Synchronous/Asynchronous Learning

I have dishonored myself. I used my résumé to support an argument. This is bad behavior, and I don’t condone it, but I do get frustrated when people who have done online learning since March give me the old “Well, actually…” when I’ve been doing it for years, and I have some hardware to back it up.

I don’t know everything, but I do know some things that are tried, true, and hard won. And more Importantly, I can tell you how it works in real life.

I have noticed that the state of Tennessee has been pushing synchronous learning hard. I get why they’re doing it: they think it feels more like school than asynchronous learning. They also know that it engenders more confidence from school boards, parents, and local leaders that kids are logging in and interacting with a teacher. They have the right of it from a political angle.

The problem is that synchronous learning isn’t the best way to learn online; synchronous learning is the best way to learn in person.

Here are some problems with synchronous learning:

  1. A lack of institutional control: it’s an easy way out for students. They can just act like they were there. They can act like they were listening. They can refuse to turn on the video. They can turn it on and alt-tab to something else. Are you still going to give them attendance credit? Yes. Are they going to learn anything? Only if they’re motivated.

  2. Synchronous learning lends itself to lecture: I’m not one of those people who believes that all lecture is evil, but I do believe lecture should be delivered in small doses, especially online. Zoom meetings wear me out as an adult; I can’t imagine what they’re like as a teenager. Imagine spending 6 hours every day in Zoom meetings. That’s what synchronous learning is.

  3. Synchronous learning robs the teacher of time they could be doing more productive things for their online students. The most important feature of online learning is the feedback/conversation/correction cycle between teacher and student. That is where the magic of learning happens, especially if the assignments are appropriately heuristic. If a teacher is Zooming six hours a day, she isn’t grading and giving feedback. And if she is giving feedback, it’s truncated and lower quality because there aren’t enough hours in a day. If you’re going to make the argument that starts “Well, what about classroom teachers?” I’m going to answer, “No kidding. You’re right. This is something we should think about.”

If you look at what are considered effective practices in teaching in the state of TN, among them are the following: differentiation/personalized learning, timely and detailed feedback, grouping students, problem solving, thinking, and questioning. And while no one expects a teacher to do all of those all the time every day, it is clear that a student-centered model where the teacher is the facilitator of learning rather than the sole source of knowledge is the model we should be using to maximize learning. As the Dothraki say, “It is known.”

This is why I don’t understand why the state of Tennessee is pushing people towards doing more synchronous content. If they’re serious about not having a learning loss, they need to be encouraging us to go against what feels politically expedient and what feels like school, and adopt a better model for online learning.

What about direct instruction?

I’ve covered this in other blog posts, but to provide effective direct-instruction, short, focused videos are preferable to long, rambling Zoom sessions with all of the interruptions that will inevitably happen. But what about questioning? You can use something like EdPuzzle or Canvas Studio to ask timely questions and to also hold the student accountable for watching the video. While it’s easy to get on a Zoom and do literally anything else in the world, it’s impossible to dodge the questions in these programs.

In a Zoom session, if it’s recorded you can go back and watch it, but a student will be digging through 45 to 90 minutes of video (depending on how you do it) to find the information they want to review. In a short, focused video, that information is easy to find especially if there is one video per concept. How many times have you looked up how to do something on YouTube and had to rewind it a few times to get it? This is something they can have online that they probably wouldn’t ever have in person (unless you told them to record you presenting a new concept which would be really smart). One could argue that furiously taking notes during a rushed lecture is the hallmark of good education, but they would be wrong.

What about students who are feeling lonely?

I’m glad we’re considering students’ social-emotional needs, but do we want to address that while simultaneously giving direct instruction? It seems like a bad time. Why not do that during a group project? Why not do that in a discussion? Or why not encourage kids to get on Xbox or whatever and socialize after school? If everyone is online, why does it have to be exactly like it is during school? “Oh this is when students see one another and interact with one another during in-person learning, so it must be exactly like that online.” That’s the kind of flawed thinking that I am trying to address in this blog post.

But, can’t you do some really engaging stuff on Zoom?

Sure, you can. And if you want to try it that way, that’s fine, but there are only so many hours in a day, and I would rather have students working on the work rather than sitting in a Zoom meeting with me even if I’m doing breakout rooms and stuff. I want to save my interactions with students for office hours or emails or one on one tutoring sessions. To me, it comes down to a choice between what I want students doing, and what I think students want to do.

Consider the shy guy

One of the magical moments you will have as an online teacher is when a student who never participate start blowing up your discussions. It’s always articulate and impressive, and you have no idea where it came from, and then you realize that when you take away the time clock and the peer pressure, you have leveled the playing field in your marketplace of ideas. In synchronous learning, discussions are typically dominated by the same types of people who would dominate them in an in-person learning environment. An asynchronous environment is ultimately more democratic, and it lends itself to participation from people who typically shy away from it.

Consider this other advantage

When I was the principal of an online school, the peak time for students to work was 10pm to 2am. One might argue that it’s unhealthy for kids to be up that late, but what was I supposed to do about it? And if you know teens, they’re going to be up that late doing something because their circadian rhythm changes. They’re more likely to get to their school work during these hours if it’s sitting there waiting for them. If they have to wake up at an unnatural hour to attend class, then they’re not going to get as much out of it. This will allow them to get natural sleep and still get their work finished. Again, one might argue, “Well, if that’s true, then why are we making kids go to school at like 7:40?” And my answer is “It has nothing to do with following science around teenagers and everything to do with following a traditional work schedule for factories.” If the learner needs help, then they can get it during the day during office hours, or just email a question to their teacher and get a response the next day.

Flexibility

I like learning blocked into a weekly module with daily targets rather than daily deadlines. It builds in flexibility for both the learner and the teacher. This fits into a teacher’s planning cycle better, too, with conceptual units and themes. It also changes the type of work a teacher can assign. Instead of having to rely on a strict time schedule, a teacher can give assignments that take a day or two to complete giving the student more time with the material. This is great for students who do not work as quickly as others. Instead of finding themselves rushed to complete something, they feel liberated without that pressure.

Wrap it up

In summation, there are plenty of reasons to embrace asynchronous learning that have to do with teaching and learning. While there are some good things about synchronous learning, most of them are political or for the sake of appearances, and that stuff doesn’t really matter as much to me.

Five Things I Wish I'd Known When Starting a Virtual High School

In 2012, I was the leader of a team of teachers who developed (before COVID) a successful online school, Tennessee Online Public School (TOPS). While we ended up creating a successful school that was a god-send for many of our students, we experienced growing pains like any other fledgling organization.

I’m the first to admit that I had no idea what I was doing when I was hired to design and lead TOPS. I had never been a principal of any kind before that. I realize now what great faith Gary Lilly had in me even to put me in that position. Honestly, I have no idea what he was thinking, but I’m happy it worked out. I had some strong beliefs about what schools should be, and I had a model to follow for building a school from scratch (even though my own personal distrust of dogmas kept me from following that model with complete fidelity).

Here are some things that I wish I had known before beginning:

  1. Choosing LMS is the single most important decision you will make. We started out using “Moodle” because it was free and because the district had been using Moodle for several years. Moodle, as anyone knows, is a nightmare for end-users and a dream for developers. It was mostly just a nightmare for us overall.

    We ended up adopting Canvas our second year, and it made all the difference.

    The LMS matters because design matters. Your teachers can’t design well in a poor LMS. The LMS matters because getting to the content matters. The adage we used at TOPS is “We want the content to be difficult; we want getting to it to be easy.”

  2. The more full-time teachers who are dedicated to online learning the better. Institutions don’t like throwing full-time teachers at online learning because it’s expensive. For example, at TOPS, our budget was about $500k. About $300k of that were the salaries of my three full-time teachers and my principal salary. By contrast, my adjunct budget was around $120k to teach the rest of our classes. And while that was very cost-effective, the full-time people were absolutely important to the culture of the school, to the fabric of the overall faculty, and to the overall operation of everything.

  3. Counseling is extremely important. I wish I had been able to convince the district that we needed a full-time school counselor. Many of our students were coming to us with mental health issues, and many were also coming with weird and tricky credit situations. It was way too much work to do for a part-time counselor. Fortunately for the school, through the charity of their free time, the school counselors who worked at TOPS did a great job (even if it did end up being the defense against the dark arts position).
    One thing the counselor could have done at TOPS that would have been beneficial to students is helping them build capacity to be successful online. There was some pressure from the district to 86 students who weren’t doing well because they were going to be a drag on the metrics: graduation rate, chronic absenteeism, and test data. And while this was justified if a student was trying to use the online school as a truancy shelter, there were many who just didn’t have the capacity to be successful because they wanted to learn how to be successful the hard way which is by failing miserably first (which is the way of the teenager).

  4. I wish I would have sold out more. I didn’t realize how important it was to “be the face” of the school. I did daily announcements (most days) and tried to be present on social media to answer questions. In one of our leadership team meetings, one of my teachers suggested I do some sort of dance (to be relatable to students). I have never liked that sort of “relatable” stuff (a bunch of white people rapping or doing weird handshakes or whatever) because it seems fake (because I took Catcher in the Rye way too seriously) and because I believe in authenticity (because I took Jean-Paul Sartre way too seriously).

    I could have done more to sell out to get my school’s name out there. I feel bad that I was just too whatever (shy?) to engineer some sort of tipping point. Honestly, TOPS enrollment should be over 500 at this point. Look at how many students are doing virtual learning during COVID. In just my small district, there are as many high school students doing virtual learning as there are enrolled in TOPS.

    I don’t know what I could have done, but what I did do was effective. I just could have done more of it, and I didn’t. Just like having a face and presence in an online class is important, it’s also important for the school to have that in the principal.

    As a result of that meeting, I did make this dancing video that one of my teachers set to music.

  5. I wish I had known that I was even more right than I knew about the battles I was fighting.

    There was just no way to know that I was right about teachers being able to work from home, and that working from home would help them be more empathetic to students working from home.

    I wish I had known that offering an asynchronous learning environment with small opportunities for synchronous interactions was an extremely effective model.

    I wish I had known how right I was that online instruction is not the same as putting face to face instruction online. I had to constantly fight the battle of “this doesn’t look like what we do in classrooms.”

These are just five small things, but they could have helped me tremendously. There are probably 15 other things I wish I had known, and if I wrote this again, I’d probably come up with a different list of five. I hope this helps someone out there trying to start an online school.

Let's hear it for online teachers

I’m not writing this to be mean to anyone. I’m just writing it to get these thoughts out of my system.

When I was principal of Tennessee Online Public School, most of the obstacles I encountered had nothing to do with delivering online instruction. The teachers took care of all that, and they were fantastic at it.

Most of the obstacles were with other people and their perceptions of what we were doing (Sartre was right, after all). Here are some comments that we often had to endure from other educators:

  • “I don’t think it’s fair that these online teachers get paid the same as classroom teachers.”

  • “It’s not a real school.”

  • “It’s not fair that their teachers get to work from home.”

  • “I’d love to teach there; you get to work in your pajamas.”

  • “Their students aren’t learning as much as the students in regular schools.”

  • “It’s not fair because they don’t have to deal with classroom behavior.”

  • “Must be nice to only work with gifted kids.”

  • “It’s easier than real school!”

All of these comments were made purely in ignorance and some sort of misplaced jealousy. And they certainly weren’t made by everyone, but each time someone said one in earshot of my teachers, it really hurt. I even got my own brand of shade from other principals, but that’s ok. I freely admitted that I enjoyed being able to avoid beans (food service), balls (sports), buses (transportation), and butts (discipline), but I filled that time with grander educational pursuits for my school.

I feel like finally a lot of the folks who made these comments are having to eat some crow. Many teachers are finding out that teaching online isn’t a pie job. It’s a very hard job that requires a lot of problem-solving and troubleshooting on a daily basis. It’s a job where a ton of work is front-loaded with design work and back-loaded with problem-solving and troubleshooting. While all of that is going on, you’re also grading, giving feedback, and helping students. In addition, you’re also working with behavioral issues such as students not turning in assignments and trying to come up with interventions or plans to help those students catch up.

What I want to say to these teachers who said these things now is imagine having to teach online like you’re doing now and count attendance, give EOCs, be held accountable for your students’ EOC scores, be held accountable for your students’ ACT scores, follow IEPs and 504 plans, and make sure everyone graduates prepared for life after high school. They did this working with a mostly at-risk student population who had, as a group, been disenfranchised by public education in one way or another.

It’s quite an accomplishment that the teachers at TOPS were able to do all of that and to be designated a reward school for three years in a row while facing all the obstacles online learning presents and while also being dragged by many of their colleagues.

So let’s hear it for online teachers - the real ones - the ones who did this on a trapeze with no COVID Closure net below. And if you are one of those teachers who made one of these ignorant comments about my online teachers, your apology is accepted.

Blended Learning - The role of the leader

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"This job would be great if it weren't for the parents." 

I've heard principals say that more than once, and there is some truth in it even though 95% of my experiences with parents as an administrator have been positive. When leading blended learning, your interactions with parents are going to be the key to success. 

Now at this point you might think of everything else you have to do to get blended learning going in your building: convincing teachers it's best for students; shifting classrooms from teacher centered to student centered. All of that is important, but how you handle parents will make or break it. 

Whenever you have a new innovation in the classroom people are always watching to see what happens. And typically, as long as it doesn't affect little Johnny's grades, parents are pretty quiet about it. With blended learning, it's going to require little Johnny to start doing some things he hasn't had to do before. And while I would expect little Johnny to enjoy his school experience more now that he has more say in his learning, not everyone is going to react the same to it. Some might even look at it is being extracurricular and thus something they don't have to do. 

Here's a scenario: Ms. Johnson has fully embraced blended learning in her U.S. History class. Ms. Johnson has started assigning discussions for homework to continue the rich discussions they're having in class. Little Johnny doesn't feel like it's fair that he has to do discussions after school so he just doesn't do them. He gets a 0 for the assignment. Little Johnny's mom calls to complain. How do you react? 

It's easy to say that you tell her that online work is now an expectation of Little Johnny and he has to do the work, and he gets a 0 because the class has moved on from the discussion and it's of little benefit for him to do it now. Or do you bend and tell Ms. Johnson not to require the discussions and just make them optional instead? 

The more you bend here the more likely your teachers are going to get turned off to blended learning. You must hold the line. It's not easy, but nothing worth doing ever is. 

Blended Learning - Mindset 1

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This summer I'm going to train two different groups (so far!) of principals on blended learning. I guess I'm qualified to do this since I've been leading an online high school for the past four years, and the biggest piece to blended learning that high schools don't have is the online part of it.

To prepare for this training, I have been reading a lot of internet articles, blogs, and blended by Michael Horn. I highly recommend it, and I might review it if I ever get time.

One of the biggest hurdles for principals to overcome when introducing blended learning in their schools is changing the mindset from a teacher-centered to a student-centered classroom. Some people call this teacher-lead versus student-centered instruction. Others call it learner-centered instruction instead of student-centered. It doesn't matter what the nomenclature is, it's still the same thing: it's the notion that the teacher doesn't hold all the knowledge in the classroom, and in its ideal form, the teacher is the lead learner.  This is the essence of Dr. Eric Glover's Leading, Teaching, Learning triad.

So what's the difference between teacher-lead instruction and student-centered instruction? The University of Connecticut has a great comparison of the paradigms here.

So how do principals get teachers to move towards student-centered learning? I'll reflect on that in part 2 of this series.

Inbound Marketing

Even though this site isn't designed to be Inbound Marketing for myself, it's something I've been thinking a lot about because of my job. I am the principal of public online school serving students all over the state of Tennessee, which is a fairly spread out state. I'm not from the largest metropolitan area, so any sort of news articles that are published about my school aren't going to reach Knoxville, Chattanooga, Nashville, or Memphis. I'm reluctant (refuse, actually) to spend public funds on outbound marketing (TV, print, etc), so inbound is the right thing for us to do.

I recently took a cool course on Inbound Marketing through HubSpot. I really liked what I learned. It has quite a bit about content generation, calls to action, emails, and SEO. Those are things that I just didn't know before. Ironically, I have a student at my school who is a master at this because he already makes money doing this sort of thing for his DIY business. I had him do some SEO for us, but this kid has enough going on with school and work, so I didn't want to take advantage of him further.

Something that has become abundantly clear to me through this process is that we needed to have a new website. I built the other one using Dreamweaver. I was very proud of it, but I noticed that my best amateur job was probably the worst professional job out there. Since nearly every Podcast I listen to is sponsored by Squarespace, I checked out what they offer, and I was really impressed with it. After buying it as a platform for my school, I decided to create my own personal site instead of playing Fallout 4 for a few days.

So, I guess this is part of a new world for me where I'm going to start creating content to drive traffic to our school website. I'm anxious to see where we are with this in a year.

First Post

Well you have to write something for your first post. I hope to keep a blog about everything I'm interested in here. Whether it's education, music, pop culture, literature, or anything else. I know you're not supposed to do that, but I guess we all do things we're not supposed to do.