your classes, all kinds of things in between. So that I think is a sort of real challenge of this period, is that our mental model ... I mean if you throw a dart in February at a map and walk to the nearest classroom to that dart, the thing you'll see in the classroom is oral, whole class, direct instruction. That is the main thing that happens in classrooms across the country. Medfield is probably somewhat distinguished in having more student group work and more collaboration and those kinds of things like that, but still, a lot of what happens in our schools is teachers talk to whole groups of kids and then kids do independent practice.
Justin Reich: And the way that we start ... I mean my first grader can figure this out. When I talked to my first grader about why she's perfectly reasonably well behaved in school and a total terror at home, and she's like, "Well dad, there's no principal at home. Why would I be good if there's no principal?" And I was like, "You know, that's a great question," and I'm sure you've either been to parent teacher conferences or done this on your own in your parent teacher conferences where you sort of made this joke like, "Things are pretty orderly in my classroom, but with my two fourth grade boys, things are off the wall," and it's not so much the principal, it's that schools have this whole network of routines which are designed to support kids' executive function, including just peer pressure.
Justin Reich: It's way easier to sit there and do the worksheet that we assign to you if you look around the room and you're like, "Well I guess pretty much everybody else is doing this worksheet. I might as well go along at home," but at home there's nobody else who's doing the worksheet. There's just a computer that is one click away from all of the television shows that you love and other kinds of things like that. So all that's to say is that the things that we're asking students and families and teachers to do right now are pretty hard. Another thing that I've said, though, is as much as possible, we should try to partner with students and families in this work. If one of the things that you're hearing from families is that they're hoping that you kind of ramp up the synchronous instruction some, I bet there are ways that are well aligned with the principles and guidelines that you've already set out to be able to listen to that and to kind of do some more of that.
Justin Reich: Maybe not all of you. So there are 88 people on this call. Some of the 88 people on the call have a brand new baby and a third grader and a fifth grader at home and their partner is an essential worker in healthcare, and the idea of that person ramping up synchronous instruction is just a nonstarter. It's probably everything that person can do just to get through the day, and then there might be other folks that are like, "Oh, I've kind of got this sort of handled and yeah, I could probably offer some more sessions and things like that." So there may be ways also to do this by grade level, by team, or things like that. There may be something like, "Oh, maybe we can have families want some more instruction. Great. The science team talked and we figured out the way that ... we're going to mostly offer this kind of asynchronous curriculum, but we're also going to have science hour part of this day and math hour part of this day."
Justin Reich: And it's not necessarily going to be with your student's teacher, but there's going to be someone who's going to be able to facilitate some more conversation and things like that. So that's just sort of one example. You'd have to figure out in your own context what that looks like, but there may be ways to listen to people and say, "Hey, this synchronous component is complex. It's complex because of our teacher's work lives, because of students' work lives and things like that, but we hear people saying they want some more of this and so here's something to do to respond."
Justin Reich: I mean I think one thing to keep in mind is the amount of improvement that we can see in remote instruction ... I think that there's something like 35 school days left or 40 school days left or something like that. I mean we're not going to see dramatic changes from what we're doing right now and we're unlikely to see super dramatic improvements. Not because people aren't working incredibly hard or other things, but just if you study how schools get better at things, it takes time. It takes more than six weeks to get better at stuff. So when we study education in emergencies, it really is more about supporting youth resilience than it is about advancing academic content knowledge. It's about providing intellectual stimulation, having connections with peers and trusted adults, and having a schedule and a routine for people to work things through. That doesn't mean we need to give up on having people learn stuff.
Justin Reich: I think people should learn stuff because it's good for them, but we also ... somehow we need to balance. We want to kind of be ambitious and make sure that we're challenging ourselves and challenging our students and families to keep making the most of whatever time we have with this experience and combining that ambition with the realism that this is just unbelievably unprecedentedly hard, and our very best efforts will be thwarted by all kinds of things. When I hear that combination of sort of be ambitious but also recognize the difficulty of the moment, that makes me think about trying to do fewer things well. What are a handful of things that we can be really good at? So the other thing you should ... in addition to listening to families about what they want more of, listen to them about what they feel like is working well and see how best you can double down on those.
Justin Reich: So then I'll follow up with the second piece, which is then the state says, "Here's some critical standards that we think might be really important for the future." I think there are a few things that you could do with those. As I flipped through those, I think one thing that maybe wasn't sufficiently on people's mind is that when you're teaching emergency remote instruction, what you should be focused on is not just what's important, but what's achievable. Things that are really important and really achievable at a distance, that's great, but there's also a bunch of things that are really important that are not achievable at a distance. So I noticed flipping through the first grade standards is that there's a bunch of stuff about phonics instruction. I'm pretty sure first grade teachers are not going to teach parents what diphthongs are and how to use effective teaching strategies to have students be able to sound out diphthongs.
Justin Reich: That just sounds like the kind of thing that we're not all going to figure out in the next six weeks, but reading a bunch of great books and talking about them with our kids is totally something that we can accomplish in the next six weeks. So I would go through these standards. I think one thing that is a useful contribution of them is that they give us some indications of the things that might very well be important. So if I was a first grade teacher looking at that, I would be like, "Okay, this probably isn't going to work super well for us to teach it at distance, but this is the thing that I need to file away and I need to be talking with my second grade colleagues and saying, okay, this is a thing that maybe we missed from this spring, and so over the summer we're going to have to figure out how more of this gets sort of woven into the fall."
Justin Reich: And there might be some other things in there that you look at. I was looking at the US history one standards, which for whatever reason they say that the thing they really want you to focus on is the progressive era. If I had a really great unit with some stuff that I thought would work well in the distance in the progressive era, then great, let's do some more stuff with the progressive era, and if not, let's sort of put a pin in that for whoever's teaching US history two like, "Oh, there might need to be a little bit more time sort of reviewing the progressive era moving forward." So those are some ways that these standards might be useful in ... and there's great questions in the chat where Kathleen said, "US one hasn't even finished the civil war," so they pivot and teach progressive era instead.
Justin Reich: No, it doesn't make any sense. I would encourage you to ignore the state on that point, to say "Okay, what actually is ..." think about what's important, what's achievable, but I think the principle there is still valuable, which is ... and this is something that we did at MIT. Our Dean of digital learning said, "With a series of students who our admissions office pre-screened, you cannot get into MIT if you cannot teach yourself effectively." That is one of the core things we're looking for, and we told all of our faculty, "You're not going to cover as much in this last semester, in this last part of the semester as you would normally. So think about what's important, what's achievable, and what makes sense online."
Justin Reich: So Orla says that redox reactions and protein synthesis and her discipline isn't the thing that's going to be able to work independently, but use this to sort of think about, "All right, so what are the things that are going to work independently? And if we can't get to these things now, we probably don't want to have people leave middle school without having done redox reactions and protein synthesis, because it's probably important for them to get a good start for high school biology." So where is that going to weave in in the future? I mean I have this bet that the time invested in planning for the fall may be more valuable than time invested in ramping up our performance now. If we have a thing which is kind of working, and especially if we get it a little bit more towards autopilot like, "Oh I figured out what a scheme works like and how to meet with my students and check in with them, reach out to the ones who are most struggling and it no longer feels like it's taking 15 hours a day to do that."
Justin Reich: I mean as soon as possible, now is the time to sort of pull out a couple of people and start planning for what the fall will look like, and if I have one suggestion, the next sort of kick I have for ... and this will be related to Nate's question about creating meaningful closure. The biggest thing I'm worried about for the fall is that educators very naturally ... I think this is a totally normal natural instinct is like, "Oh man, we're really behind. What are we going to do to catch up?" We have this course we're running called becoming a more equitable educator, and we published this beautiful video from this incredible teacher who teaches remedial high school English.
Justin Reich: They call their remedial course reading for debate, and she says, "If you're a below grade level reader, you have probably been told that every single day of your academic career. Every single day, probably someone has pointed out to you that you are a below grade level reader." If those kids, who are the kids who are most likely to be negatively affected by the recession, by the pandemic, if they show up in the fall and we tell to them, "Man, now you're really behind," that's just a recipe for psychological disaster. I do think we need to be attentive to what people have missed. I think we need to be attentive to where people are behind, but if we take a really strong sort of deficit mindset to this, I think it's going to be really hard for kids to feel good about coming back to school.
Justin Reich: So I think an important thing to do, maybe both now, but certainly in the fall, is how do we celebrate whatever it is that kids did do? How do we bring a kind of asset framing lens to this work? Because I think kids have learned some awesome things, including my story about my daughter learning how to ride a bicycle without training wheels and other kinds of things like that. I bet almost all of our students can tell us stories about things they're really proud of that they did with their teachers during the closures, and I think they could tell us stories of things that they're really proud of without their teacher. So it might be good towards the end of the year to think about what would be some kind of performances of understanding, some sort of celebrate festivals of learning, celebration kinds of things that people can do with their teachers and other folks that just says like, "What are you most proud of that you figured out?"
Justin Reich: And if you're like our MIT ... some of our MIT students would say the thing that they're most proud of is that we recreated MIT in Minecraft, and that'd be a great thing to celebrate. They learned all kinds of stuff doing that and it's not going to show up on their [inaudible 00:23:32] engineering accreditation exams, but it's pretty cool, and I think similar kinds of things coming back in the fall. How do we celebrate all the resilience that youth showed, and tell kids a million times we love them and that we're glad that they're here, and then from that build towards, okay, there are some things that we missed and we need to figure out some ways to focus on those. It's going to require doing some kind of less is more sorts of things, being really deliberate about saying, "This is the most important stuff that we think you need to be a citizen, to pass these gatekeeping exams we have, to be a good person here."
Justin Reich: I had this conversation with the Worcester public schools, and some of their leaders are like, "You know what? You know where our students really struggle is in transitions from sixth grade to seventh grade, and from eighth grade to ninth grade." They have this kind of K, six, seven, eight, nine, 12 model, and as soon as we started talking about it, that really clicked for them. They were like, "Okay, limited time, limited planning, limited focus, but we already know that the place where kids fall through is in these true transition points. We're not going to be able to fix and design everything for the fall, but let's really focus on those couple of things that might be important."
Nat Vaughn: There's just a couple of things that popped in. One is ... and I've shared with you how you had shared in I think in one of the podcasts about the difference between online learning and online schooling, how we're very good at ... everyone can think about ... and I think that speaks to what you're talking about, the learning that's happening during this time, and that's something we've talked about wanting to really capture right now and also reflect back and kind of hear from parents, what are they learning about their own child and learning skills? So I think that's something to [inaudible 00:25:05]. I'd love to hear your thoughts about ... and I copied one of the questions from the doc in about ... and I'll just say it aloud. If you can share some thoughts about access and equity for students, advice to planning for heterogeneous classes, that sometimes the choice can feel like easy versus hard. How can we plan lessons in your mind that are meaningful and provide access for all? Do you have some thoughts on that?
Justin Reich: Well I would say I would say the number one ... so first of all, Tressie McMillan Cottom who's this ... she's a national book award finalist. You wrote this book called Thick and this book called Lower Ed. She has this great line, which is the main tool that schools have to address issues of equity is the school. We lost the main thing we have, the thing that allows us to serve different kinds of kids from different kinds of background relatively equally well is the building where we bring them all in together. We don't have that right now, which doesn't mean that we can give up on equity and access, but we all have to be realistic that the tools we have were really foreshortened. The number one thing I think the teachers can do to address issues of equity is to reach out to our most struggling learners.
Justin Reich: One piece of advice I had is take your roster, put a tick mark next to each interaction that you have with your students in a week and try to make sure there are two or three times as many tick marks next to the kids who are struggling most than to the rest of the students, and the normal thing is that the kids who are ... I have one daughter who's old for her age and one daughter who's young for her age. The older one, she's a joy to teach and she reaches out to the teacher all the time and she gets tons of feedback because she's soliciting it, because she's excited about it, and that's really ... it's just naturally stimulating for us as educators. The trick, especially during this period, is to try and reach out to the folks who aren't doing that as naturally.
Justin Reich: I think the way to address issues of access and equity is by checking in with our most struggling kids and see what we can do. Most of them ... I wouldn't ... again, if you have a choice between putting 10 extra hours into fully differentiating a lesson and eight of those hours into checking in with kids and two of those hours into planning for the fall ... I mean we've all been there on Sunday nights fiddling with lessons and plans forever, and my hunch is that getting that plan from the 80th percentile to the 100th percentile, the time invested in that could be better invested in other places, but of course if you're fired up about that ... take nothing as I say a critique of anything that anyone is doing. I love you all and you're all doing great and we're doing the best we can, and I'm sure the kids in middle school in Medfield are extremely well-served by your thoughtful work.
Nat Vaughn: Can you give us, just maybe in your final minute ... if you're looking into your crystal ball into the future, how do you see schools changing or impacted from this moving forward?
Justin Reich: Man, I hope that people give them a bunch more money to do the social service function. I think the number one thing that we learned is that our society should not be depending this much on schools to keep kids fed and to do their laundry and to meet their mental health needs and all of these kinds of things, that there should be more community institutions doing this work in the model that Harlem Children's Zone and other people have talked about, and if society for whatever reason is going to ask schools to do these things, I hope that we get ... I'm not sure they will, but I think in lots of other places, a bunch of folks will go, "Oh wow, that was pretty hard teaching my kid for X months. Maybe I should support my school's more to be able to do that." It's wonderful talking with you all and I've got to hop off, but thanks for taking the time and thanks for all the incredible work you're doing to serve the kids in Medfield. It's a real treat to be able to chat with you, and if any of these questions I didn't get to that you really want me to talk more about, ping me on Twitter. I'm @vjfr, and I would love to talk more.
Justin Reich: I'm Justin Reich. Thanks for listening to TeachLab. We hope you enjoyed that recording. Special thanks to Nat Vaughn and the rest of the Blake Middle School faculty for joining me and letting us record the conversation. Be sure to subscribe to TeachLab to get future episodes on how educators from all walks of life are tackling distance learning during COVID-19. This episode of TeachLab was produced and edited by Aimee Corrigan and Garrett Beazley and sound mixed by Garrett Beazley. Stay safe, until next time.