Zoom and Gloom

The week of March 13, 2020 included a time change, a full moon, and Friday the 13th. Parents and teachers alike were wary. Time changes make kids cranky. Full moons make kids crazy. How much worse could Friday the 13th be? Turns out, immeasurably worse. Friday, March 13, 2020 was the last day millions of students in California public schools set foot on campus. 

The Covid-19 pandemic brought extended school closures. A massive experiment in K-12 education ensued - online distance learning for everyone. 

What resulted was an educational famine and widespread Zoom and gloom.

Online education has emerged over recent decades as an efficient way to increase access for learners across distance and time. Millions of people around the world use Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) to learn for a variety of reasons: career development, college preparation, lifelong learning, corporate training, and more. Similarly, programs like Outschool are offering young learners opportunities to explore areas of interest with access to a broad offering of online classes and clubs. Digital learning applications like Khan Academy, iReady, and Lexia have also become commonplace in K-12 education. Applications like these, and countless others, are expanding opportunities to individualize learning and give students access to additional instruction before, during, or after traditional lessons in the classroom. 

While online learning is transforming education in many of these positive ways, it has never before been the default mode of instruction for kindergarten through 12th grade students. 

When schools were closed in March 2020, educators worked frantically to take K-12 classrooms online, but the outcomes for kids have been largely troublesome. 

That’s my 12 year old daughter on the right. Under her mask is a huge smile because she was on campus to attend school in person for the first time in 369 days. 

For the first time in over a year, she was getting a break from the Zoom and gloom that haunted her and millions of students just like her for this past year. 

Ask any parent or child in distance learning and they’ll have a distance learning debacle to share. Last fall after our schools twice said they would re-open and instead “pivoted” back to all virtual learning, my sixth grade daughter went through a bout of refusing to get out of bed. The Zoom and gloom of distance learning had tightened its grasp and my daughter’s zest for school and love of learning was fading fast. She was suffering and she wasn’t alone. The evidence is clear that remote learning erodes students’ well-being.

Though there are plenty of hilarious parodies of pandemic parenting out there, it really is no joke. Helping our kids through a pandemic education is hard. I followed guidance to listen and connect and just focused on my daughter’s health and happiness for a bit. We found some opportunities for her to feel productive by helping others, we prioritized time for socializing, and we started making arrangements for her to do her online schooling with a friend or two whenever we could. Steadily we noticed her spunk and her spark making a comeback. 

Then, I put on my teacher glasses and started thinking deeper about the cause of this Zoom and gloom we had battled. 

What exactly is missing in this virtual school experience?

In education, we use the phrase whole child education. The concept is that school should support students’ academic, cognitive, social-emotional, and identity development as well as promote students’ mental and physical health. Basically, we count on schools for a lot more than academics. 

Educating the whole child is about a balanced and integrated approach to teaching and learning. It’s a lot like nutrition. A healthy diet includes a balance of protein, fruits, vegetables, and grains, with fats in moderation and limited sweets. Imagine in a learner’s diet the academics are the fruit and the cognitive skills are the veggies. When we shifted to full-time distance learning, we basically forced all kids to survive by consuming only green smoothies for over a year.  

Zoom school is not sufficiently nourishing our children as learners.

It’s no wonder so many students are failing to thrive. The Zoom and gloom they are experiencing is a symptom of educational malnutrition. It is like the crushing headache and overwhelming lethargy we feel when we eat poorly. Just as chronic malnutrition causes serious and tragic consequences, the famine of forced distance learning has resulted in dire educational outcomes for students. Possibly the worst outcome being widening educational inequality.

We need to focus on nourishing our students with a complete and balanced education.

In this mission to provide whole child education, experts have determined schools must attend to four domains:

1. Building a positive school climate in both classrooms and the school as a whole

2. Shaping and strengthening student behaviors through social and emotional learning

3. Developing productive instructional strategies that support motivation, competence, and self-directed learning

4. Creating systems of individualized supports that address student needs, including the effects of trauma and adversity

Now, picture those four domains as the essential food groups for learners.

The Learner’s Plate - A balanced education for nourishing the learner as a whole child

The Learner’s Plate is an adaptation of the Framework of Whole Child Education (Darling-Hammond & Cook-Harvey)

The kind of online education most students experienced this past year leaves most of the plate empty. In the process of shifting to online K-12 education, much attention was given to productive instructional strategies and that’s about it. 

Students found themselves learning in isolation and missing the support of their school environment. The opportunities to interact with peers for social-emotional development have largely been lost. In the best case scenarios, teachers and parents alike are striving to be a system of support. In worst case scenarios, students have no support or are missing from school altogether. 

So, how do we go about getting our learners’ diets back on track? As educators and parents, we have to commit to nourishing our children as learners. 

For many students, the best path will be getting back on campus. School was far from perfect pre-pandemic, but the structures, systems, and supports are much easier to access on campus. Returning to in-person learning is like a basic diet reset - nothing drastic, just get back to balanced meals. 

On the other hand, many families are looking for alternate education paths post-pandemic. For some, this year of alternative learning has sparked an interest in online learning, joining private and charter schools, or homeschooling. These families are choosing the equivalent of keto, vegan, or paleo learning diets and it just might be the perfect fit for their children. The trick will be making sure this new learning diet fulfills all of their children’s needs as learners. 

Just like someone adopting a vegan diet has to make smart choices to include plant-based protein, a homeschooling family has to make smart choices to nurture social-emotional well-being. Similarly, as a keto eater has to carefully balance carbs, fats, and protein, a family choosing to continue in virtual school needs to carefully select a program that balances quality academic content with a system of support and opportunities for healthy social-emotional development.

No matter which path you take, whether you’re an educator or a parent, please protect our kids from any recurring Zoom and gloom. 

Let’s nourish our learners with quality, whole-child education. 

Why?

We’ve all been asked and asked it ourselves. If you’re parenting anywhere between toddlerhood and teenagedom, you have probably heard it multiple times within the last hour. “Why?” It is an ever-present question. Maybe there is a somewhat universal answer.

Why do we have to do chores? Why do I need to take a shower? Why do I have to eat vegetables? Why do I have to do this math? Why does it matter if my room is messy? Why do I have to get up so early? Why can’t I have just a little more screen time? Why is she so mean to me? Why should I apologize? Why do you care what my hair looks like in this picture? That’s just a little sound-byte sampler from the past 24 hours with my own three kids (ages 7, 10, and 12-going-on-20).

Do you remember asking why as a kid? Does the answer “Because I said so!” echo in your memory? How about when you were asked as a child to answer those why questions? I am pretty sure my own childhood refrain of I-don’t-knows and just-becauses isn’t all that unique. As parents, we tend to dismiss these whys as mere annoyances. Sometimes I feel like my kids’ questions are like those slippery banana peels in the cartoons. I swear they toss the questions out just hoping whatever parental mission I’m on will slip right out from under me. But what if we stop dismissing why as a mundane question and instead shift our thinking?

If we really embrace the question “Why?” we might empower our kids to think differently too.

Why do we have expectations for our children around chores, homework, hygiene, nutrition, and behavior anyway? Here’s a hint. It’s not about exerting control over our children. It’s about equipping our children with experience and expertise, knowledge and wisdom, health and wellness, habits and mindsets. Through chores, we aim to nurture a sense of shared responsibility for our home. Why homework? Because education is not just a responsibility; it is a privilege and an opportunity that begets more opportunities. How about hygiene? Well let’s be honest, “boy smell” is a real thing and none of us are interested in capturing the scent for a new “sweat, mud, and musk” candle, but the real reason is hygiene is all about health, as is nutrition. As for behavior, I think parents are all doing our best to raise children to be good people - the kind of people we can trust to care for each other, care for us, and care for our community/our future/our world.

The answer to “Why?” seems to often have something to do with taking care - taking care of ourselves, taking care of the people and spaces around us, taking care to maximize resources and opportunities for positive outcomes for ourselves and others, taking care of our relationships. Taking care is a way of giving purpose to our actions.

So, how do we upgrade the pesky whys to the purpose-giving whys?

First, I think, as parents, we have to have patience and perseverance to endure the pesky whys. Adam Grant recently summarized three signs that someone is worth learning from. He said someone worth learning from:

• Encourages you to think for yourself, rather than expecting you to think like them

• Aims to have many teachers, not just many disciples

• Admits when they're wrong, instead of insisting that they're right

Let’s be people worth learning from and model these traits. That means we, as parents/teachers/coaches/mentors, have to not just tolerate the whys, but encourage them. We have to respond to the whys with an open mind and an optimistic outlook about raising free-thinking, capable, competent humans (not disciples). We have to remember that when we embrace the whys from both the adult and child points of view, we can learn from our children as much as they can learn from us. And sometimes, often in my house, we have to admit when something we do or say maybe doesn’t pass the why test.

Howard Gardner proposes nurturing five minds in our children - the disciplinary mind, the synthesizing mind, the creating mind, the respectful mind, and the ethical mind. He argues that synergy among these minds, in individuals and collectively in a population, enables us to thrive personally and professionally. It may seem like a stretch, but chores really are about ethics. Showers are about respect. All those pesky whys we get are fleeting opportunities to nurture these five minds. If we pause, embrace the question, and examine the learning opportunity presented, we help our children find purpose in both asking and answering “Why?”.

Adam Grant offers more wisdom here. In reflecting on a podcast conversation with Brene Brown, he wrote, “It takes courage, humility, and integrity to favor hard questions over easy answers, learning over knowing, and getting it right over being right.”

Maybe the universal answer to “Why?” is “because we are striving to get it right” so we can thrive in this life we are living together.

Now, I’m not aiming to answer those bigger, metaphysical types of whys. I definitely have the courage and humility to leave those questions unanswered. But for now, for my family, I am going to settle on answering “Why?” with “I’m glad you asked” and “because we are striving to get this right”.

P.S. Stay tuned for my kids’ reactions to this new mantra. I can picture the eye-rolls already, “Yeah, yeah...because we’re striving to get right...we know, Mom.”

Being the learner

It’s been ten years since I was officially a student. Sure, learning happens every day in lots of ways, even for grown-ups, especially for parents. This is different though. For the next five weeks, I get to be a real student. I am embarking on a new adventure, taking an intensive course in online writing. I love teaching, but I think my first love is learning. Here we go…