Implementing hybrid schooling runs from rescheduling classes to rethinking education

Although it’s not gotten any easier to predict what will happen broadly with schools in the fall, every day my Google news feed carries more than one story of a district announcing a hybrid plan for school year 2020-21. Given that there are more than 13,000 school districts in this country, that’s a lot of news feeds that can be filled by a small percentage of districts. Still, it seems like there is enough movement towards hybrid schooling that it’s worth exploring more about what hybrid means in the context of adapting to the pandemic.

Much of the focus is on hybrid schedules—and with good reason. The schedule is the logistical heart of a hybrid approach. The plan released by Clark County School District (the country’s fifth largest) last week is a good example. It recommends students being in school for face-to-face instruction for two days per week, and learning online three days per week. The plan is supported by large scale Chromebook deployment, the use of a learning management system, enhanced WiFi, newly calculated classroom capacities based on social distancing, and two weeks of professional learning for teachers.

The plan goes into more detail that is worth reviewing by anyone seeking a fairly in-depth forecast. It will be submitted for approval by the school board in early July.

Even the additional details, however, mostly touch on the logistics of hybrid learning. That’s a good and necessary start, but it’s not nearly sufficient for success. A successful plan has to think deeply about online instruction.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that CCSD is ignoring these issues; I’m just saying they aren’t in this version of the plan. In fact, knowing CCSD’s history with digital learning, they are as likely as just about any district to be covering deeper issues. But it’s not clear that other districts with less digital learning experience are addressing the more complex instructional issues.

What are these issues? Over at Education Week, Rick Hess unpacks some of them in his commentary on The Key to Getting Hybrid Schooling Right. From his opening:

Truly doing remote learning better will require much more than platitudes about additional training and better tech; it'll require rethinking how educators go about their work. Beyond all the practical questions about access, devices, and curricula, what matters most will be what teachers and school staff actually do with their time.

After all, teachers perform scores of tasks in the course of a typical school day. They lecture. They facilitate discussions. They grade quizzes. They fill out forms. They counsel distraught kids…

While always significant, the importance of distinguishing high-value from low-value work grows exponentially when we introduce remote learning, where teacher interaction with students has been slashed. It's a mistake to spend class time doing things that can be done just as well remotely. If teachers only have limited time in classrooms—or online chats—with a student, it's vital that the time be used wisely and for things that really benefit from face-to-face intimacy. (emphasis added)

There’s far more that should be said on this topic than can be covered in one post. But when instruction shifts from face-to-face to online, the best starting point is not considering how to re-create classroom teaching. Instead, the better launch point is contemplating instructional goals, and then determining how they can be met in the online learning environment.

Considering conferences’ strategies for switching from onsite to online provides a valuable adjacent example. Since mid-March, essentially every conference has either cancelled or moved to virtual. Some of the ones shifting to virtual have thought about the components of a conference—keynotes, breakout sessions, exhibit halls, etc—and tried to figure out how to replicate each of those elements online. But the smarter conference organizers have started by exploring what a conference aims to accomplish for its attendees. These goals might include connecting with colleagues, inspiration, meeting new people, learning new ideas, meeting vendors, and so on. From there, online conference organizers are then determining how these goals can be met while everyone is “gathered” from thousands of miles apart.

Most districts haven’t put out detailed plans yet for the fall. But as they do, we will be interested to see which are doing a good job of recreating onsite school, and which are truly taking advantage of the possibilities that online learning offers.