Transitioning back to school - What will it look like?

We are now expecting to go back to school. There will of course be families that stay at home and families that return to school. So how will we do this? The online experience has proven to be effective for some learners and had a variance of buy in from others. So now comes the challenge of keeping the good stuff and mixing it in to the classroom to mix with the two groups of learners: those at home and those at school.

What do I think has been good for students with distance learning?

- Having school learning at a time that suits students' families. i.e. If the family is up at dawn then they can get their school work done early.

- Quality learning time one-on-one with parents when learning to read and write.

- Parents have learnt some of the language we use at school because they are immersed in it (not just going to a parent evening).

- For my young learners and parents learning to use a class site I had to keep things simple and consistent. I imagine this was good for students. I tend to like to change routines.

- If students share their learning with me their teacher, they always have an authentic audience. This has been a good incentive for one student who needs to know their work will be seen by me. It has helped his mum to get him to do the learning I have set.

- Sharing work has been easy to do because parents have submitted the learning. There has not been the time needed to show students how to post and not post the same thing 10 times taking up lots of valuable time. Therefore, I have had plenty of time to respond to each student. I feel for the first time in my teaching career that I know exactly where all of my students are at. And I could still be wrong about this.

- When I have given feedback to students the impact is immediate. e.g. I suggested a new learning goal to one learner to put titles in her writing. This was only relevant to her because she was ready for a next step. The next day she had a title in her story! Why? Because her mum read the feedback and made it happen. I probably would have forgotten about it from having lots of other learners.

Honestly, I am not sure how I can feed most of that in to the classroom. Some students have made terrific progress because they have had a parent helping them. One-on-one support from parents has been the winning formula in my opinion.