Can public education be agile and equitable?
High Level Summary: The mass media always talks about equality. What we fail to discuss is equity. Some families and students need more resources and support to access education and succeed — especially during this Shelter In Place (SIP) time. A one-size-fits-all approach does not support all students. Educators are doing their best to support their students’ diverse needs — and they need your support. We are all stakeholders and need to collaboratively invest in educating and meeting the needs of the next generation.
Parents — with Shelter in Place, do you feel like you’re ready for an adult beverage by noon? What was your gut reaction when your local school system announced it was extending its shutdown? If you’re just about ready to put your kids on Roblox for the rest of the school year, please be patient.
Frustration is to be expected. As a Bay Area public school teacher and budding UX designer, I want to assure you that I’m just as frustrated as you. Many educators have switched to conducting digital teaching overnight. We are all building this plane as we’re flying it. Funny thing is, we shouldn’t even be near an airplane nor an airport at this time. The bottom line is: can public education support students and families quickly and equitably?
PROBLEM:
The public education system’s reactionary response to distance learning is frustrating. Just look at the memes and selfies of parents trying their best to educate their children at home. Edtech companies are quickly filling educators’ inboxes with free trials for remote lessons and activities. So what’s the hold up? Slow and steady wins the race. School districts are tirelessly reaching out to families to ensure that every student has equitable access to digital learning resources, food, and community services. On the other hand, teachers — like myself — feel stuck between a rock and a hard place. We are quickly adapting digital resources while also prioritizing student privacy and equity of access. One process is swift; one process is slow. We need your help. We all have a responsibility to protect and educate our future workforce.
SOLUTIONS:
Since we all have a role in supporting educators, students, and families, below are some ideas and suggestions, broken down by stakeholders, to get started.
School districts & Administrators
Human Capital
Please invest in your human, physical, and digital capital. A great place to start is by hiring technology integration specialists, training instructional coaches, and encouraging administrators to empower innovative teachers. Motivate teachers to contribute their expertise and tech integration talent by providing compensation for serving as technology leaders at their grade, school, or district levels. Provide extra extrinsic motivators for teachers to embrace new pedagogy and edtech resources.
Technology Plan: Standardizing Technology Licenses
It would definitely help to standardize the funding of technology licenses and devices in a technology plan. As an educator, it is absolutely frustrating when I receive ten frantic emails complaining that a favorite app’s license expired. In most schools and districts, there is no reliable funding source that auto-renews technology licenses.
Technology Plan: Social Media Strategy
Invest in and create a social media strategy and technology plan. It’s pretty obvious why we need to protect student identities and privacy. Why create a social media strategy? Thanks to Hootsuite for sharing the best practices for governmental and public sector organizations. Currently, school districts are scrambling to create multilingual email newsletters, automated phone call messages, and text alerts. I also compose my family messages in English and rely on Google Translate for Spanish and Japanese translations. Good thing I am somewhat conversational in these languages to proofread and catch some translation errors. Wouldn’t it be nice to have communication tools automatically translate content for families? Thank you Class Dojo, TalkingPoints, Seesaw and many more edtech messaging apps for connecting multilingual families and educators.
Technology Plan: Service Design
Parents, students, and teachers want to feel like they can trust school districts. Investments in student privacy is a no brainer. “Listening” to the social media chatter of schools and districts will give administrators important insights. Mapping the “customers’ journey” helps school districts focus on service design — more on this in another article. Focusing on culture and celebrating the joyful learning in each classroom grounds and humanizes educators’ work. Instead of pinging teachers with requests to upload photos of anchor charts or student work, how about harnessing technology to cultivate these assets by scouring teachers’ websites and emailed newsletters. If school districts universally adopted a platform like Mailchimp, administrators could easily peruse media libraries for examples of great teaching and learning.
Streamline Workflow & Customer Support
Pilot ticketing and workflow tools like Zendesk, Salesforce, Asana, Trello, and Confluence to help grade level, departments, and school sites efficiently problem solve. Educators should spend the majority of their time and effort creating and supporting rich academic and socio-emotional learning experiences. Especially during this remote learning period, I spend about 30% of my time fielding district emails. I probably spend another 15% of my time in back and forth emails with students trying to figure out why they cannot connect to an app. Common problem: they are not logged into their Google Account. More on that in a bit.
Educators & Unions
Practice a Growth Mindset
Educators, we’re always asked to do more and more. No matter how much we do, sometimes it feels like we can never do enough. You are enough. Your dedication, passion, and love for your students is more appreciated now than ever. Set boundaries and work within your Zone of Proximal Development. During this time of uncertainty, embrace it and be open minded. At least we’re still employed! Challenging ourselves and learning can be scary and uneasy at times. Remember, our students feel this way every day. We have created safe learning environments where they feel like they can take learning risks. Create that safe space in your practice to take some risks, reach out to your teaching team, and remind students that mistakes are expected, inspected, and respected.
Empathize with the Families We Serve
Working parents are eager for independent, engaging activities their children can do somewhat quietly. Students and teachers miss seeing each others’ smiles everyday. Try out products like Jackbox’s Drawful2, Dictionarium, Tee K.O. or Mad Verse City to distance socially. Just make sure to turn on Family Mode. Minecraft and Roblox provide more parental control than Fortnite.
Stay Close to the Issue
Stay close to the issue — Talk with, and not just at, students and families. It is not possible to make everyone happy. The least we can do is solicit feedback to inform our practice. As we continue to invest in our families, hopefully they will invest and continue to lift us up with respect. If you are already using G Suite and Google Classroom, Google Meet makes it easy to integrate directly into Classroom. This cloud-based LMS does a great job of integrating all Google for Education products on one platform. Thank you for making our lives easier (I hope you’re listening, Google). The only catch: your G Suite administrator needs to turn on Meet.
Pat Yourself on the Back
You are hustling and always thinking of everyone other than yourself. THANK YOU FOR BEING YOU! You’re constructing a safe, fun, and lively virtual classroom environment without much guidance — or perhaps with way too much guidance and oversight. Each and everyone one of you deserves a Teacher of the Year Award. Please know that you are appreciated and deeply missed by your students, families, and administrators. Psst — Teacher Appreciation Week is May 4–8.
Edtech Companies
Lean on and invest in Customer Support Specialists
Continue to process tickets to improve user experiences. Conduct robust user testing and research. Try to directly engage with school district technology specialists in addition to teachers. Hopefully grassroots and top down supports will meet in the middle to support all educators and students. This EdSurge article covers the top three concerns with remote teaching: privacy and student data, accessibility, and the digital divide.
Quick UX problems — Thank You!
G Suite & Google Accounts:
- Students struggle to remember to log out of their parents’ or siblings’ Google Accounts and log into theirs on shared devices. I spent a full day, and 13 back and forth emails, trying to support a student that couldn’t edit Google Slides on an iPad in a Safari browser. Eventually, we discovered that this student was logged into the parent’s Google Account. I’ve created video tutorials on my YouTube channel and tried my best to practice with students to teach them how to log in and out of accounts. Perhaps this user error could be addressed by someone other than me.
- In Slides, a best practice is to screenshot each slide to set as a background. This prevents students from accidentally deleting content. The downsides: (1) the images are compressed and get blurry and (2) Chrome extensions can no longer read content for speech-to-text. Many students rely on Google accessibility features.
Google Classroom:
- Thank you for making sure your servers do not crash! On the other hand, there is an issue when creating assignments with multiple attachments. Some “make a copy for each student” documents don’t actually make a copy for each student. The workaround is quite laborious.
Zoom, Google Meet, WebEx:
- Teachers and schools that quickly embraced video conferencing sometimes found themselves treading through muddy FERPA and COPPA compliance issues.
- Districts, like mine, slowly embraced video conferencing. We might have received some criticism due to our slow adoption, but hopefully our protocols help to protect students and families.
- Creating an age selector modal window to remind families of student privacy guidelines when opening a video conferencing app could potentially just take a few lines of Javascript.
- Thank you for regularly releasing updates and investing in protecting user privacy! Please continue to do what you can to boost security and protect student and educator privacy.
Society’s Homework:
- Discuss the role of educators and parents in society. It takes a village to raise children.
- Understand teachers have home demands and responsibilities too. No, we don’t live at school. During this distance learning time, many of us are teaching our students and our own children simultaneously.
- Observe and take action to close the access and achievement gap. Schools are not just educational centers. We provide equitable access to food, technology, learning experiences, social networks, and much more. Do what you can to reduce digital, opportunity, racial, gender, and socio-economic inequalities.
- Be kind. Your parents were right. Treat others as you’d like to be treated.
- Remember that we are stronger together. Even though we are not physically together during this Shelter In Place time, we are together as the human race. You have so much to offer the world. Do what you can to help out your neighbor safely and responsibly.
- Smile. Recount your blessings. Pass it on.
