Virtual Learning for Elementary School-Description by Our Principal

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The FCPS school choice paperwork stated that each student in upper elementary would receive 3.5 hours of instruction, Monday-Thursday.

Our principal described a typical "virtual learning" day as this:

9:30-9:50 morning meeting

950-10:10: language arts lesson

10:10--teacher holds small reading groups. if it's not your child's reading group day, he goes offline and does work independently

11:10-break for teacher

11:25-Math lesson for 15 minutes

11:40: small group for math--if its not your child's day, he goes off and do their own math work independently

12-1 break for lunch

1-130: specials with a special teacher

1:30: 15 minutes science or social studies lesson (one or the other)

teacher office hours, but not every day.

Is my math wrong or is this nowhere near 3.5 hours of instruction for every kid each day? Even if your child had both reading and math group, that's still nowhere near 3.5 hours?
Is this what everyone else expected? I honestly don't know what I expected, except that there would be 3.5 hours of instruction that was stated in the planning document. The planning document stated instruction, and then after the instructional day, students would complete schoolwork independently. Here the students are doing the work during the instructional time. Am I confused?

For younger children, a parent will have to be nearby to supervise/help with the independent work and log in/log off multiple times.

lol 15 minutes for math, sounds like a winner!!!! Good thing we are getting a tutor.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Does anyone know if my child will receive speech therapy if we choose 100% virtual? She did not receive any speech after school closed in the spring.

Braband made it sound like yes, but you should reach out to your principal.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Are you counting the reading and math time? Sometimes it’s independent work and sometimes it’s teacher- led, but it still would count as instruction. That adds up to about 3 hours. I’m guessing that the science, social studies, and perhaps other instruction periods would include activities that could add up to a total of 3.5.

If a child logs off to do work independently while the teacher meets virtually with other
kids, then no—I would not consider what that child is doing alone to be “instructional time”. Do you? They are working alone at home.

That’s what we do during the school day. We don’t spend all the time teaching directly to the entire class.

I’ll add that I don’t know how this will work with DL. In school I can circulate to see what students are doing and help as needed. It’s a lot of facilitating in addition to meeting with groups and the whole group lessons. I’m not sure how to do that online.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Are you counting the reading and math time? Sometimes it’s independent work and sometimes it’s teacher- led, but it still would count as instruction. That adds up to about 3 hours. I’m guessing that the science, social studies, and perhaps other instruction periods would include activities that could add up to a total of 3.5.

If a child logs off to do work independently while the teacher meets virtually with other
kids, then no—I would not consider what that child is doing alone to be “instructional time”. Do you? They are working alone at home.

That’s what we do during the school day. We don’t spend all the time teaching directly to the entire class.

You can’t think about virtual learning as just like your classroom, only on a computer. It’s a completely different environment. A child logging off to do homework is like a child leaving the school building in the middle of the lesson.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I would be more likely to choose DL if i knew it was NOT up to the individual schools/principals to implement and the program was ran by a DL unit for FCPS. Our school, which is highly rated on great schools, did a terrible job with DL. Teachers did whatever they wanted and there was zero oversight. There was ONE hour of instruction a day for 4 days. No office hours. No small groups, nothing. No one was even getting pulled by specialists or even resource teachers. The principal was told and did nothing. We ended up finding resources online that other counties were posting for their students and had my child do those. We got a tutor who teaches at our school to help DURING spring DL. I'm choosing hybrid bc I can't risk that again.

I agree, and I thought that the plan was for it to be centralized (with Braband talking about online school being a separate program from in person school), and with the very clear requirements spelling out that teachers will be online teaching to the students 3.5 hours per day.

Even if FCPS didn’t care about educational quality at all, you would think they would standardize things just to avoid the thousands of complaints they will get.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Are you counting the reading and math time? Sometimes it’s independent work and sometimes it’s teacher- led, but it still would count as instruction. That adds up to about 3 hours. I’m guessing that the science, social studies, and perhaps other instruction periods would include activities that could add up to a total of 3.5.

If a child logs off to do work independently while the teacher meets virtually with other
kids, then no—I would not consider what that child is doing alone to be “instructional time”. Do you? They are working alone at home.[/quote

In most classes there are multiple groups. Teachers are actively instructing one reading group, for example, while the other two are reading or doing independent group in the classroom. If the independent work is the same, would you view it as "instructional time"?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Are you counting the reading and math time? Sometimes it’s independent work and sometimes it’s teacher- led, but it still would count as instruction. That adds up to about 3 hours. I’m guessing that the science, social studies, and perhaps other instruction periods would include activities that could add up to a total of 3.5.

I don’t get your math. If the child is working alone, that’s not instructional time. Even on OPs schedule, if it’s the child’s day for both reading and math groups, it’s well below 3.5 hours.

I am counting the independent work as "instructional time". Students frequently do independent work in their classrooms while teachers work with other groups of students in the classroom. I don't see this as being any different.

[Anonymous]

A student logging off to do homework is not “direct instruction from a teacher”. That is not what those words mean.

[Anonymous]

The phrase is not “instructional time”. It’s “virtual synchronous instruction by the teacher for 3.5 hours”. The afternoon after “virtual school” is over, and all day Monday, is intended for homework.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This actually sounds about right. People who thinks it is a straight 2.5 or 3.5 hours don't know how the kids are learning in school. Most of the time is spent doing independent/center work while the teacher works with different groups on different things. HS will look different because of their schedules and kids are already split based on specific classes. But ES has always been like this in regular times when kids were in school. Independent work is considered instruction time in the school, regardless of how you feel about it. Yeah, teachers could give feedback in the "small group" days that your child gets, but that also takes time. I mean, your kid is not the only kid in the class. The teacher can go over the activities in the small group and give all student feedback, but all this does is ensure that your particular small group will be seen maybe once a week, possibly once every 2 weeks depending on how many kids are in the class.

You are making pp's point that 100% virtual school day needs to be thought about differently. You can't recreate the in person school day online, and just cut out all the interactive parts. You have to be more creative.

This is the crux of the issue and why there will be MANY complaints this fall. Teachers are just doing what they did in the classroom but online. Teachers think it’s reasonable to count a child working alone offline as “teaching time”. Parents do not and will be expecting 3.5 hours a day of a live teacher on screen interacting with their child. FCPS needs to be clear what the expectations are either way before parents are locked in for a year.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This was a sample schedule for upper grades released by our principal, with a total listed as 4 hours of synchronous instruction.

10:00-11:15: Morning Meeting/LA
11:15-12:00 Science/Social Studies
LUNCH
12:30-1:30 Math instruction
BREAK
1:45-2:45 or 2:50-3:50 Specials

The assumption was that kids would do assignments after their synchronous time had completed as well.

OP, sounds like your school is choosing to do less than they could.

Our kids might be at the same ES. During the meeting, he said that this is the sort of schedule that a group of principals had gotten together and developed (as a rough outline), so maybe there will be a bunch of ES with similar schedules.

May I ask which elementary school this is? This looks like a good schedule for DL. I didn't hear anything from our principal. No meeting or emails

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This actually sounds about right. People who thinks it is a straight 2.5 or 3.5 hours don't know how the kids are learning in school. Most of the time is spent doing independent/center work while the teacher works with different groups on different things. HS will look different because of their schedules and kids are already split based on specific classes. But ES has always been like this in regular times when kids were in school. Independent work is considered instruction time in the school, regardless of how you feel about it. Yeah, teachers could give feedback in the "small group" days that your child gets, but that also takes time. I mean, your kid is not the only kid in the class. The teacher can go over the activities in the small group and give all student feedback, but all this does is ensure that your particular small group will be seen maybe once a week, possibly once every 2 weeks depending on how many kids are in the class.

You are making pp's point that 100% virtual school day needs to be thought about differently. You can't recreate the in person school day online, and just cut out all the interactive parts. You have to be more creative.

This is the crux of the issue and why there will be MANY complaints this fall. Teachers are just doing what they did in the classroom but online. Teachers think it’s reasonable to count a child working alone offline as “teaching time”. Parents do not and will be expecting 3.5 hours a day of a live teacher on screen interacting with their child. FCPS needs to be clear what the expectations are either way before parents are locked in for a year.

+1.

[Anonymous]

That schedule is a hot steaming pile of virtual dog poop.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I would be more likely to choose DL if i knew it was NOT up to the individual schools/principals to implement and the program was ran by a DL unit for FCPS. Our school, which is highly rated on great schools, did a terrible job with DL. Teachers did whatever they wanted and there was zero oversight. There was ONE hour of instruction a day for 4 days. No office hours. No small groups, nothing. No one was even getting pulled by specialists or even resource teachers. The principal was told and did nothing. We ended up finding resources online that other counties were posting for their students and had my child do those. We got a tutor who teaches at our school to help DURING spring DL. I'm choosing hybrid bc I can't risk that again.

The principal seems to make all the difference in the world. Our not well rated school has a good principal. At least for us, the DL experience was excellent.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This was a sample schedule for upper grades released by our principal, with a total listed as 4 hours of synchronous instruction.

10:00-11:15: Morning Meeting/LA
11:15-12:00 Science/Social Studies
LUNCH
12:30-1:30 Math instruction
BREAK
1:45-2:45 or 2:50-3:50 Specials

The assumption was that kids would do assignments after their synchronous time had completed as well.

OP, sounds like your school is choosing to do less than they could.

Our kids might be at the same ES. During the meeting, he said that this is the sort of schedule that a group of principals had gotten together and developed (as a rough outline), so maybe there will be a bunch of ES with similar schedules.

May I ask which elementary school this is? This looks like a good schedule for DL. I didn't hear anything from our principal. No meeting or emails

Bull Run ES. Our principal was very engaged with the kids and parents during the Spring DL, and has remained engaged over summer. We have been getting weekly emails. He held a townhall of sorts yesterday, scheduled from 6:30 - 8:00, but stayed to answer questions until 8:30-ish.