Planning Helps (Or: Supporting students to succeed as online learners)

Pandemics. Living through a pandemic. Teaching in the middle of a pandemic. Learning while living through a pandemic.

Let’s just acknowledge: this is hard.

Actually, it’s many different kinds of hard.

But the kind of hard I’m thinking about today is how it makes it hard to plan, but also, how much planning helps all the other hard things.

I’m back to remote teaching this month.

My students’ tech access is limited, and demands on everyone’s time are high, and I have a well-honed set of routines and teaching tools that are not all going to transfer, and it’s hard to let go of things I’ve worked to create.

But, we’re all making the best of it.

As teachers, we’re making new plans, discovering new tools, crafting new routines, finding new ways to support our students.

And, like I said, I’m thinking about first principles. Today: Planning Helps

Photo of a laptop and a woman writing in a notebook.

Text: Distance Learning is Hard. Planning Helps.
Helping students plan and complete online learning.
Mathacognitive.

It’s helping me figure out a curriculum and new tools and design video conferencing classes.

It’ll help my students, as they figure out video conference classes and asynchronous work, and their kids’ video conferences or hybrid schedules or strange new in-person school routines.

But, especially, asynchronous work.

Homework has always been hard for my students

So, we’ve learned to plan.

We make a plan at the beginning of the term.

And a back up plan

And we check in on it a few times.

We pool our best ideas to improve our plans.

And then we make a new plan for when vacations happen, or big exams approach, or something else changes.

Planning doesn’t solve everything. Some students never consistently make homework work. Some weeks, even for the most dedicated student, other things take priority. But, it helps.

So, in between all the new plans I’m making for this new year, I’m planning to keep our homework planning.

I updated my PDFs using TPT’s nifty digital activity tools.

And I’m adding planning, and supporting, and re-planning, and checking-in on plans to my synchronous lessons.

And, I’m searching for good resources about how to help my students navigate (and plan!) for this new school year. (A few below, please share more!)