Our team is deeply immersed in the design challenge of our lives – hybrid learning that meets the needs of all learners, is cost neutral, and doesn’t require teachers to simultaneously teach distance and in-person students hour after hour. Ever since the Ministry of Education in Costa Rica outlined steps for a return to school next semester in 2021, we have been meeting regularly to outline out plans and systematically communicate details to our students and families.
I remember when we first moved from in-person to emergency distance learning (aka crisis teaching) back in March. Back then, as a member of the Executive Cabinet of SAUSD, we moved from a weekly cabinet meeting to a nearly daily huddle to work through the endless decision-points that needed to be addressed. Everything was unknown, and every 24 hour cycle brought new developments, new news, and changes to our decisions.
Over 8 months and a new job later, we’re quickly approaching an end of our exclusively distance learning model. We’re making the transition into hybrid learning. I told my leadership team at the beginning of November that we all needed to embrace the fact that we would again be meeting regularly, if not daily, to work through endless details and decision points that will give our hybrid learning plan its substance.
This time, the uncertainty and relative panic of last March has become a much more clear-eyed and deliberate design process. At the very least we have more time to work out the details, despite ongoing uncertainties. We have the benefit of learning from the decisions, successes and mistakes of other systems who have already been in hybrid learning mode. From conversations with people in those systems, we’ve come away with a few big learnings:
First, and perhaps most importantly, well over 50% of our students will still be learning remotely on any given day. That means that while we are working with hybrid learning, our predominant mode of instruction will continue to be distance learning. With that being the case, we need to continue to prioritize high quality distance learning throughout the spring semester. Second, the plan needs to be flexible enough to deal with unexpected challenges – quarantines, sick teachers, lack of staff. We realized early on in our hybrid plan that expecting 100% of our teachers to be available every day would be poor planning. We needed a plan that assumed 20-30% might not be available in person on any give day. Third, if we were down adults, we needed a substitute plan and extra professional skill in the building to provide slack to address needs on the fly. We’re still trying to work those details out, but having a corps of on-call adult staff, as well as ensuring an “all hands on deck” attitude amongst our professional staff is essential. Fourth, we needed to be careful about handing out special privileges to certain teachers and not others – including permission to work from home. Teachers and administrators alike from other systems reported on rifts between those teachers who have to report physically to work, and those who continue to work from home. We want to be united as a staff. Fifth and finally, we would love to avoid simultaneous in-person and distance teaching to the extent possible. As many schools have discovered, without a significant increase in the number of teachers available to teach, that last one will be very difficult to manage.
Of course this is all still hypothetical. Students don’t come back to campus until late January for us. We have the next 3 weeks to work with our families to pin down our cohort assignments, make final physical preparations, and communicate our systems and protocols over and over again. Each time we make good progress in our planning, another wrench gets thrown into the system to cause us to pause to go back into problem solving mode. It has been one of the most demanding design challenges I have confronted in my time as an educator.