Middle School Parents: What does ideal distance learning look like to you?

[Anonymous]

As a teacher (and parent), I am curious to what parents would say ideal distance learning (in the full distance or hybrid plan) looks like to them? (feel free to write the ward you live in and/or the ward your child goes to school in)

If no distance learning would ever be ideal for a middle schooler, you can write that too. (Then, I'll be aware of the losing battle I'll fight.)

[Anonymous]

This spring, my child had a pretty good experience with DL at Hardy for 8th grade. For the most part the teachers tried to stay on a true period schedule where the kids would join their class (via zoom or teams) and have class. I think the live instruction is vital (please limit the recorded stuff) and encourage verbal engagement. Allow the students to discuss, ask questions and engage some with one another. Middle schoolers really need the interactions. Crave them. Their developing selves and hormones demand it!! I know middle school teachers are more used to parents being hands off, but please make a special effort to keep them informed. Give them a heads up about what you’re teaching each week (allow parents to be on your notificAtion apps). If I knew what my child was learning, I can help my child more easily. I want to know what the deadlines are. Streamline all the website and app resources and logins as much as possible. Be clear about your grading policies, what assignments are worth, what category they each fall in (what’s homework vs assessment vs participation vs etc). Thanks for asking!

[Anonymous]

I am not the OP, but also a middle school teacher, and that was really helpful. Thank you!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:This spring, my child had a pretty good experience with DL at Hardy for 8th grade. For the most part the teachers tried to stay on a true period schedule where the kids would join their class (via zoom or teams) and have class. I think the live instruction is vital (please limit the recorded stuff) and encourage verbal engagement. Allow the students to discuss, ask questions and engage some with one another. Middle schoolers really need the interactions. Crave them. Their developing selves and hormones demand it!! I know middle school teachers are more used to parents being hands off, but please make a special effort to keep them informed. Give them a heads up about what you’re teaching each week (allow parents to be on your notificAtion apps). If I knew what my child was learning, I can help my child more easily. I want to know what the deadlines are. Streamline all the website and app resources and logins as much as possible. Be clear about your grading policies, what assignments are worth, what category they each fall in (what’s homework vs assessment vs participation vs etc). Thanks for asking!

If that is how middle schools are operating, please please help out the parents of incoming sixth graders. That is so far away from what my son's ES was doing in spring. I would have to do a lot to support a transition to DL that "looked like" full time school.

I might suggest asking incoming students what DL looked like for them at elementary school, as a I think there's a lot of diversity among the implementation across schools. Our elementary school gave a paper packet every 2 weeks, with a 15-20 minute check-in with each teacher each week. I will add also that this model worked very well for my child but I know families who found it to be challenging.

[Anonymous]

I love how basis did it, which seems like the opposite of hardy. They had assignments for each class each day but they were due on Sunday. The teachers did not try to reinvent the wheel, instead they relied a lot on good already existing videos that were actually done well. Tests and quizzes were as frequent as ever. Teachers were constantly responsive to email and provided a ton of feedback. They each had one weekly optional live q and a sessions. The school had lots of extracurricular ways of connecting. I hope it is done exactly the same in the fall, no interest in physical attendance.

[Anonymous]

More writing - maybe require kids to write 10 minutes per day in a journal
As much face to face as possible - office hours on an open zoom were also popular with my 6th grader
Projects where kids can choose from a variety of formats - make a poster, record a mock interview, or build a model, etc.
Keep parents in the loop as much as possible - maybe a monthly call where parents can provide feedback or ask questions. Let us know how the kids are doing.

[Anonymous]

:35 is spot on with our kids' needs too. The socialization is critical. My older kid did fine creating online meetings with classmates and working together. My younger one did not. He was completely isolated and now has created socialization through his xbox so he really needs interaction with his peers that he couldn't get in the spring.

Also +1 on understanding deadlines/assignments. I am trusting the platforms will be better in the fall, and I would like to stay hands off as much as possible but if the continued development of personal responsibility and organizational skills is at home I guess we will need to be involved in someway.

My wish would be to somehow ensure that kids have at least one friend on their learning team which would help so much with socialization but I know that's a big reach. I wonder if MS are planning to keep ES schoolmates on the same teams for this reason.

I thought Deal's approach of 2 periods/day with no classes Friday worked pretty well from an academic perspective. And fingers crossed the issues with grading (expectations/continuity among teachers) gets ironed out for the fall.

[Anonymous]

I'm a Latin middle school parent and was pleased with the workload and classwork during the spring. Latin primarily used asynchronous learning which had its benefits. My DCs could manage their own schedule and do the work at their own pace. However, for social reasons it would be great to have more synchronous learning in the fall, although a combination would work well. Two/three "classes" a day seems like a good balance.

[Anonymous]

My kid really struggled with managing all the different platforms and due dates and links and...everything. It all really overwhelmed his executive functioning abilities. And he said it was like all the terrible things about school (I.e. academics) with none of the good things (PE, art, friends, recess, friends...did I mention friends?) so he just hated each and every day of DL. However, I could see that things went better with those teachers who checked in with him personally and communicated with him verbally when they had feedback. He got totally overwhelmed by all the written instruction and feedback. He just tuned out, refused to check the grade book. He gave up in all classes where he felt the teacher had checked out - unfair, since teachers were struggling with the same challenges he was, but he’s 13 and insight isn’t his big thing yet. I heartily endorse the earlier PP with a great list of practical suggestions.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I love how basis did it, which seems like the opposite of hardy. They had assignments for each class each day but they were due on Sunday. The teachers did not try to reinvent the wheel, instead they relied a lot on good already existing videos that were actually done well. Tests and quizzes were as frequent as ever. Teachers were constantly responsive to email and provided a ton of feedback. They each had one weekly optional live q and a sessions. The school had lots of extracurricular ways of connecting. I hope it is done exactly the same in the fall, no interest in physical attendance.

I know this model would work wonders for some students, which is great! But it’s the opposite of what would work for my student. Limited live-action teaching by teachers, same tests and quizzes as frequent as ever!? Who is responsible for actually engaging students, because — for my child — teaching requires give and take among teacher and students.

One optional q and a session a week: my student would not even know where to begin to ask questions; “uummm coukd you please explain all those periodic table videos? From the beginning. Or: start from the beginning — I didn’t quite get those Khan Academy videos on graphing y= mx + b.

That said, I’m glad this model worked for Basis families!!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This spring, my child had a pretty good experience with DL at Hardy for 8th grade. For the most part the teachers tried to stay on a true period schedule where the kids would join their class (via zoom or teams) and have class. I think the live instruction is vital (please limit the recorded stuff) and encourage verbal engagement. Allow the students to discuss, ask questions and engage some with one another. Middle schoolers really need the interactions. Crave them. Their developing selves and hormones demand it!! I know middle school teachers are more used to parents being hands off, but please make a special effort to keep them informed. Give them a heads up about what you’re teaching each week (allow parents to be on your notificAtion apps). If I knew what my child was learning, I can help my child more easily. I want to know what the deadlines are. Streamline all the website and app resources and logins as much as possible. Be clear about your grading policies, what assignments are worth, what category they each fall in (what’s homework vs assessment vs participation vs etc). Thanks for asking!

If that is how middle schools are operating, please please help out the parents of incoming sixth graders. That is so far away from what my son's ES was doing in spring. I would have to do a lot to support a transition to DL that "looked like" full time school.

I might suggest asking incoming students what DL looked like for them at elementary school, as a I think there's a lot of diversity among the implementation across schools. Our elementary school gave a paper packet every 2 weeks, with a 15-20 minute check-in with each teacher each week. I will add also that this model worked very well for my child but I know families who found it to be challenging.

6th grade teacher here- this is a great idea, thanks!

[Anonymous]

Not OP but also a teacher and have a follow up question- what does ideal communication from teachers look like for you during DL? In the Spring
I had a lot of families who were overwhelmed with the amount of texts/emails, especially if they had multiple kids at the secondary level. On the other hand, I consistently hear from parents that they want to know details of what their kids are working on so they can better support them. Not sure how to accommodate both...

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Not OP but also a teacher and have a follow up question- what does ideal communication from teachers look like for you during DL? In the Spring
I had a lot of families who were overwhelmed with the amount of texts/emails, especially if they had multiple kids at the secondary level. On the other hand, I consistently hear from parents that they want to know details of what their kids are working on so they can better support them. Not sure how to accommodate both...

From my experience it was that the content wasn’t well organized at all. We had packets sent home, but portions of the packets were completely optional, but the only way to know that was to login to teams and check the assignments, but the assignments weren’t under assignments they were under files, but only the ones for the main class, for specials it was under its own separate folder, but some folders were only for certain classes or students. On top of that some of the assignments were in iready, others were in khan, then some only on paper, some on other apps. It was absolutely infuriatingly painful to decrypt what was due when and how to get to each thing, etc. I also got emails about stuff that didn’t really matter - long winded emails about supporting the community and all sorts of other stuff, including to monitor the team chat, etc.

What did I want? One email, every week, with just a few things outlined. Topics for each day, Whats mandatory, Whats optional, and links to each thing.

That would have been enormously clearer.

[Anonymous]

Have a rising 8th grader at Deal and I’d like to see increased live instructional time. I don’t think my kid should be in a virtual classroom from 9-3 M-F, but there needs to be more live instruction than what we did in the Spring, which was 30 minutes once a week with each teacher. And many times the teacher didn’t teach during that 30 minutes but treated it like office hours. Here is my wish list:

Live instruction with each core teacher for 45 minutes at least 2 times a week.

Scheduled office hours with each teacher every day when they can drop in for questions and extra instruction. [like Grit - available every day. Not just 30 minutes on Tuesday]

Organized clear instruction to the students about assignments and when they are due. School needs to find a way to target this information better. Students should not have to read the entire weekly bulletin, click on the link for World languages, and then reach the entire World Languages newsletter to decipher the assignments for French 1. In school students were taught to write down all assignments in their planner. They need to find a way to replicate that process in a digital environment so students can organize their time and work.

Assignments scheduled with some flexibility on the ability to work ahead. My Deal student used to do a lot of work on the weekends to “get ahead”, but that was impossible during DL because assignments were not announced in advance and many “opened and closed” on a strict schedule.

I would like teachers to stay on top of their grading. Some teachers are always a challenge, but overall it seemed much worse during DL probably due to changing instructions on grading, but since that is the only way for students to check and make they don’t have missing assignments, its not helpful when all the grading is dumped in the last week fo the advisory.

I would like teachers to actually grade assignments and provide feedback. For some reason, my students were regularly asked to complete work but not turn it in - or turn it in but get no feedback on it. Only stuff with an automated program like math would give the student feedback on what they needed to work on. I recognize that this may require everyone to learn new vehicles for communication, but its a necessity.

Skip resources all together. What is the point of distanced PE? Just makes it more painful than needed.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Not OP but also a teacher and have a follow up question- what does ideal communication from teachers look like for you during DL? In the Spring
I had a lot of families who were overwhelmed with the amount of texts/emails, especially if they had multiple kids at the secondary level. On the other hand, I consistently hear from parents that they want to know details of what their kids are working on so they can better support them. Not sure how to accommodate both...

Thank you for asking!! (All props to teachers. You guys are awesome.)

I have two communication challenges -- tracking new info, and then finding older info.

For stuff that is routine -- e.g., every week I know there will be math problems -- having stuff in a single web location is useful. Worksheets, schedules, instruction guide on how to use the zoom, that kind of thing.
For stuff that is new -- e.g. "This week there will be a parent conference on Tuesday, please sign up for a slot" -- an email with a link to the schedule for sign-up

BUT. I also get that you guys have training to teach kids, not to organize electronic communications! I think you need the resources of tech support staff to help with the online organization. It's extra work -- I do this for my own job, and it's not easy or without a time cost. I hope you get someone to help you with all of this.