Remote Learning — Week 13

As part of their end-of-year portfolios, students completed a survey reflecting on their remote learning experiences. I asked questions about the workload, the resources they found most helpful, and what was missing. Overall I got lots of great feedback, both on things I knew about and things I didn’t.

But the feedback also demonstrates why it can be so difficult to think and talk about education at scale. Take these two responses, sitting right next to each other in my spreadsheet.

“I think that you should consider doing more whole class meetings.”

“I would say to avoid class-wide calls for Remote Learning.”

To me, this exemplifies the core challenge of the practice of teaching: What works for one student may not work for another. What works for one teacher may not work for another. What works today may not work tomorrow.

The fundamental unit of teaching is person-to-person interaction, and those individual interactions are subject to great variation. Of course there are general trends in what the students said in their surveys, and there are general approaches to teaching that work better than others. But to teach all students we need to listen to all students. And we must always be mindful that each experiences instruction in their own way.

Related Posts

• Remote Learning — Week 12
• Remote Learning — Week 11
• Remote Learning — Week 10
• Remote Learning Journal