A Digital Redesign on the Fly
JOY B. SILK/School Administrator, February 2021

As digital learning supervisor in Cherokee County, Ga., Joy Silk (standing) oversaw a digital badging system to build virtual teaching skills among teachers. PHOTO BY CARRIE MCGOWAN

When I was growing up, my dad had a saying: “When you know better, you do better.” When the Cherokee County schools in northern Georgia shut down in March due to COVID-19, our district turned to a digital learning plan we had developed for the occasional inclement weather day.

The process enabled teachers to post lessons on Canvas, our learning management system, for students to complete on their own schedule. In developing our Digital Learning Day plan, we never considered the possibility we would need to manage the plan for weeks on end. We know now our plan was not meaty enough to sustain us during longer school closures.

We discovered we needed to provide guidance on attendance, grading and just what exactly online teaching entailed given most of our teachers graduated from teacher preparation long before virtual instruction was even an option, much less a necessity.

Addressing Shortfalls

Almost immediately, we began planning what re-entry would look like for our 42,000-student school district in the fall as well as redesigning the Digital Learning Day plans. How were we going to address the criticism and shortfalls from the spring closure? Were we bold enough to own where we needed to improve and make a plan to adjust?

Among the most significant questions we had to address were these: How do you connect with students remotely? Are there options for instructing students other than just lectures via MS Teams meetings? How will an instructor know whether students understand the concepts? What are the best options for assessment that discourage cheating? And how do you accomplish all those things while you are still in the middle of a pandemic?

For answers, we turned to our teachers.

We formed a committee made up of two teachers from each of the district’s 43 schools to help us design the guidelines and training for our staff to succeed in remote teaching. We called the 80-member team our digital learning leaders. They represented nearly every grade level and subject area, including special education and foreign languages.

Self-Paced Training

At the outset, we asked the digital learning leaders to look closely at the parental and community feedback, including the critical feedback, that we received during “Grace Academy” — our nickname for the period between March and June when in-person schooling was not possible. We had to generate solid plans for virtual instruction that would address the concerns.

The teacher team examined the district instructional framework our schools had been using for several years to apply its components through the lenses of the digital teacher and the digital learner. The training that it fed into over the summer delivered a robust course for educators in Cherokee County.

The course includes nine self-paced training modules: Canvas Course Expectations, Digital Learning Expectations (revised), Digital (Remote) Learning Expectations, Hybrid School Support, Connect, Design, Instruct, Assess and Reflect. Each module was designed to explain the concept as it related to the digital student, to provide examples of each concept and to give teachers opportunities to earn a badge upon completion of the module.

We asked teachers to complete the first two modules by the end of the week of pre-planning to ensure they set up their Canvas courses consistently for the start of school and understood the updates to our Digital Learning Day plans. The remaining modules were to be completed by Aug. 21, a couple of weeks into the school year. These deadlines gave teachers time to work through the training in anticipation of classes or schools moving to a remote model.

Livesaving Support

Our school district gave families a choice on students returning to school face-to-face or virtually, and 25 percent elected to start the year virtually. That made the digital training modules lifesavers for the teachers. They provided guidance for virtual learning concepts along with instructions and examples of the various digital tools to support student engagement and learning. They also proved beneficial when three of our high schools transitioned to a hybrid model.

JOY SILK is supervisor of digital learning with Cherokee County School District in Canton, Ga. Twitter: @joysilk131