Chris Bigenho directs the virtual school in the Lewisville Independent School District in Texas that serves about 3,000 students. PHOTO COURTESY OF LEWISVILLE INDEPENDENT SCHOOL DISTRICT, FLOWER MOUND, TEX.

We can all point to spring 2020 and say, “This is when education took a new direction and changed forever.” No doubt, our profession has changed more in the past 12 months than it did in the past 100 years. That being said, it does not have to be so difficult, strange and uncomfortable.

Public school districts were severely challenged when we all did the “COVID pivot” last March. We did our best with what we had and what we knew and worked in the best interest of our students. Yet few school or district leaders would venture to say, “We nailed it.” As a profession steeped in traditional practices and limited background in virtual learning, we did what we could to reach the finish line.

As director of the Virtual Learning Academy, a school serving about 3,000 students that’s part of the Lewisville Independent School District in Texas, I’ve had 15 years of experience with remote teaching and learning. Of late, I’ve had several opportunities to discuss effective navigation through the COVID-19 pivot in webinars hosted by the United States Distance Learning Association and the Texas Distance Learning Association.

Adaptive Behaviors

When the pandemic forced school districts in most states to close down in-person operations, schools were challenged with building online programs with what they had available while keeping the learning going. The mantra was to acknowledge the moment, assess what you have and focus on leveraging all existing resources. This was not a time to get lost in theories and best practices of online learning. We just needed to get kids to the end of the year.

From the beginning, I have said that if our profession does not come out of this period stronger than we were before the COVID pivot, we will have wasted an opportunity. To that end, what can school districts do to prepare for a future that demands we become more agile in the ways we teach and learn?

Start with the teacher’s role. We need a revolutionary change in teaching, and that starts with what it looks like to teach. In his book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, Clay Shirky makes the case that “revolution does not happen when society adopts new technology, it happens when society adopts new behaviors.”

To expand on this thought, the change we see in learning will not happen because we now all have new tools for teaching and learning, it will only happen when we change what it means to teach and learn with these new tools. In short, what does teaching look like in an online environment? What is the role of a teacher in today’s online classroom?

The answer will vary slightly depending on whether you are teaching in a synchronous or asynchronous environment. But one thing is clear, if a teacher’s main form of teaching is the time-honored lecture, things will have to change to be successful in online instruction.

Personal Journeys

Taking a page from the Reggio Emilia approach to student-centered education, think of your online classroom as the Third Teacher. Teachers need to prepare the environment so their students have more agency over their daily learning activities while being guided toward a common set of learning objectives. Rather than teachers directing learning to the whole class, they are directing the individual learning journeys of each student. This approach allows teachers to individualize instruction on the fly in meeting students’ needs as they arise. It requires a shift in mindset for both teacher and student.

Consider Greg, someone I know who has been teaching science for 18 years, the past 13 teaching high school physics and biology in Lewisville, Texas. He started his career like most of us, teaching in the same way that he was taught. However, he became an early adopter of emerging technologies, finding them helpful in shaping the way he delivered his lessons. He explored flipped classrooms and problem-based learning and leveraged technology as a way to change how students shared and where the learning was taking place. However, it really clicked for him and his students when his role as teacher shifted from delivery of content to clarification of concepts.

As an early adopter of Moodle and Google Documents and then Canvas, Greg built online resources and activities that served as the “learning playground” for his students. His role in the classroom shifted to one of instructional guide leading students by meeting their individual needs. This approach increased the time spent one-on-one with his students. Students became more self-directed and at any given time, his students in his classroom were working on different parts of the learning adventure he had prepared.

Last spring, when his class moved online during the COVID pivot, his students didn’t miss a beat. They already were used to working in a self-directed fashion, they just did so in different physical spaces. In effect, Greg had prepared his classroom environment and vision of teaching and learning in a way that did not appreciably change for him or his students when they shifted to fully online.

Teacher Caseloads

What about student-teacher relationships and teacher caseloads in remote settings? How are they related, and do they change when moving online?
I define teacher caseload as the total number of students a teacher is working within a single grading period across all modalities of teaching — traditional, blended and online. Many enter teaching because of the connections they make with kids and the hope of stimulating curiosity about their world and a desire to learn. As caseloads go up, the ability to make and maintain these important relationships goes down.

As you go online, it is important to keep teacher caseloads in mind, especially if you have teachers who teach in multiple modalities. There is a tendency to think that because of the technology, virtual teachers can teach more students. This fallacy often is perpetuated by the way some online tools are marketed.

Today, most learning management and content systems have some form of dashboard showing student progress. However, dashboards do not replace the need for teachers to work individually with students. Dashboards will help you monitor who is falling off pace and the overall quality of work, but these tools lack the capacity to advance meaningful relationships with students.

I have overheard many conversations about how virtual teachers should have more students as they have “unlimited space.” I know of programs where teachers have caseloads as high as 500 to 800 students! It is not about the space and dashboards but the ability to make meaningful connections. For some students, the only meaningful and healthy relationships they have with adults are those made in schools.

False Portrayals

Avoid falling into the trap of thinking that online learning is just students interacting with computers. I recently spent time in Austin, Texas, sharing testimony about online learning with our state lawmakers and, while there, had the opportunity to hear how others portray online learning. I was appalled by the bleak pictures painted for legislators by various special interest groups. If your only experience with online learning came from this testimony, you would think online students are lonely, disconnected children parked in front of computers all day.

How wrong that view can be. I have virtual teachers in my program who every year are asked by multiple students to write their college recommendations. This is not something teachers take lightly as it only comes from having built trusting relationships with kids over time.

In the case of virtual teachers, building relationships occurs over time and space, mediated by technology. Sometimes, like for those in traditional classrooms, these relationships can be lifesaving. One of the best examples of meaningful relationship building comes from one of my full-time virtual teachers. When one of her students was admitted to a hospital for being a danger to them-selves, the student was asked to provide a name of a trusted adult to reach out to in a moment of personal harm or distress. The student provided the name of the virtual teacher as a lifeline.

These types of powerful relationships can’t be developed if we see virtual programs as places where we can support larger caseloads. While the technology can help you track general progress, it still takes a personal touch to develop important meaningful connections with students. The ability to forge these relationships must remain a cornerstone of teaching and learning when going fully online.

New Norms

Finally, how do we prepare for “the new normal”? The new normal requires our schools to become more agile. We must take this opportunity to develop new systems, methods and expectations for what it means to teach. This must become the new norm because of the overwhelming likelihood of the need to pivot again. The need to be agile is part of our new normal.

Some things we can do now to prepare for our next pivot:

»Get creative with the schedule now. Leverage new teaching techniques and technology to play with time and space allowing for new ways of scheduling students.

»Resist the temptation to revert to old ways when teachers return to classrooms. Leverage what has been learned about teaching re-motely to shift how teachers interact in the classroom. Make the shifts now so that when we need to go remote again, it will not be as great a shift for both teachers and students. Use micro-credentialing or badging to track new skills acquired by teachers.

»Develop a virtual teacher training program within your district and provide incentives for teachers to grow their capacity to teach virtually. In my experience, teachers who have trained specifically in remote teaching change their craft in ways that make them more effective in the physical classroom.

»Develop or acquire systems for online learning and train on them while everyone is on campus. Set expectations that this is the new normal and these tools are expected to be used regularly in daily practice so when classes must move fully online, there is little difference in the way learning happens.

A Viral Disruptor

For many years, it was assumed the personal computer would be the great disruptor of education. Imagine our surprise when we discovered it was a virus that disrupted education and probably changed it forever. As education leaders, we are tasked with improving the here and now while simultaneously laying tracks for a future that looks quite different from anything we’ve experienced.

Visionary leadership is more important than ever before as we reposition teaching and learning. It is up to us to make the best of this opportunity to ensure education will thrive in uncertain times.

CHRIS BIGENHO is director of the Lewisville Independent School District’s Virtual Learning Academy in Flower Mound, Tex. Twitter: @bigenhoc