What Can Parents Do to Make Distance Learning Easier?
Even with the prospect of a return to the live classroom on the horizon, many students are continuing distance learning into 2021. These strategies can help your student get the most out of this season.
The challenges of remote learning are plentiful and well-documented: lack of engagement, technological barriers, burnout, apathy, and lack of rigor, to name a few.
Having witnessed these struggles directly, parents are typically looking for guidance around how to make distance learning effective. Here are three suggestions to make distance learning easier on you and your student.
Know Your Limits
You may have found yourself getting a deeper glimpse into your child’s educational experience than you bargained for. You may have even been drawn into the role of a makeshift teacher’s aide or homeschool principal—or at least it feels that way. And unless you took Algebra II recently or brushed up on active reading strategies, you may feel a bit helpless, too.
It’s okay to acknowledge the limits on your time and ability to be actively involved. Educators are professionals; nobody is asking you to help out nuclear engineers or medical doctors, right? You shouldn’t be tasked with managing your ninth grader’s learning experience, either.
On the bright side, here’s an excellent opportunity for students to cultivate academic independence, which they will need as they progress academically. If your child’s idea of “academic independence” is endless hours of video games or doom scrolling social media, follow these steps to encourage structure and accountability.
Ask them to jot down a few main tasks for the day, and put the list in a public spot (if you do the same, it will feel more collaborative). I recommend post-it notes. The more concrete and specific the goals, the better.
At the end of the day, do a brief check-in, and that’s it. If you’re feeling ambitious, you can ask them to share something they worked on. With so much work done on shareable platforms, such as Google Docs, this shouldn’t be difficult. This is a simple check-in. You don’t need to add commentary. In fact, some teachers will actively prefer that you don’t.
Leave space for students to structure their time and energy in a way more suited to distance learning. A full day at school doesn’t have to be wall-to-wall instruction. Give your student that small degree of accountability, encourage modest goals, and then get out of the way.
Ease the Technological Barrier
Given the recent proliferation of “ed tech solutions,” this arena can be intimidating to parents. But there are a few steps you can take that will help immensely. (Note that you may need to adapt some of these suggestions, depending on your school’s distance learning setup.)
Caveats aside, poor audio, video, internet connection, or hardware all make for a poor distance learning experience. The bad news is you may not have much choice about any of those factors. But, if feasible, try to provide the following: a pair of headphones with a built-in mic, a “study space” relatively close to your Wi-Fi source, and a setting free of background noise.
If your internet connection isn’t great, you may have the option to mute your own video for the sake of clearer, consistent audio. In the end, reliable audio is more critical than seeing a face. Of course, seeing student faces also increases student engagement, so please keep those videos on if you don’t have connection issues—and don’t let your student hide in the corner of the screen at an angle that makes them look like Godzilla.
In my own experience, a tablet and stylus are vital for retaining the ease of communication that happens when I use a whiteboard in the classroom or tutoring office. Tablets and interactive surfaces might seem like a luxury, but they’re another way students can more naturally express themselves within the binary medium of computers.
Think Long-Term
Finally, it’s helpful to set practical, realistic expectations. Whatever in-person learning opportunities students may be missing out on, there are indeed ways to compensate—both now and in the future. Educators, administrators, colleges, and counselors know this, too. This is a collective challenge, and it’s not fatal.
Standards in education often change. There’s no need to cling to yesterday’s standards if they’re irrelevant in the era of digital education (pandemic-driven or not). Instead, think about what opportunities students do have. What would they like to accomplish in the long term? There’s some loosening up of expectations. Shape your own with an eye on the long term. As a parent, you can help provide that deeper, more seasoned perspective.
One immediate way to do this is to think beyond end-of-term grades and instead encourage students to develop independent projects that speak to their interests. Younger students will need more guidance in developing their own projects, while older students will likely appreciate the freedom to work outside the confines of a rubric and a grade. You can find a wide range of ideas for all ages to get you started here. This self-directed approach to learning can be especially effective for otherwise disengaged students.
If you’d like personalized insight into how to make distance learning more effective for your student, feel free to reach out to our team. Many students benefit from the extra accountability and expert support a tutor provides – whether that’s strengthening foundational study skills or bringing them up to speed in their most challenging subjects. Adapting to a new learning structure doesn’t come naturally to anyone, and your student doesn’t have to go it alone.
